Practice

The Words

If you took the time to write out your whole presentation, you're already in great shape! You have thought about everything you wanted to say, and if you're lucky, you did it enough ahead of time that you have been able to take a break from it for a day or two. After a break, you can reread it when you have fresh eyes so that you can more clearly see any big gaps in your own logic, or things you may have forgotten to mention.

Once you have written it, and taken a break from it, the best thing you can do is to read it out loud to make sure everything makes sense. You would be amazed how many mistakes (either grammatical or logical) you catch when you have to listen to yourself say something you wrote. Isn't it better to catch those gaps before you get in front of your audience?

Rehearsing aloud will also help you firmly plant your presentation in your memory, so that you can free yourself from your written notes and visual aids. A word of caution, however: Do not set a goal of memorizing your whole presentation. The best (or rather, worst) example of memorized speeches is a tenth-grade English class in which all the students have to memorize one of a list of 15 speeches from Julius Caesar. One after another, the kids march to the front of the class with their little brothers' action-figure bed sheets wrapped around them as a pseudo-toga, and they recite the same words over and over again. One out of twenty students might actually use some kind of voice inflection and personality, but most of them are just reciting words without really communicating their meaning.

In this scenario, the memorized speech is no more effective than one read off the back of a note card.

The other downside of a memorized presentation is that it relies heavily on maintaining the flow of words--in other words, if a classmate stopped a student in the middle of "Et tu, Brute?" the speaker would have a difficult time recovering his place in the recitation and getting back in the groove. Being so dependent on a sequential flow of words sets you up for sounding like a robot, and it will definitely discourage your group from having any kind of dialogue or conversation.

So don't feel like you have to memorize every phrase, but do make sure you understand your presentation well enough to give it without reading off your notes. You should also feel comfortable answering questions as they arise--if this is appropriate for the situation.

Here are some strategies to help you get comfortable without memorization:

• Visualize it: remember the columns that you used when building the outline? Visual thinkers can usually recall the chart and remember their way.


• Walk through it: Remember the rhetorical "house" we discussed previously? Classical speakers used to visualize their speeches as houses, and would walk from the doorway (introduction) to the kitchen, living room and bedroom (supporting arguments).


• Transition it: If you wrote your speech well, you found good ways to transition from one topic to the next. Now those strong transitions will help you remember all the points you have to make.


• Say it: Hearing helps everyone learn--not just your audience. By hearing yourself say the words out loud, you bring another of your senses to the task. And you will catch many more errors in logic or grammar if you have to say it aloud.