Public Speaking Tips for Clarity
Clarity is key - for every speaker.
Donald Trump for all his faults is clear in his messaging.
Most of his messages comprise three monosyllables:
Lock her up
Build the wall
Drain the swamp
Send them home
It does not get much simpler than that.
The key to a successful presentation is not just:
‘Do you understand?’
rather
‘Do you now understand well enough to tell someone else.?
If I were to come away from a Trump rally and was asked:
‘What was it about?’
If all I could say was:
‘It was about the challenges of immigration.’
That would be a bit vague.
If on the other hand I was able to say:
‘We need to ‘build the wall’’
I have retained a message that I can share with others.
I remember watching a committee discussing the importance of using plain English in government business until one of their expert witnesses pointed out that the choice of communication in politics is often deliberately vague!
Therefore except for some politicians who might want to blur the lines, be ambiguous or equivocate, let us assume the main aim of delivering a speech is to make a point and to express it clearly
10 tips for Clarity in Public Speaking
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Have a clear premise
It will not be possible to deliver a clear argument or make a clear point if the whole premise of the talk is vague. This is why Debating Societies will try to define the premise as clearly as possible, usually in the form of:
‘This house believes….’
A statement like:
‘Education is important.’
is so broad that one speaker could find themselves discussing the importance of a good grounding in English and Maths in early years, while another is speaking about apprenticeships and readiness for the jobs market.
And then we might want to consider whether a good education is important for psychological well-being or to have the skills necessary to obtain the skills for the workplace.
And then of course we might want to consider from whose point of view?
The individual or the society.
So clearly: ‘Education is important’, but how and for what and for whom?
Even with a well-defined premise part of the presentation might still centre on precisely defining terminology.
‘This house believes that secondary education should focus more on practical skills rather than academics.’
The speaker might still need to refine what they understand under ‘practical skills’: use of machinery, basic IT, simple financial intelligence, or interpersonal relationships.
Therefore the first three steps outlined as ‘Cicero structure’ are
- Introduction (gather the audience and set the scene)
- Statement of facts (outline the topic to be considered)
- Division (focus in on the specific area to be covered)
The introduction gathers the audience together; this needs to be tailored to engage each unique audience:
‘Today employers are increasingly advertising technical roles and are finding that many of the applicants responding lack even the basic grounding in those skills.’
The statement of fact will then start to lay out the terms of the presentation:
‘This evening I want to lay out my plan of how we can start to address this in Secondary School Education.’
The division allows the speaker to become even more specific:
More specifically how a greater emphasis on work-based training holds the key.
Now rather than having a wide-ranging ramble around the subject, we can focus in on one area.
This also means that if a questioner asks a question that addresses something outside the defined area, the speaker can always choose to deflect it as it is not part of the focus of this presentation.
Therefore it is worth spending much of your preparation time honing in on what part of the vast subject you intend to cover and and so define your terms of reference clearly – both for your benefit and for the audience’s!
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Have a clear message
Donald Trump succeeds in his messages by firstly having a clear premise; there is no ambiguity in his definition of immigrants, which means there is no danger of his audience having mixed emotions about these ‘uninvited drains on our society’. Trump’s definition centres on criminals and dangerous individuals pouring across an unprotected border to wreak havoc and dismay when they arrive.
With a premise defined as clearly as that, the solution becomes very clear: ‘Build a wall!’
Since any sympathy I might have for the immigrants has been removed by the defining statement, I do not need to allow my conscience to trouble me about any hardship experienced by otherwise innocent people.
A clear argument leads to a clear message, whereas an unclear argument, even if it does manage to conclude with a clear message, might seem flawed.
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Use a process of deduction
Deduction in an argument will mostly take the form of establishing a large general definition and then proving that the example falls within that definition.
There are several false deductions that speakers might try to use, therefore our first job is to decide whether their premise is valid. Once that is achieved we can then decide whether we agree that it is true.
Therefore if Mr Trump can persuade us that all immigrants are dangerous, all he now has to do is prove that a particular person is an immigrant to prove that they are dangerous.
If you imagine the statement that ‘all immigrants are dangerous’ is illustrated by one large circle containing ‘dangerous immigrants’ and any individual or group of individuals that is defined as immigrants is then expressed as a smaller circle. By deduction that smaller circle must be inside of the larger circle if we accept ‘all immigrants are dangerous’.
Used in a political argument this often leads to oversimplification and unfair generalisation.
It then becomes the listener’s job to decide that even though the structure of the argument might be valid, is it actually true? – ‘All immigrants?’
The danger of this form of argument is summed up by Noam Chomsky’s keen observation:
‘If you want to conquer a people, create an imaginary enemy who seems more dangerous than you, then be their saviour.’
You may achieve the speaker’s prime goal of being clear, but is that at the expense of truth?
Simple clear deductive arguments will follow a neat step-by-step process like:
‘If we agree that A is true; and All of B is part of A; and all C is part of B; then we can conclude that all C must be part of A.’
Very persuasive and logically hard to counter, nevertheless the flaw in many of these arguments is usually centred around the blanket assumption of ‘all’.
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Use a process of induction
While deduction starts with the large assumption and narrows down to show how the small assumption fits within the large assumption, induction starts with the small example and uses it to leap to the larger conclusion. This means by deduction you can ‘prove’ something to be true, whereas by induction you can only ‘suggest’ something to be true.
For example:
‘All boys love football’
Just like ‘all immigrants are dangerous’, I would first need to allow myself to be persuaded that this is true.
Once I am willing to agree, then I can deduce that since my son is a boy and ‘all boys love football’, then my son, being a boy, must also love football. That is a deduction.
However, if I see my son kicking a ball in the back garden, it is a large leap to concluding that therefore ‘all boys love football’.
However if all my sons love football and I notice that all my friends have football-mad sons and that wherever I travel, I see boys kicking footballs, it will still be a leap, but it has become a much smaller leap to conclude ‘all boys love football’,
because even with all these examples I cannot establish for certain that there is not one small boy somewhere who hates football.
So a clear inductive argument will offer the audience lots of examples, statistics and testimonies that aim to lead towards the final conclusion.
Remember the Trump–Harris debate where he claimed that immigrants were eating household pets?
Did he mean all immigrants? That would be impossible to prove.
By saying just ‘immigrants’, he allowed the definition to be sufficiently blurred that those who wanted to believe him could ‘choose’ to assume ‘all’.
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Simple language
Hilary Benn in his proposal to take military action in the Middle East in 2015 tells us that although the situation seems very complicated, it is ‘at its heart very simple’ and he goes on to use clear language to explain his position.
The recently departed John Prescott was often mocked for his confusing utterances, as William Hague humorously pointed out to the then Prime Minister Tony Blair:
Rhetoric is the skill of finding the right words. Therefore the language of a poet is going to be very different to the language of an instruction manual. If you message is either complex or likely to be challenged, then it is important to express your reasoning in short simple sentences.
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Sign-posts and Clarifying words
Words like ‘therefore’, ‘however’, ‘on the other hand’, ‘which means’, ‘in conclusion’ will help to clearly indicate the direction of the argument.
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Diction
Speak clearly and speak slowly. Make sure that each word is easily understood.
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Gestures
Using descriptive gestures to support keywords makes it easier for the audience to follow the argument.
Therefore indicate ‘on the other hand’; indicate a change of direction when you say ‘however’; indicate a coming together with the words ‘in conclusion’.
If you tend to rush when you speak, used appropriately, your gestures can also be used to help slow down your delivery.
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Read the Room
If you can maintain a good eye as you speak, you will be able to read the expressions on the audience’s faces.
Are they looking confused? Should you reach for another example? Should you speak extra slowly? (without sounding patronising of course)
Even though a speech is one person speaking to others, it should still feel like an interaction, with the speaker responding to the audience’s signals.
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Sum up
You may think your argument is clear, but while you have been thinking about it for many hours beforehand, your audience is hearing it for the first time and so a quick summing up at the end is a good way of recapping and recapturing any audience member that might have got lost on the way.
