And if you can incorporate these three Ps into your speechmaking, you will be certain of making a good impression on just about any audience you may come across.



Pace. This P can make or break your speech - it's that important. Get this wrong and you will either bore your audience to tears OR they will be nudging their close neighbour to ask whether he could understand a garbled word you say.

If you have ever had the misfortune to be listening to a presentation being made by a slow speaker, you will already appreciate just how tedious too slow a pace can be. The audience will be itching to shout "speed it up, won't you? I have to be in work tomorrow morning!"

Delivering your speech too slowly is guaranteed to make even the most polite audience lose their patience with you.

Too fast a delivery, on the other hand, will simply mean that a large portion of your audience will miss what you have to say and others will find making sense of your ideas extremely hard work. Your job, when speaking to an audience, is to take the hard work out of listening to you speak and allow the audience the luxury of simply relaxing and letting your words seep effortlessly into their consciousness.

Speak fast enough to avoid your delivery becoming tedious yet slow enough to allow each member of your audience to easily take in your words and ideas. Be sure to vary your pace throughout your speech so that your presentation remains interesting and upbeat.

Poise. Most speakers are only concerned with the subject matter of their speeches and with the actual construction of their speech. They will spend hours collecting information, organising it into the correct sequence, choosing an appropriate opening and closing style and making sure that the rhythm and flow of their words is just right.

And of course, all that effort is certainly required to produce an excellent speech. But that's not the end of it. How you present yourself is just as important as how you present your words.

Run through this checklist immediately before you step out in front of your audience:

1. Is your clothing presentable, clean, appropriate and arranged correctly? 2. Is your hair neatly combed? 3. Does your body language convey the right impression?

Always bear in mind that your audience will start forming their opinion of you from the first moment that they see you and long before you have a chance to woo them with your words. Your poise - that is, the visual impression given to the audience - will influence their first impression of you and that is something that you must pay great attention to .

Make sure that your impression is a positive one.

Polish. This is what will make a good speech great! It is also the thing that will help you kill off any of those pre-speech nerves. Good and thorough preparation is the key to most things in life and speaking in public is no exception.

Make time to rehearse your speech in front of a mirror, or better still, in front of your family or friends. Make sure that you become very familiar with the content of your speech. Practice until you find the most effective style of delivery and think about the incorporation of suitable gestures. Spend time on anything that you feel needs to be practised until it becomes second nature.

Set aside time to scrutinise your stage clothes and pay close attention to how you stand and move. Don't lean, don't hunch, don't slouch and don't allow yourself to display any outward signs of tension. You must polish your performance until it sparkles! Whilst in front of your audience you must always appear relaxed, confident and in control at all times - even if you don't feel it.

Pace, Poise and Polish - if you can remember these three Ps in 'speechmaking' you can guarantee that your speech will be delivered in such a manner that any audience will be entertained, enraptured and enthralled by your performance.