How to Prepare Your Delivery

 

Once you have worked through your part with your group in the ‘content rehearsal’, you need to learn your part on your own to get ready for the first delivery rehearsal. 

Remember that you should learn your part as if you were going to be speaking to a group of friends.  Your task is not simply to give them information, but to communicate ideas or insights. 

The key things to work on alone, and when you work with your group in rehearsal are:

 

Audience Focus: This means that you are “out there” with the audience.  Some people are shyer than others about making eye contact with people they don’t know well, but it’s important for the audience to know that they are the center of gravity, that your goal is to communicate with them. 

Projection:  This is related to the audience focus and enhances your ability to be “out there.”  The goal here is take control of the room with your personal presence.  You’re not doing this if your voice can’t be heard.  You’re not doing this if you’re body language is stiff and your voice monotone.  So another key word is expressiveness.  Speakers who are expressive use their voice and their body language to shape their ideas.  They speak loud or soft, fast or slow in a natural spontaneous way that helps the audience to know what’s important and what’s just background information.  A very important technique to learn is not to speak as if every word you say has the same value.  Some ideas are more important than others, and that should be reflected by the non-verbals, such as voice intonation, facial expression, hand gesture, etc.

Fluency:  The opposite of fluency is a choppy, halting delivery and garbled, overly convoluted syntax in the sentence you speak.  You should attain an easy-going pace that gives the audience time to assimilate what you have to say and which varies according to what is appropriate in terms of the expressiveness you’re trying to achieve at any given moment in your presentation.  It’s ok to stumble here and there.  It’s ok to let slip an “um” or “uh” or some other filler word.  But have your group give you feedback about whether you do it too frequently.