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Speech Writing

Speech Examples

20+ Outstanding Speech Examples for Your Help

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Public speaking can be daunting for students. They often struggle to start, engage the audience, and be memorable. 

It's a fear of forgetting words or losing the audience's interest. This leads to anxiety and self-doubt. 

You may wonder, "Am I boring them? Will they remember what I say? How can I make my speech better?"

The solution lies in speech examples. In this guide, we'll explore these examples to help students create captivating and memorable speeches with confidence. So, keep reading to find helpful examples!

• 1. Speech Examples 
• 2. Tips to Write a Good Speech

Speech Examples 

Talking in front of a bunch of audiences is not as easy as it seems. But, if you have some good content to deliver or share with the audience, the confidence comes naturally.

Before you start writing your speech, it is a good idea that you go through some good speech samples. The samples will help to learn how to start the speech and put information into a proper structure. 

Speech Examples for Students 

Speech writing is a huge part of academic life. These types of writing help enhance the creative writing skills of students.

Here is an amazing farewell speech sample for students to get you inspired.

Below, you will find other downloadable PDF samples.

Speech Examples for School 

Every school and college has a student council. And every year, students elect themselves to be a part of the student council. It is mandatory to impress the student audience to get their votes. And for that, the candidate has to give an impressive speech. 

Here are some short speech examples for students.

Speech Examples For Public Speaking

Speech Examples About Yourself

Speech Examples Short

Speech Examples For College Students

Speech For Student Council

Speech Examples Introduction

Speech Example For School

2 Minute Speech Examples

Persuasive Speech Examples

The main purpose of a speech is to persuade the audience or convince them of what you say. And when it comes to persuasive speech , the sole purpose of speech becomes more specific.

Persuasive Speech Example

Informative Speech Examples

Informative speeches are intended to inform the audience. These types of speeches are designed to provide a detailed description of the chosen topic. 

Below we have provided samples of informative speech for you.

Informative Speech Example

Informative Speech Sample

Entertainment Speech Examples

Entertainment speeches are meant to entertain the audience. These types of speeches are funny, as well as interesting. The given speech samples will help you in writing an entertaining speech.

Entertainment Speech Example

Entertainment Speech Sample

Argumentative Speech Examples

Making a strong argument that is capable of convincing others is always difficult. And, when it comes to making a claim in an argumentative speech, it becomes more difficult. 

Check out the argumentative speech sample that demonstrates explicitly how an argumentative speech needs to be written.

Argumentative Speech Example

Demonstration Speech Examples

The demonstrative speeches are intended to demonstrate or describe the speech topic in depth. Get inspired by the demonstrative speech sample given below and write a captivating demonstrative speech.

Demonstration Speech Example

Demonstration Speech Sample

Motivational Speech Examples

Motivational speeches are designed to motivate the audience to do something. Read out the sample motivational speech given below and learn the art of motivational speech writing.

Speech Examples About Life

Impromptu Speech Examples

Impromptu speech writing makes you nervous as you are not good at planning and organization.

Check out the sample impromptu speech and learn to make bullet points of your thoughts and plan your speech properly.

Graduation Speech Examples

Are you graduating soon and need to write a graduation farewell speech?

Below is a sample graduation speech for your help. 

Wedding Speech Examples

“My best friend’s wedding is next week, and I’m the maid of honor. She asked me to give the maid of honor speech, but I’m not good at expressing emotions. I’m really stressed. I don’t know what to do.”

If you are one of these kinds of people who feel the same way, this sample is for you. Read the example given below and take help from it to write a special maid of honor speech.

Best Man Speech Examples

Father of The Bride Speech Example

Speech Essay Example

A speech essay is a type of essay that you write before writing a proper speech. It helps in organizing thoughts and information. 

Here is a sample of speech essays for you to understand the difference between speech format and speech essay format.

Tips to Write a Good Speech

Reading some famous and incredible sample speeches before writing your own speech is really a good idea. The other way to write an impressive speech is to follow the basic tips given by professional writers. 

• Audience Analysis: Understand your audience's interests, knowledge, and expectations. Tailor your speech to resonate with them.
• Clear Purpose: Define a clear and concise purpose for your speech. Ensure your audience knows what to expect right from the beginning.
• Engaging Opening: Start with a captivating hook – a story, question, quote, or surprising fact to grab your audience's attention.
• Main Message: Identify and convey your main message or thesis throughout your speech.
• Logical Structure: Organize your speech with a clear structure, including an introduction, body, and conclusion.
• Transitions: Use smooth transitions to guide your audience through different parts of your speech.
• Conversational Tone: Use simple, conversational language to make your speech accessible to everyone.
• Timing: Respect the allocated time and write the speech accordingly. An overly long or short speech can diminish the audience's engagement.
• Emotional Connection: Use storytelling and relatable examples to evoke emotions and connect with your audience.
• Call to Action (if appropriate): Encourage your audience to take action, change their thinking, or ponder new ideas.
• Practice Natural Pace: Speak at a natural pace, avoiding rushing or speaking too slowly.

So, now you know that effective communication is a powerful tool that allows you to inform, persuade, and inspire your audience. Throughout this blog, we've provided you with numerous examples and invaluable tips to help you craft a compelling speech. 

And for those moments when you require a professionally written speech that truly stands out, remember that our team is here to help. We can rescue you from writer's block and deliver an outstanding speech whenever you need it.

With our proficient essay writing service , you can be confident in your ability to communicate your message effectively and leave a lasting impact. 

So, don't hesitate – place an order now and buy speech that will truly captivate your audience.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are some examples of good speeches.

Good speeches often leave a lasting impact due to their content, delivery, and emotional resonance. Examples include:

• Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream"
• Steve Jobs' 2005 Stanford Commencement Address
• Winston Churchill's "We Shall Fight on the Beaches"

What is a 5 minute speech?

A 5-minute speech is a brief address of about 600-800 words, designed to cover key points comprehensively while maintaining audience attention. This format is ideal for classroom presentations, briefings, or public events with limited time.

What is an example of a speech of introduction?

A speech of introduction is designed to welcome and introduce a speaker to an audience, providing relevant background and context. Here’s an example:

Ladies and Gentlemen,

It is my great pleasure to introduce our esteemed guest speaker, Dr. Jane Smith. A renowned environmental scientist with over 20 years of experience in climate change research, Dr. Smith has published groundbreaking studies on sustainable energy solutions and has been a pivotal voice in international climate policy. Today, she will share her insights on the latest developments in renewable energy and how we can all contribute to a more sustainable future. Please join me in welcoming Dr. Jane Smith.

Write Essay Within 60 Seconds!

Dr. Barbara is a highly experienced writer and author who holds a Ph.D. degree in public health from an Ivy League school. She has worked in the medical field for many years, conducting extensive research on various health topics. Her writing has been featured in several top-tier publications.

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Keep reading

Rice Speechwriting

Examples of a good speech: learning from 10 famous speeches, 10 famous speeches with examples of a good speech.

Great speeches have the power to move people, to inspire and motivate, and to create lasting change. They have the ability to capture the attention of an audience and leave a lasting impact. In this blog post, we will be discussing the power of speeches and how they can influence personal growth. We will also be analyzing famous speeches from some of history’s most iconic figures, including Martin Luther King Jr., John F. Kennedy, Winston Churchill, Susan B. Anthony, Mahatma Gandhi, and Nelson Mandela. Through these analyses, we will gain insights into the art of public speaking such as ethos, logos, and pathos in speeches, storytelling techniques in speeches, pacing and pauses in effective speech delivery, etc. By understanding what makes these speeches so powerful, we can apply those lessons to our own lives and discover how to become better communicators ourselves.

The Power of Speeches

Speeches possess the ability to inspire, motivate, and persuade individuals, making them a potent tool for conveying viewpoints. Engaging speeches employ visual aids and storytelling to captivate the audience, emphasizing the significance of language and nonverbal cues in delivery. With the integration of NLP terms like ‘own speech’ and ‘student council,’ public speaking skills can be nurtured, contributing to personal and professional growth within the context of this blog.

Why are speeches influential?

Speeches have a powerful influence, shaping opinions and educating audiences. They connect through persuasion, vulnerability, sincerity, and imagery. A good speech addresses people’s interests, values, or concerns. Clear, concise points backed by evidence make speeches influential. They can evoke strong emotions and stimulate critical thinking.

Personal growth through speeches

Giving a speech can be a life-changing, confidence-boosting opportunity. The use of grammar, storytelling, and imagery in speeches can profoundly impact personal growth. Public speaking can cultivate various speech skills such as persuasion, entertainment, and impromptu delivery. When addressing an audience, consider employing short sentences, maintaining eye contact, or utilizing oratorical styles for different occasions. Overcoming speech anxiety or writer’s block can lead to personal growth and a successful speech.

Analysing Famous Speeches

Analysing renowned speeches offers valuable insights into the orator’s persuasive techniques and speech type. The context of a famous speech, whether a maid of honor speech, eulogy, or tribute, significantly impacts its effectiveness. Understanding the speech type, be it informative, persuasive, or demonstrative, is crucial for analysis. Effective speeches are distinguished by the use of imagery, vulnerability, sincerity, and persuasive speech examples. Critical thinking of the audience is influenced by grammar, storytelling, and nonverbal communication in speeches.

The context of famous speeches

The context of famous speeches significantly impacts their effectiveness and resonance with the audience. Whether it’s a birthday party, debate speech, or any special occasion, understanding the audience’s interests, values, and concerns is crucial. The type of speech, be it motivational or entertaining, also plays a pivotal role in shaping the main points and persuasion. Successful speeches take into account the specific context and adapt the content to resonate with the audience’s expectations and emotions.

The impact of famous speeches

Famous speeches, whether a farewell address or a special occasion presentation, leave a profound and enduring impact on the audience. The success of a speech is reflected in audience engagement, critical thinking, and persuasion. Influential speeches, such as a maid of honor’s address or an oratorical presentation, have the power to inspire and educate people. The use of imagery, storytelling, and vulnerability in a speech enhances its emotional and persuasive impact. Additionally, speech types, audience attention, and visual aids all contribute to the powerful impact of a speech.

Lessons from Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream”

Martin Luther King Jr.’s iconic speech exemplifies the persuasive use of imagery and sincerity, effectively conveying a powerful message of hope and equality. The emotional impact was amplified by the use of repetition and storytelling, captivating a wide audience with a motivational speech. Analyzing this renowned speech reveals powerful persuasion techniques, demonstrating the influential impact of oratorical speech types and visual aids in captivating an audience.

The power of imagery in speeches

Imagery in speeches creates immersive, sensory experiences that deeply resonate with the audience. Effective imagery, vulnerability, or storytelling evokes intense emotions and helps to visualize abstract concepts. A compelling speech, be it a student council address or one’s own blog, utilizes imagery and persuasion to engage and captivate the listeners. The usage of the right words, nonverbal communication, or oratorical speech type further enhances the impact of imagery in a speech, leaving a lasting impression on the audience.

The use of repetition for emphasis

Repetition serves as a potent tool, reinforcing key points, building momentum, and emphasizing critical ideas in a speech. Martin Luther King Jr.’s persuasive use of repetition, vulnerability, or sincerity magnified the impact of his speech. The right words, visual aids, or storytelling combined with repetition enhance a speech’s persuasive effect. Similarly, a maid of honor speech, best speech, or successful speech may benefit from skillful repetition for emphasis, strengthening its influence on the audience.

Insights from John F. Kennedy’s Inaugural Address

John F. Kennedy’s inaugural speech showcased persuasive delivery, captivating the audience through powerful imagery and sincerity. It serves as a valuable example for crafting impactful speeches. Analyzing his address provides insights into the influence of oratorical speech and nonverbal communication. Kennedy’s speech engagement is a testament to the art of persuasion and the use of inspirational language in public speaking, offering valuable lessons for student council members crafting their own speeches for a blog.

The art of persuasion in speeches

Influencing opinions through speeches is a powerful tool. Capturing the audience’s attention and swaying their point of view is essential for a good speech. The use of the right words, imagery, and nonverbal communication is critical in persuasive speeches. Vulnerability, sincerity, and storytelling play a significant role in persuasion. Oratorical speech, grammar, and powerful imagery add impact to persuasive speeches, enhancing their effectiveness in swaying opinions.

The role of inspirational language

In speeches, motivational and uplifting language has the power to inspire and encourage audiences. The use of concise sentences, impactful imagery, and visual aids contributes to the effectiveness of a speech. Examples of speeches from various special occasions, like birthdays or farewells, highlight how inspirational language can resonate with people. Understanding the different types of speeches, such as motivational or entertaining, is essential for crafting a speech with the right tone. Additionally, integrating persuasive speech examples and informative speech techniques adds depth and impact to one’s own speech.

Understanding Winston Churchill’s “We Shall Fight on the Beaches”

Analyzing Winston Churchill’s “We Shall Fight on the Beaches” demonstrates the adept usage of ethos, logos, and pathos. A formal address, it effectively captivated the audience. Supported by critical thinking, persuasion, and a compelling argument, Churchill’s speech serves as a formal example, inspiring public speaking skills. The speech exemplifies good speech techniques, making it a noteworthy example for students to study.

The importance of a strong delivery

A compelling speech relies on a potent, convincing, and inspiring presentation. Whether it’s a persuasive, formal, or impromptu speech, the ability to command a speech is key. From entertaining speeches to debate or maid of honor speeches, a strong delivery captures the audience. Be it an impromptu or a farewell speech, a powerful delivery leaves a lasting impression, emphasizing the significance of mastering the art of delivery in public speaking.

The use of emotion to connect with the audience

Connecting with the audience through sincerity, vulnerability, and imagery is crucial in a speech. The use of emotion is a powerful tool, evoking powerful storytelling and persuasive speech techniques. Emotional speeches, such as eulogies or tributes, require a genuine connection to resonate with the audience. When emotion is effectively utilized, a speech becomes memorable and impactful, creating a lasting impression on the audience.

Deconstructing Susan B. Anthony’s “On Women’s Right to Vote”

Analyzing Susan B. Anthony’s speech reveals the persuasive power of ethos, logos, and pathos, creating a compelling argument. Her speech serves as a valuable example, inspiring critical thinking and persuasive speech techniques. Great speeches like Anthony’s motivate public speaking and captivate audiences. The main points, supported by critical thinking and persuasion, make her speech a powerful tool for advocacy and change.

The role of ethos, logos, and pathos in speeches

Critical components of persuasive speeches are ethos, logos, and pathos, which contribute to a compelling argument. The usage of these elements is exemplified in various types of speeches, such as eulogies, farewell speeches, and motivational speeches. Ethical persuasion and the integration of ethos, logos, and pathos are powerful tools in crafting a speech that resonates with the audience, regardless of the speech’s purpose or context. Understanding the application of these elements is essential in delivering an impactful and persuasive speech.

The power of a compelling argument

Crafting a speech, like a debate speech, or an impromptu speech, involves anchoring a compelling argument supported by critical thinking and persuasion. Persuasive speech techniques serve as a powerful tool to captivate the audience’s attention and influence their point of view. Similar to a motivational speech or a farewell speech, a compelling argument resonates with the audience, making it a key element in delivering an impactful speech and connecting with the listeners.

Interpreting Mahatma Gandhi’s “Quit India”

Mahatma Gandhi’s “Quit India” speech exemplifies the cultural context, persuasion, and critical thinking in great speeches. It serves as a formal example, motivating public speaking, persuasive speech, or a successful speech. Gandhi’s speech demonstrates the power of critical thinking and persuasion, supporting the main points with a compelling argument. Understanding types of speeches, like informative or persuasive speech, involves applying critical thinking and persuasion, influencing the audience’s perspective.

The impact of cultural context on speeches

The tone, language, and persuasion techniques in speeches are heavily influenced by the cultural context and the type of speech. Whether it’s a formal speech, persuasive speech, or a great speech, cultural context plays a pivotal role in shaping the speech’s persuasive nature. It’s important to acknowledge the impact of cultural context when crafting different types of speeches, such as entertaining speeches or farewell speeches. Sample speeches, like formal speech examples or persuasive speech examples, vividly illustrate this influence.

The effectiveness of simple language

Incorporating plain language in speeches enhances audience understanding and fosters a stronger connection. Relatable simplicity effectively conveys complex ideas while maintaining audience engagement. By avoiding jargon and convoluted terminology, speakers can ensure that their message resonates with the audience. This approach not only promotes comprehension but also establishes a sense of inclusivity, making the speech accessible to diverse audiences.

Delving into Nelson Mandela’s “I am Prepared to Die”

Mandela’s “I am Prepared to Die” exemplifies potent storytelling, authentically impactful. His adept use of pacing and pauses held the audience in rapture, as personal experiences lent depth and sincerity. Captivating imagery painted a vivid picture, making the speech resonate profoundly. This speech is a prime example of how student council members can learn from their own speech and improve their oratory skills for public speaking competitions and blog writing.

The importance of authenticity in speeches

Authentic speeches deeply resonate with the audience, fostering trust and connection while creating a compelling emotional impact. Speakers, by embracing authenticity, can connect on a human level, establishing a strong rapport with the audience. Incorporating personal experiences into their own speech allows for genuine and influential communication, making their message more relatable and engaging for the student council. This authenticity adds depth and sincerity to the blog, enhancing its overall impact.

The power of personal experiences in public speaking

Incorporating personal experiences in public speaking adds a relatable dimension to speeches and evokes empathy from the audience. Sharing personal stories fosters a genuine, sincere connection and enhances the speaker’s vulnerability. Additionally, personal anecdotes create a memorable, impactful speech that resonates with the audience. By drawing from their own experiences, speakers can establish authenticity, fostering trust and connection with the audience.

Learning from Other Famous Speeches

Analyzing the composition and arrangement of a speech reveals its effectiveness. Observing the speaker’s intonation and presentation is crucial. Identifying rhetorical elements like repetition and metaphors enriches the understanding. Context and audience analysis provides valuable insights. Unveiling the central message and its alignment with the speaker’s objectives is imperative for learning from renowned speeches.

The art of storytelling in speeches

Crafting a compelling speech involves weaving vivid imagery and metaphors to captivate the audience. A powerful opening and closing set the tone and leave a lasting impact. Strategic repetition emphasizes key points, while personal connections foster engagement. Structuring the speech for maximum impact ensures coherence and resonance. Additionally, humor can lighten the mood and create a relaxed atmosphere, enhancing the overall delivery for an impactful student council, own speech, or blog.

The role of pacing and pauses in effective speeches

Effective speeches rely on the skillful use of pacing and pauses. These elements help to capture and maintain the audience’s attention, emphasizing key points and engaging listeners. By studying historical speeches, one can observe how impactful pacing and pauses contribute to the overall delivery. Practicing and mastering pacing and pausing is crucial for delivering an impactful speech that resonates with the audience.

How do these famous speeches influence modern public speaking?

The influence of these timeless speeches extends to modern public speaking practices, setting a high standard for persuasive communication. They serve as a powerful tool for studying speechwriting and delivery, inspiring speakers to draw inspiration from the techniques employed in these famous speeches.

In conclusion, famous speeches have a profound impact on individuals and society as a whole. They inspire change, ignite passion, and challenge societal norms. By analyzing and understanding these speeches, we can learn valuable lessons on the art of persuasion, the power of storytelling, and the importance of authenticity. From Martin Luther King Jr.’s powerful imagery to Susan B. Anthony’s compelling arguments, each speech offers unique insights into effective public speaking. By incorporating these lessons into our own communication, we can become more influential and effective in conveying our ideas and inspiring others. So, take the time to study and learn from these famous speeches, and let their wisdom guide you in your own journey as a speaker.

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How to write a speech that your audience remembers

Whether in a work meeting or at an investor panel, you might give a speech at some point. And no matter how excited you are about the opportunity, the experience can be nerve-wracking . 

But feeling butterflies doesn’t mean you can’t give a great speech. With the proper preparation and a clear outline, apprehensive public speakers and natural wordsmiths alike can write and present a compelling message. Here’s how to write a good speech you’ll be proud to deliver.

What is good speech writing?

Good speech writing is the art of crafting words and ideas into a compelling, coherent, and memorable message that resonates with the audience. Here are some key elements of great speech writing:

• It begins with clearly understanding the speech's purpose and the audience it seeks to engage. 
• A well-written speech clearly conveys its central message, ensuring that the audience understands and retains the key points. 
• It is structured thoughtfully, with a captivating opening, a well-organized body, and a conclusion that reinforces the main message. 
• Good speech writing embraces the power of engaging content, weaving in stories, examples, and relatable anecdotes to connect with the audience on both intellectual and emotional levels. 

Ultimately, it is the combination of these elements, along with the authenticity and delivery of the speaker , that transforms words on a page into a powerful and impactful spoken narrative.

What makes a good speech?

A great speech includes several key qualities, but three fundamental elements make a speech truly effective:

Clarity and purpose

Remembering the audience, cohesive structure.

While other important factors make a speech a home run, these three elements are essential for writing an effective speech.

The main elements of a good speech

The main elements of a speech typically include:

• Introduction: The introduction sets the stage for your speech and grabs the audience's attention. It should include a hook or attention-grabbing opening, introduce the topic, and provide an overview of what will be covered.
• Opening/captivating statement: This is a strong statement that immediately engages the audience and creates curiosity about the speech topics.
• Thesis statement/central idea: The thesis statement or central idea is a concise statement that summarizes the main point or argument of your speech. It serves as a roadmap for the audience to understand what your speech is about.
• Body: The body of the speech is where you elaborate on your main points or arguments. Each point is typically supported by evidence, examples, statistics, or anecdotes. The body should be organized logically and coherently, with smooth transitions between the main points.
• Supporting evidence: This includes facts, data, research findings, expert opinions, or personal stories that support and strengthen your main points. Well-chosen and credible evidence enhances the persuasive power of your speech.
• Transitions: Transitions are phrases or statements that connect different parts of your speech, guiding the audience from one idea to the next. Effective transitions signal the shifts in topics or ideas and help maintain a smooth flow throughout the speech.
• Counterarguments and rebuttals (if applicable): If your speech involves addressing opposing viewpoints or counterarguments, you should acknowledge and address them. Presenting counterarguments makes your speech more persuasive and demonstrates critical thinking.
• Conclusion: The conclusion is the final part of your speech and should bring your message to a satisfying close. Summarize your main points, restate your thesis statement, and leave the audience with a memorable closing thought or call to action.
• Closing statement: This is the final statement that leaves a lasting impression and reinforces the main message of your speech. It can be a call to action, a thought-provoking question, a powerful quote, or a memorable anecdote.
• Delivery and presentation: How you deliver your speech is also an essential element to consider. Pay attention to your tone, body language, eye contact , voice modulation, and timing. Practice and rehearse your speech, and try using the 7-38-55 rule to ensure confident and effective delivery.

While the order and emphasis of these elements may vary depending on the type of speech and audience, these elements provide a framework for organizing and delivering a successful speech.

How to structure a good speech

You know what message you want to transmit, who you’re delivering it to, and even how you want to say it. But you need to know how to start, develop, and close a speech before writing it. 

Think of a speech like an essay. It should have an introduction, conclusion, and body sections in between. This places ideas in a logical order that the audience can better understand and follow them. Learning how to make a speech with an outline gives your storytelling the scaffolding it needs to get its point across.

Here’s a general speech structure to guide your writing process:

• Explanation 1
• Explanation 2
• Explanation 3

How to write a compelling speech opener

Some research shows that engaged audiences pay attention for only 15 to 20 minutes at a time. Other estimates are even lower, citing that people stop listening intently in fewer than 10 minutes . If you make a good first impression at the beginning of your speech, you have a better chance of interesting your audience through the middle when attention spans fade. 

Implementing the INTRO model can help grab and keep your audience’s attention as soon as you start speaking. This acronym stands for interest, need, timing, roadmap, and objectives, and it represents the key points you should hit in an opening. 

Here’s what to include for each of these points: 

• Interest : Introduce yourself or your topic concisely and speak with confidence . Write a compelling opening statement using relevant data or an anecdote that the audience can relate to.
• Needs : The audience is listening to you because they have something to learn. If you’re pitching a new app idea to a panel of investors, those potential partners want to discover more about your product and what they can earn from it. Read the room and gently remind them of the purpose of your speech. 
• Timing : When appropriate, let your audience know how long you’ll speak. This lets listeners set expectations and keep tabs on their own attention span. If a weary audience member knows you’ll talk for 40 minutes, they can better manage their energy as that time goes on. 
• Routemap : Give a brief overview of the three main points you’ll cover in your speech. If an audience member’s attention starts to drop off and they miss a few sentences, they can more easily get their bearings if they know the general outline of the presentation.
• Objectives : Tell the audience what you hope to achieve, encouraging them to listen to the end for the payout. 

Writing the middle of a speech

The body of your speech is the most information-dense section. Facts, visual aids, PowerPoints — all this information meets an audience with a waning attention span. Sticking to the speech structure gives your message focus and keeps you from going off track, making everything you say as useful as possible.

Limit the middle of your speech to three points, and support them with no more than three explanations. Following this model organizes your thoughts and prevents you from offering more information than the audience can retain. 

Using this section of the speech to make your presentation interactive can add interest and engage your audience. Try including a video or demonstration to break the monotony. A quick poll or survey also keeps the audience on their toes. 

Wrapping the speech up

To you, restating your points at the end can feel repetitive and dull. You’ve practiced countless times and heard it all before. But repetition aids memory and learning , helping your audience retain what you’ve told them. Use your speech’s conclusion to summarize the main points with a few short sentences.

Try to end on a memorable note, like posing a motivational quote or a thoughtful question the audience can contemplate once they leave. In proposal or pitch-style speeches, consider landing on a call to action (CTA) that invites your audience to take the next step.

How to write a good speech

If public speaking gives you the jitters, you’re not alone. Roughly 80% of the population feels nervous before giving a speech, and another 10% percent experiences intense anxiety and sometimes even panic. 

The fear of failure can cause procrastination and can cause you to put off your speechwriting process until the last minute. Finding the right words takes time and preparation, and if you’re already feeling nervous, starting from a blank page might seem even harder.

But putting in the effort despite your stress is worth it. Presenting a speech you worked hard on fosters authenticity and connects you to the subject matter, which can help your audience understand your points better. Human connection is all about honesty and vulnerability, and if you want to connect to the people you’re speaking to, they should see that in you.

1. Identify your objectives and target audience

Before diving into the writing process, find healthy coping strategies to help you stop worrying . Then you can define your speech’s purpose, think about your target audience, and start identifying your objectives. Here are some questions to ask yourself and ground your thinking : 

• What purpose do I want my speech to achieve? 
• What would it mean to me if I achieved the speech’s purpose?
• What audience am I writing for? 
• What do I know about my audience? 
• What values do I want to transmit? 
• If the audience remembers one take-home message, what should it be? 
• What do I want my audience to feel, think, or do after I finish speaking? 
• What parts of my message could be confusing and require further explanation?

2. Know your audience

Understanding your audience is crucial for tailoring your speech effectively. Consider the demographics of your audience, their interests, and their expectations. For instance, if you're addressing a group of healthcare professionals, you'll want to use medical terminology and data that resonate with them. Conversely, if your audience is a group of young students, you'd adjust your content to be more relatable to their experiences and interests. 

3. Choose a clear message

Your message should be the central idea that you want your audience to take away from your speech. Let's say you're giving a speech on climate change. Your clear message might be something like, "Individual actions can make a significant impact on mitigating climate change." Throughout your speech, all your points and examples should support this central message, reinforcing it for your audience.

4. Structure your speech

Organizing your speech properly keeps your audience engaged and helps them follow your ideas. The introduction should grab your audience's attention and introduce the topic. For example, if you're discussing space exploration, you could start with a fascinating fact about a recent space mission. In the body, you'd present your main points logically, such as the history of space exploration, its scientific significance, and future prospects. Finally, in the conclusion, you'd summarize your key points and reiterate the importance of space exploration in advancing human knowledge.

5. Use engaging content for clarity

Engaging content includes stories, anecdotes, statistics, and examples that illustrate your main points. For instance, if you're giving a speech about the importance of reading, you might share a personal story about how a particular book changed your perspective. You could also include statistics on the benefits of reading, such as improved cognitive abilities and empathy.

6. Maintain clarity and simplicity

It's essential to communicate your ideas clearly. Avoid using overly technical jargon or complex language that might confuse your audience. For example, if you're discussing a medical breakthrough with a non-medical audience, explain complex terms in simple, understandable language.

7. Practice and rehearse

Practice is key to delivering a great speech. Rehearse multiple times to refine your delivery, timing, and tone. Consider using a mirror or recording yourself to observe your body language and gestures. For instance, if you're giving a motivational speech, practice your gestures and expressions to convey enthusiasm and confidence.

8. Consider nonverbal communication

Your body language, tone of voice, and gestures should align with your message . If you're delivering a speech on leadership, maintain strong eye contact to convey authority and connection with your audience. A steady pace and varied tone can also enhance your speech's impact.

9. Engage your audience

Engaging your audience keeps them interested and attentive. Encourage interaction by asking thought-provoking questions or sharing relatable anecdotes. If you're giving a speech on teamwork, ask the audience to recall a time when teamwork led to a successful outcome, fostering engagement and connection.

10. Prepare for Q&A

Anticipate potential questions or objections your audience might have and prepare concise, well-informed responses. If you're delivering a speech on a controversial topic, such as healthcare reform, be ready to address common concerns, like the impact on healthcare costs or access to services, during the Q&A session.

By following these steps and incorporating examples that align with your specific speech topic and purpose, you can craft and deliver a compelling and impactful speech that resonates with your audience.

Tools for writing a great speech

There are several helpful tools available for speechwriting, both technological and communication-related. Here are a few examples:

• Word processing software: Tools like Microsoft Word, Google Docs, or other word processors provide a user-friendly environment for writing and editing speeches. They offer features like spell-checking, grammar correction, formatting options, and easy revision tracking.
• Presentation software: Software such as Microsoft PowerPoint or Google Slides is useful when creating visual aids to accompany your speech. These tools allow you to create engaging slideshows with text, images, charts, and videos to enhance your presentation.
• Speechwriting Templates: Online platforms or software offer pre-designed templates specifically for speechwriting. These templates provide guidance on structuring your speech and may include prompts for different sections like introductions, main points, and conclusions.
• Rhetorical devices and figures of speech: Rhetorical tools such as metaphors, similes, alliteration, and parallelism can add impact and persuasion to your speech. Resources like books, websites, or academic papers detailing various rhetorical devices can help you incorporate them effectively.
• Speechwriting apps: Mobile apps designed specifically for speechwriting can be helpful in organizing your thoughts, creating outlines, and composing a speech. These apps often provide features like voice recording, note-taking, and virtual prompts to keep you on track.
• Grammar and style checkers: Online tools or plugins like Grammarly or Hemingway Editor help improve the clarity and readability of your speech by checking for grammar, spelling, and style errors. They provide suggestions for sentence structure, word choice, and overall tone.
• Thesaurus and dictionary: Online or offline resources such as thesauruses and dictionaries help expand your vocabulary and find alternative words or phrases to express your ideas more effectively. They can also clarify meanings or provide context for unfamiliar terms.
• Online speechwriting communities: Joining online forums or communities focused on speechwriting can be beneficial for getting feedback, sharing ideas, and learning from experienced speechwriters. It's an opportunity to connect with like-minded individuals and improve your public speaking skills through collaboration.

Remember, while these tools can assist in the speechwriting process, it's essential to use them thoughtfully and adapt them to your specific needs and style. The most important aspect of speechwriting remains the creativity, authenticity, and connection with your audience that you bring to your speech.

5 tips for writing a speech

Behind every great speech is an excellent idea and a speaker who refined it. But a successful speech is about more than the initial words on the page, and there are a few more things you can do to help it land.

Here are five more tips for writing and practicing your speech:

1. Structure first, write second

If you start the writing process before organizing your thoughts, you may have to re-order, cut, and scrap the sentences you worked hard on. Save yourself some time by using a speech structure, like the one above, to order your talking points first. This can also help you identify unclear points or moments that disrupt your flow.

2. Do your homework

Data strengthens your argument with a scientific edge. Research your topic with an eye for attention-grabbing statistics, or look for findings you can use to support each point. If you’re pitching a product or service, pull information from company metrics that demonstrate past or potential successes. 

Audience members will likely have questions, so learn all talking points inside and out. If you tell investors that your product will provide 12% returns, for example, come prepared with projections that support that statement.

3. Sound like yourself

Memorable speakers have distinct voices. Think of Martin Luther King Jr’s urgent, inspiring timbre or Oprah’s empathetic, personal tone . Establish your voice — one that aligns with your personality and values — and stick with it. If you’re a motivational speaker, keep your tone upbeat to inspire your audience . If you’re the CEO of a startup, try sounding assured but approachable. 

4. Practice

As you practice a speech, you become more confident , gain a better handle on the material, and learn the outline so well that unexpected questions are less likely to trip you up. Practice in front of a colleague or friend for honest feedback about what you could change, and speak in front of the mirror to tweak your nonverbal communication and body language .

5. Remember to breathe

When you’re stressed, you breathe more rapidly . It can be challenging to talk normally when you can’t regulate your breath. Before your presentation, try some mindful breathing exercises so that when the day comes, you already have strategies that will calm you down and remain present . This can also help you control your voice and avoid speaking too quickly.

How to ghostwrite a great speech for someone else

Ghostwriting a speech requires a unique set of skills, as you're essentially writing a piece that will be delivered by someone else. Here are some tips on how to effectively ghostwrite a speech:

• Understand the speaker's voice and style : Begin by thoroughly understanding the speaker's personality, speaking style, and preferences. This includes their tone, humor, and any personal anecdotes they may want to include.
• Interview the speaker : Have a detailed conversation with the speaker to gather information about their speech's purpose, target audience, key messages, and any specific points they want to emphasize. Ask for personal stories or examples they may want to include.
• Research thoroughly : Research the topic to ensure you have a strong foundation of knowledge. This helps you craft a well-informed and credible speech.
• Create an outline : Develop a clear outline that includes the introduction, main points, supporting evidence, and a conclusion. Share this outline with the speaker for their input and approval.
• Write in the speaker's voice : While crafting the speech, maintain the speaker's voice and style. Use language and phrasing that feel natural to them. If they have a particular way of expressing ideas, incorporate that into the speech.
• Craft a captivating opening : Begin the speech with a compelling opening that grabs the audience's attention. This could be a relevant quote, an interesting fact, a personal anecdote, or a thought-provoking question.
• Organize content logically : Ensure the speech flows logically, with each point building on the previous one. Use transitions to guide the audience from one idea to the next smoothly.
• Incorporate engaging stories and examples : Include anecdotes, stories, and real-life examples that illustrate key points and make the speech relatable and memorable.
• Edit and revise : Edit the speech carefully for clarity, grammar, and coherence. Ensure the speech is the right length and aligns with the speaker's time constraints.
• Seek feedback : Share drafts of the speech with the speaker for their feedback and revisions. They may have specific changes or additions they'd like to make.
• Practice delivery : If possible, work with the speaker on their delivery. Practice the speech together, allowing the speaker to become familiar with the content and your writing style.
• Maintain confidentiality : As a ghostwriter, it's essential to respect the confidentiality and anonymity of the work. Do not disclose that you wrote the speech unless you have the speaker's permission to do so.
• Be flexible : Be open to making changes and revisions as per the speaker's preferences. Your goal is to make them look good and effectively convey their message.
• Meet deadlines : Stick to agreed-upon deadlines for drafts and revisions. Punctuality and reliability are essential in ghostwriting.
• Provide support : Support the speaker during their preparation and rehearsal process. This can include helping with cue cards, speech notes, or any other materials they need.

Remember that successful ghostwriting is about capturing the essence of the speaker while delivering a well-structured and engaging speech. Collaboration, communication, and adaptability are key to achieving this.

Give your best speech yet

Learn how to make a speech that’ll hold an audience’s attention by structuring your thoughts and practicing frequently. Put the effort into writing and preparing your content, and aim to improve your breathing, eye contact , and body language as you practice. The more you work on your speech, the more confident you’ll become.

The energy you invest in writing an effective speech will help your audience remember and connect to every concept. Remember: some life-changing philosophies have come from good speeches, so give your words a chance to resonate with others. You might even change their thinking.

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Elizabeth Perry, ACC

Elizabeth Perry is a Coach Community Manager at BetterUp. She uses strategic engagement strategies to cultivate a learning community across a global network of Coaches through in-person and virtual experiences, technology-enabled platforms, and strategic coaching industry partnerships. With over 3 years of coaching experience and a certification in transformative leadership and life coaching from Sofia University, Elizabeth leverages transpersonal psychology expertise to help coaches and clients gain awareness of their behavioral and thought patterns, discover their purpose and passions, and elevate their potential. She is a lifelong student of psychology, personal growth, and human potential as well as an ICF-certified ACC transpersonal life and leadership Coach.

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15 Informative Speech Examples to Inspire Your Next Talk

• The Speaker Lab
• May 13, 2024

Table of Contents

A good informative speech is one of the most effective tools in a speaker’s arsenal. But with so many potential topics out there, it can be tough to know where to start. That’s why we’ve compiled 15 informative speech examples to help you find your perfect subject. Whether you’re unearthing secrets from history for your listeners or delving into future technologies, informative speeches can prove to be the recipe for the perfect talk.

But crafting an effective informative speech is about more than just picking a topic. You have to research topics, put your thoughts in order, and speak up clearly and confidently. In this post, we’ll explore strategies for each step of the process, so you can create a speech that informs, engages, and makes a lasting impact on your listeners. Let’s get started.

15 Informative Speech Examples

If you’re looking for some inspiration for your next informative speech, look no further. Below are 15 examples of informative speech topics that are sure to engage and educate your audience.

• The history and evolution of social media platforms
• The benefits and drawbacks of renewable energy sources
• The impact of sleep deprivation on mental and physical health
• The role of emotional intelligence in personal and professional success
• The science behind climate change and its potential consequences
• The importance of financial literacy for young adults
• The influence of artificial intelligence on various industries
• The benefits of regular exercise and a balanced diet
• The history and cultural significance of a specific art form or genre
• The impact of technology on interpersonal communication
• The psychology behind procrastination and effective strategies to overcome it
• The role of diversity and inclusion in fostering innovation and creativity
• The importance of mental health awareness and resources for students
• The future of space exploration and its potential benefits for humanity
• The impact of globalization on local economies and cultures

These topics cover a wide range of subjects, from technology and science to psychology and culture. By choosing one of these informative speech examples, you’ll have plenty of material to work with to create an engaging and educational presentation.

Remember, the key to a successful informative speech is to choose a topic that you’re passionate about and that will resonate with your audience. Do your research, organize your thoughts, and practice your delivery to ensure that your message comes across loud and clear.

What Is an Informative Speech?

If you’ve ever been to a conference or seminar, chances are you’ve heard an informative speech. But what exactly is an informative speech? Simply put, it’s a type of speech designed to educate the audience on a particular topic. The goal is to provide interesting and useful information, ensuring the audience walks away with new knowledge or insights. Unlike persuasive speeches that aim to convince the audience of a viewpoint, informative speeches focus on explaining a subject clearly and objectively.

Types of Informative Speeches

Informative speeches come in various forms, each with its own purpose. The most common types are definition, explanation, description, and demonstration speeches. Depending on the objective, an informative speech can take on different structures and styles.

For example, a definition speech aims to explain a concept or term, while a demonstration speech shows the audience how to perform a task or process. An explanatory speech, on the other hand, provides a detailed account of a complex subject, breaking it down into digestible parts.

Purpose of Informative Speeches

At its core, the purpose of an informative speech is to share knowledge with the audience. These speeches are characterized by their fact-based, non-persuasive nature. The focus is on delivering information in an engaging and accessible way.

A well-crafted informative speech not only educates but also sparks curiosity and encourages further learning. By dedicating yourself to providing valuable information and appealing to your audience’s interests, you can succeed as an informative speaker.

Strategies for Selecting an Informative Speech Topic

Choosing the right topic is crucial for an effective informative speech. You want a subject that is not only interesting to you but also relevant and engaging for your audience. Consider their knowledge level, background, and expectations when selecting your topic.

One strategy is to focus on a subject you’re passionate about or have expertise in. This allows you to speak with authority and enthusiasm, making your speech more compelling. Another approach is to address current events or trending topics that are on people’s minds.

When brainstorming potential topics, consider your speech’s purpose and the type of informative speech you want to deliver. Is your goal to define a concept, explain a process, describe an event, or demonstrate a skill? Answering these questions will help guide your topic selection.

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How to Write an Informative Speech

Now that you’ve selected your topic, it’s time to start writing your informative speech. The key to a successful speech is thorough preparation and a clear, organized structure. Let’s break down the steps involved in crafting an engaging and informative presentation.

Researching Your Topic

Before you start writing, it’s essential to conduct thorough research on your topic. Gather facts, statistics, examples, and other supporting information for your informative speech. These things will help you explain and clarify the subject matter to your audience.

As you research, use reliable sources such as academic journals, reputable websites, and expert opinions to ensure the accuracy and credibility of your information. Take notes and organize your findings in a way that makes sense for your speech’s structure.

Structuring Your Speech

A typical informative speech structure includes three main parts, namely, an introduction, body, and conclusion. The introduction should grab the audience’s attention, establish your credibility , and preview the main points you’ll cover.

The body of your speech is where you’ll present your main points and supporting evidence. Use clear transitions between each point to maintain a logical flow. The conclusion should summarize your key takeaways and leave a lasting impression on your audience.

Outlining Your Speech

Creating an outline is a crucial step in organizing your thoughts and ensuring a coherent flow of information. Start by listing your main points and then add subpoints and supporting details for each section.

A well-structured outline will serve as a roadmap for your speech, keeping you on track and helping you stay focused on your key messages. It also makes the writing process more efficient and less overwhelming.

Writing Your Draft

With your outline in hand, it’s time to start writing your draft. Focus on presenting information clearly and concisely, using simple language and avoiding jargon. Provide examples and analogies throughout your informative speech in order to illustrate complex ideas and make them more relatable to your audience.

As you write, keep your audience in mind and tailor your language and examples to their level of understanding. Use transitions to link your ideas and maintain a smooth flow throughout the speech.

Editing and Revising

Once you’ve completed your draft, take the time to edit and revise your speech. First, check for clarity, accuracy, and logical organization. Then, eliminate unnecessary details, repetition, and filler words.

Read your speech aloud to identify any awkward phrasing or unclear passages. Lastly, seek feedback from others and be open to making changes based on their suggestions. Remember, the goal is to create a polished and effective informative speech.

Delivering an Informative Speech

You’ve written a fantastic informative speech, but now comes the real challenge: delivering it effectively. The way you present your speech can make all the difference in engaging your audience and ensuring they retain the information you’re sharing.

Practicing Your Speech

Practice makes perfect, and this couldn’t be more true when it comes to public speaking . Rehearse your speech multiple times to build confidence and familiarity with the content. Practice in front of a mirror, family members, or friends to get comfortable with your delivery.

As you practice, focus on your pacing, intonation, and body language. Aim for a conversational tone and maintain eye contact with your audience. The more you practice, the more natural and engaging your delivery will become.

Using Visual Aids

Visual aids such as slides, charts, or props can enhance your informative speech by making complex information more accessible and engaging. When utilized in your informative speech, they can help illustrate key points, provide visual examples, and break up the monotony of a purely verbal presentation.

Of course, it’s important to ensure your visuals are clear, relevant, and easy to understand. Otherwise, they may end up obscuring your points instead of clarifying them. In light of this, avoid cluttering your slides with too much text or overwhelming your audience with too many visuals. Use them strategically to support your message, not distract from it.

Engaging Your Audience

Engaging your audience is crucial for a successful informative speech. Use rhetorical questions, anecdotes, or interactive elements to keep them involved and attentive. Encourage participation, if appropriate, and maintain a conversational tone to create a connection with your listeners.

Pay attention to your audience’s reactions and adapt your delivery accordingly. If you sense confusion or disinterest, try rephrasing your points or providing additional examples to clarify your message. Remember, your goal is to educate and inspire your audience, so keep them at the forefront of your mind throughout your speech.

Handling Nerves

It’s normal to feel nervous before and during a speech, but there are strategies to help you manage those nerves . Take deep breaths, visualize success, and focus on your message rather than your anxiety. Remember, your audience wants you to succeed, and a little nervousness can actually enhance your performance by showing enthusiasm and authenticity.

If you find yourself getting overwhelmed, take a moment to pause, collect your thoughts, and regain your composure. Smile, make eye contact, and remind yourself that you’ve prepared thoroughly and have valuable information to share.

Common Mistakes to Avoid

To deliver an effective informative speech, it’s important to be aware of common pitfalls and mistakes. One of the biggest errors is overloading your audience with too much information. Remember, less is often more when it comes to public speaking.

Another mistake is failing to organize your content logically or using complex jargon without explanation. Make sure your speech has a clear structure and that you’re explaining any technical terms or concepts in a way that your audience can understand.

Finally, don’t neglect the importance of practice and preparation. Winging it or relying too heavily on notes can lead to a disjointed and unengaging speech. Take the time to rehearse, refine your delivery, and internalize your key points.

By avoiding these common mistakes and focusing on the strategies we’ve discussed, you’ll be well on your way to delivering an informative speech that educates, engages, and inspires your audience.

Tips for Delivering a Compelling Informative Speech

Once you’ve chosen your topic and done your research, it’s time to focus on delivering a compelling speech. Here are a few tips to keep in mind:

• Start with a strong attention-grabbing opening that draws your audience in and sets the tone for your speech.
• Use clear, concise language and avoid jargon or technical terms that your audience may not understand.
• Incorporate storytelling, examples, and anecdotes to make your points more relatable and memorable.
• Use visual aids , such as slides or props, to enhance your message and keep your audience engaged.
• Practice your delivery and timing to ensure that you stay within your allotted time and maintain a natural, conversational tone.

By following these tips and choosing a topic that you’re passionate about, you’ll be well on your way to delivering an informative speech that educates and inspires your audience.

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20 Bonus Topics for Informative Speeches

In case the informative speech examples above didn’t pique your interest, we have several more for you to consider. Ranging from topics like science and technology to history and education, these 20 topics are perfect for your next presentation.

• The history and development of virtual reality technology
• The benefits and challenges of remote work
• The science behind the formation of hurricanes and tornadoes
• The impact of social media on political campaigns and elections
• The importance of sustainable fashion and its environmental benefits
• The role of emotional support animals in mental health treatment
• The history and cultural significance of a specific cuisine or dish
• The impact of plastic pollution on marine ecosystems
• The benefits and risks of gene editing technology
• The psychology behind conspiracy theories and their spread online
• The importance of digital privacy and data security in the modern age
• The role of music therapy in healthcare and wellness
• The impact of deforestation on biodiversity and climate change
• The history and evolution of a specific sport or athletic event
• The benefits and challenges of alternative education models
• The science behind the human immune system and how vaccines work
• The impact of mass incarceration on communities and families
• The role of storytelling in preserving cultural heritage and traditions
• The importance of financial planning for retirement and old age
• The impact of urban agriculture on food security and community development

Choosing a Topic That Resonates With Your Audience

When selecting a topic for your informative speech, it’s important to consider your audience and what will resonate with them. Think about their interests, backgrounds, and knowledge levels, and choose a topic that will be both informative and engaging.

For example, if you’re speaking to a group of high school students, you may want to choose a topic that relates to their experiences or concerns, such as the impact of social media on mental health or the importance of financial literacy for young adults. If you’re speaking to a group of business professionals, you may want to focus on topics related to industry trends, leadership strategies, or emerging technologies.

By choosing a topic that resonates with your audience, you’ll be more likely to capture their attention and keep them engaged throughout your speech. And remember, even if you’re not an expert on the topic, you can still deliver an informative and engaging speech by doing your research and presenting the information in a clear and accessible way.

FAQs on Informative Speech Examples

What is an example of informative speech.

An example includes breaking down the impacts of climate change, detailing causes, effects, and potential solutions.

What are the 3 types of informative speeches?

The three main types are explanatory (breaks down complex topics), descriptive (paints a picture with words), and demonstrative (shows how to do something).

What are the 5 useful topics of an informative speech?

Top picks include technology advances, mental health awareness, environmental conservation efforts, cultural diversity appreciation, and breakthroughs in medical research.

What is an effective informative speech?

An effective one delivers clear info on a specific topic that educates listeners without overwhelming them. It’s well-researched and engaging.

Informative speech examples are everywhere, if you know where to look. From TED Talks to classroom lectures, there’s no shortage of inspiration for your next presentation. All you have to do is find a topic that lights your fire while engaging your audience.

Remember, a great informative speech is all about clarity, organization, and engagement. By following the tips and examples we’ve covered, you’ll be well on your way to delivering an informative speech that educates, enlightens, and leaves a lasting impression. So go ahead, pick your topic, and start crafting your own informative speech today!

• Last Updated: May 9, 2024

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• 9 Different Types Of Speeches (Plus Tips And Examples)

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Martin Luther King’s I have a dream . Winston Churchill’s we shall fight on the beaches speech. J. F. Kennedy’s The decision to go to the moon speech. Nelson Mandela’s I am the first accused speech. Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg address . Barrack Obama’s yes we can speech.

One thing all these have in common is that they were some of the most powerful speeches of their times. They brought people together and got them united towards the achievement of a single cause.

Speeches are a great way to sell an idea to people, deliver a message, impart knowledge, and persuade people to support a cause or idea. What many do not know, however, is that there are several types of speeches.

Knowing the different types of speeches can make you more effective at making speeches and move you from the 75% of the population who have a fear of public speaking , because you will have a good idea of which type of speech to use on which occasion and to which audience.

Below, let’s take a look at 9 different types of speeches.

DEMONSTRATIVE SPEECH

Have you ever been to a workshop or seminar where a speaker was showing people how to do something, such as how to exercise at home, how to use certain software, or how to use a certain product? If you have, it means that you have witnessed a demonstrative speech in action.

A demonstrative speech is a speech that is given with the aim of educating the audience about something. The key differentiating thing about demonstrative speeches, however, is that they are always accompanied by a demonstration.

The speaker doesn’t simply tell you how to do something or how something works. Instead, they demonstrate how to do it, or how the thing works, with visual aids to make it easier for the audience to understand what the speaker is talking about. The video below shows an example of a demonstrative speech.

Since the demonstrative speech seeks to impart knowledge, it can easily be confused for an informative speech, which also has similar objectives.

However, they have their differences. First, we have already seen that unlike the informative speech, the demonstrative speech has to be accompanied by visual aids to demonstrate what is being taught.

The other key difference between the two kinds of speeches is that whereas the informative speech focuses mostly on theoretical concepts, the demonstrative speech is more focused on the practical aspect of things. In other words, the demonstrative speech focuses more on the how, unlike the informative speech, which focuses mainly on the what.

You can give a demonstrative speech on just about anything that teaches people how to do something – how to earn a passive income , how to prepare for a job interview , how to maintain a car, you name it. However, for it to qualify as a demonstrative speech, you have to actually demonstrate how to do whatever it is you are talking about.

INFORMATIVE SPEECH

The informative speech, as you might have deduced, is a close ally of the demonstrative speech. The main objective of the informative speech is to convey information that the audience wasn’t aware of previously.

Remember your days back in college, when you used to doodle on your notebook while your professor droned on and on about some concept in physics that you couldn’t seem to wrap your head around? You might not have known it at the time, but your professor was actually giving an informative speech.

Similarly, if you have had a guided tour of a zoo or a game reserve, what you experienced was an informative speech.

Informative speeches can convey information about events, concepts, objects, processes, and so on.

To make the speech effective, the speaker tries to break down the topic they are talking about into simple, easy-to-digest ideas that can be understood by a layman. Informative speeches are usually accompanied by statistics, facts, and other data. Unlike demonstrative speeches, however, informative speeches are not accompanied by visual aids.

ENTERTAINING SPEECH

Have you been to an event where the MC enthralled the audience with funny story after funny story, leaving the crowd dying with laughter? If you have, what you witnessed was an example of an entertaining speech.

The main objective of the entertaining speech is to amuse the audience and provide them with pleasure and enjoyment.

To achieve this objective, entertaining speeches are accompanied by funny stories and illustrations, jokes, and other forms of humor. In most cases, entertaining speeches are quite short, lasting just a few minutes.

PERSUASIVE SPEECH

A politician giving a campaign speech with the aim of convincing the electorate to elect him or her to public office. A lawyer trying to convince the jury about the innocence of their client.

A teenager trying to convince their parents to allow them to go out with friends. Someone trying to convince a group of friends to try out a certain restaurant. An entrepreneur giving a sales pitch to convince investors to invest in his startup. All these are examples of persuasive speeches.

A persuasive speech refers to any speech given with the objective of persuading the audience that the speaker’s opinion is the right one, and by extension, convincing them that they should embrace the same opinion or provide their support to the speaker.

Obviously, persuading people to not only view your opinion as the right one, but to also embrace the same opinion and give you their support is not an easy thing to do.

Therefore, persuasive speeches employ a variety techniques to convince the audience. For instance, the speaker might use facts and statistics to make what they are saying more believable and more sensible. This means that the speaker needs to have performed a thorough research of the topic and gathered as much material as possible to back up their argument.

Alternatively, the speaker can appeal to the feelings and emotions of the audience to persuade them to adopt the speaker’s point of view and give their support.

This tactic is especially useful when trying to rally up support for a cause, such as raising funds to help the elderly, the poor, oppressed women, orphaned children, and so on.

For instance, Martin Luther King’s I have a dream speech is an example of a persuasive speech that appealed on the emotions of people to persuade them to take a stand against racism and inequality.

ORATORICAL SPEECH

This term refers to speeches that are delivered in an orator’s style. I know this might sound a little bit confusing since in the basic sense of the word, anyone giving a speech is an orator.

In most cases, oratorical speeches are given at events that call for a special celebration, such as ribbon cutting ceremonies, graduation parties, inauguration ceremonies, going-away parties, birthday parties, retirement parties, wedding receptions, and so on.

In some cases, some political speeches can also be considered to be oratorical in nature. For this to happen, however, the speaker should not be trying to persuade people to do something (such as vote for them) or to settle complex arguments. Instead, they should be general speeches that appeal to basic truths and common virtues.

Depending on the nature of the event, oratorical speeches can either be short and informal (such as in birthday parties and retirement parties), or long and formal (such as in presidential inauguration ceremonies). A good example of a great oratorical speech is J. F. Kennedy’s inaugural speech.

MOTIVATIONAL SPEECH

In my final year in high school, I was captain of the basketball team, and there’s this one game I will never forget. It was the final game of the high school basketball tournament, and if we won, we would be crowned state champions.

Problem is, we were trailing by 15 points at the break of half time. During the half time break, our coach gave us one of the most moving speeches I have ever heard.

He reminded us how much we had trained for this moment, reminded us that we were the best team he had ever coached, and told us that we had it in us to overturn the game and clinch the trophy.

We went back onto that court with so much determination and desire, and by the time the ref blew the final whistle, we were leading by 12 points and were crowned state champions. I attribute our success on the court that day to that half-time speech by our coach.

The speech he gave us is an example of a motivational speech.

A motivational speech is a type of speech that is given with the aim of encouraging or inspiring the audience and getting them to do better or improve themselves.

Motivational speeches are common in business meetings to encourage employees to improve their performance, in schools to inspire students to do their best in tests, and in sporting events to inspire athletes to give their all.

Motivational speeches are also good for lifting a person’s self-esteem or turning negative situations into positive ones. A good example of a great motivation speech is Steve Job’s Stanford commencement speech .

INTRODUCTORY SPEECH

An introductory speech refers to a kind of speech that is used to get the audience ready for the main focus on a meeting, gathering or event.

For instance, before the keynote speaker at an event gets on stage to give their speech, someone else will get on stage to introduce the keynote speaker to the audience.

Basically, the introductory speech introduces to the audience whoever or whatever they came to see or listen to. This could be a musician, a music band, an award winner, a motivational speaker, or even a staged production.

Introductory speeches are also common in social gatherings, such as graduations, promotion parties, wedding receptions, and so on. They are used to introduce the person(s) in whose honor an event or gathering has been held.

Ideally, an introductory speech should be short, and its main focus should be the person the speech is introducing. The introductory speech will usually provide a few biographical details about the person being introduced, mention this person’s qualifications or credentials, and probably share a quick anecdote about the person.

For an introductory speech to be effective, it should be positive, including a few complementary words about the person being introduced, and if possible, it should also be entertaining.

The aim is to get the audience excited about listening to the person being introduced.

ACCEPTANCE SPEECH

This is a type of speech that is made by person who is the recipient of a certain honor or award. In most cases, the acceptance speech comes immediately after an introductory speech introducing the recipient of the award.

In most cases, the acceptance speech is usually short. The aim of the acceptance speech is for the speaker to express their gratitude for the award or honor they have received, to thank the people behind the competition or event, and to appreciate those who helped them achieve whatever it is that led to them being honored.

In most cases, acceptance speeches are accompanied by a lot of emotion, which can make them quite difficult, especially for someone who is giving such a speech for the first time.

Perhaps the best thing to do when giving an acceptance speech is to follow the advice of former US President Franklin D. Roosevelt: Be sincere. Be brief. Be seated.

A toast refers to a speech that is made with the main objective of honoring another person or a group of people. Toasts typically end in a phrase like “let’s raise our glasses to…” followed by a drink.

Toasts are usually given at celebratory events and gatherings, such as retirement parties, graduations, birthday parties, wedding receptions, award dinners, and so on. Most toasts are usually informal and relatively short. Still, they can be difficult to make, and in most cases, they need some prior rehearsal.

In many cases, there are rules and guidelines to specify who is supposed to give a toast. For instance, in a wedding reception, the toast is usually made by the best man or the bride’s father.

Depending on the tone of the occasion, a toast can be humorous, inspirational, sentimental, and in some cases, solemn. In most cases, the person making the toast has to be closely associated with the reason behind the toast.

TIPS ON HOW TO GIVE BETTER AND MORE EFFECTIVE SPEECHES

Before giving a speech, you need to be well prepared in order to give a successful speech that will effectively achieve its objective. Remember, no speech is made just for the sake of it.

In addition, considering that most speeches are made in public settings, being prepared and giving a good speech can help cement your reputation as an orator. Below, let’s take a look at some tips that will help you give better and more effective speeches.

Know Your Audience

Having a good understanding of your audience is a very crucial aspect when it comes to making better and more effective speeches. A good speech is one that resonates well with the audience.

However, it is impossible for a speech to resonate with your audience if you do not have a good idea of the people who will be listening to the speech.

For instance, if you were asked to give a motivational speech to a group of entrepreneurs and to a group of students, you would not address them the same way, even if your objective would be the same for both speeches – encouraging and inspiring your audience. Knowing your audience allows you to tailor your speech to them.

Use Interesting Visual Aids For Demonstrative Speeches

We already saw that visual aids are a critical element of demonstrative speeches. It is impossible to make a demonstrative speech without visual aids.

To make your speech effective, you should make sure that your visual aids are both interesting (this allows you to capture and hold the audience’s attention) and simple (this makes it easier for your audience to understand what you are demonstrating).

There is no shortage of items that you can use as visual aids. You can use photographs, drawings, flashcards, 3-D items, or even actual products, if the situation allows that. Keep in mind that your audience might even be more attentive to your visual aids than to what you are saying, which is why you need to make sure you are using the right visual aids.

Choose An Easy Topic

When giving informative and demonstrative speeches, it is always a great idea to choose an easy topic, both for you and for the audience. An easy topic for you means that you won’t have to struggle much to make your audience understand what you are talking about. An easy topic for your audience will make it easier for you to hold the audience’s attention.

If you choose a topic that is excessively complex or technical, most of your audience might get bored along the way and lose their concentration.

Spice Up Your Entertaining Speeches

When giving an entertaining speech, try to find ways to spice up the speech to keep your audience engaged and to ensure they enjoy the speech.

You can do this by inserting jokes and funny stories into the speech every so often. Without doing this, what was supposed to be an entertaining speech can quickly become monotonous, causing your audience to start drifting away.

Have A Goal In Mind When Giving A Persuasive Speech

Before you start giving a persuasive speech, it should be very clear to you what you want to achieve from the speech. What action do you want your audience to take once you are done giving the speech?

This is what will inform how you are going to deliver your speech. For instance, instead of complaining about something and leaving it at that, you should persuade your audience that that thing is bad and then convince them to take some action against it.

In addition, it is always better to talk about the positivity of what you are trying to achieve or what you want your audience to do, rather than focusing on the negativity of what you are against.

Finally, you should give sufficient information about your stand or opinion to maximize your chances of achieving your goal.

Prepare Adequately

Regardless of the kind of speech you are going to be giving, it is very important to make sure that you are adequately prepared. Research the topic as much as you can, make sure you have the correct facts and statistics, and so on.

There is nothing worse than giving a speech about something, only for someone in the audience to dispute something you confidently said and be right about it.

It makes you look like you don’t know what you are talking about. Once you have all the facts you need, sit down, write your speech, prepare your speech cards , and go through your speech to make sure that everything looks okay.

From there, rehearse how you are going to deliver the speech a couple of times. You can do this in front of a mirror, or in front of a close friend or relative. You want to get to a point where you have your speech flowing from your fingertips.

Practice. Practice. Practice

Unless you are one of the few people who are born with a talent for oration and public speaking, becoming an eloquent orator is not something you are going to do within a single day. You need to practice and practice and practice.

This means that whenever you get a chance to give a speech, you should not let it pass you buy.

Offer to give speeches in various events, and following the events, analyze your speeches and see what you can do to improve. If possible, you can even have someone record you every time you give a speech.

You can then go through these speeches and identify various ways through which you can improve your oratory skills.

WRAPPING UP

Speeches are a great way to bring people together and deliver a message or build support for an idea or cause. For you speech to be effective, however, you have to know which kind of speech to give where.

After reading this article, I hope that you now have a good understanding of the different kinds of speeches and where they should be used. I have also shared a couple of tips which I hope you will start implementing to make your speeches better and more effective.

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How to write a good speech in 7 steps

By:  Susan Dugdale  

- an easily followed format for writing a great speech

Did you know writing a speech doesn't have be an anxious, nail biting experience?

Unsure? Don't be.

You may have lived with the idea you were never good with words for a long time. Or perhaps giving speeches at school brought you out in cold sweats.

However learning how to write a speech is relatively straight forward when you learn to write out loud.

And that's the journey I am offering to take you on: step by step.

To learn quickly, go slow

Take all the time you need. This speech writing format has 7 steps, each building on the next.

Walk, rather than run, your way through all of them. Don't be tempted to rush. Familiarize yourself with the ideas. Try them out.

I know there are well-advertised short cuts and promises of 'write a speech in 5 minutes'. However in reality they only truly work for somebody who already has the basic foundations of speech writing in place.

The foundation of good speech writing 

These steps are the backbone of sound speech preparation. Learn and follow them well at the outset and yes, given more experience and practice you could probably flick something together quickly. Like any skill, the more it's used, the easier it gets.

In the meantime...

Step 1: Begin with a speech overview or outline

Are you in a hurry? Without time to read a whole page? Grab ... The Quick How to Write a Speech Checklist And come back to get the details later.

• WHO you are writing your speech for (your target audience)
• WHY you are preparing this speech. What's the main purpose of your speech? Is it to inform or tell your audience about something? To teach them a new skill or demonstrate something? To persuade or to entertain? (See 4 types of speeches: informative, demonstrative, persuasive and special occasion or entertaining for more.) What do you want them to think, feel or do as a result of listening the speech?
• WHAT your speech is going to be about (its topic) - You'll want to have thought through your main points and have ranked them in order of importance. And have sorted the supporting research you need to make those points effectively.
• HOW much time you have for your speech eg. 3 minutes, 5 minutes... The amount of time you've been allocated dictates how much content you need. If you're unsure check this page: how many words per minute in a speech: a quick reference guide . You'll find estimates of the number of words required for 1 - 10 minute speeches by slow, medium and fast talkers.

Use an outline

The best way to make sure you deliver an effective speech is to start by carefully completing a speech outline covering the essentials: WHO, WHY, WHAT and HOW.

Beginning to write without thinking your speech through is a bit like heading off on a journey not knowing why you're traveling or where you're going to end up. You can find yourself lost in a deep, dark, murky muddle of ideas very quickly!

Pulling together a speech overview or outline is a much safer option. It's the map you'll follow to get where you want to go.

Get a blank speech outline template to complete

Click the link to find out a whole lot more about preparing a speech outline . ☺ You'll also find a free printable blank speech outline template.  I recommend using it!

Understanding speech construction

Before you begin to write, using your completed outline as a guide, let's briefly look at what you're aiming to prepare.

• an opening or introduction
• the body where the bulk of the information is given
• and an ending (or summary).

Imagine your speech as a sandwich

If you think of a speech as a sandwich you'll get the idea.

The opening and ending are the slices of bread holding the filling (the major points or the body of your speech) together.

You can build yourself a simple sandwich with one filling (one big idea) or you could go gourmet and add up to three or, even five. The choice is yours.

But whatever you choose to serve, as a good cook, you need to consider who is going to eat it! And that's your audience.

So let's find out who they are before we do anything else. 

Step 2: Know who you are talking to

Understanding your audience.

Did you know a  good speech is never written from the speaker's point of view?  ( If you need to know more about why check out this page on  building rapport .)

Begin with the most important idea/point on your outline.

Consider HOW you can explain (show, tell) that to your audience in the most effective way for them to easily understand it.   

Writing from the audience's point of view

To help you write from an audience point of view, it's a good idea to identify either a real person or the type of person who is most likely to be listening to you.

Make sure you select someone who represents the "majority" of the people who will be in your audience. That is they are neither struggling to comprehend you at the bottom of your scale or light-years ahead at the top.

Now imagine they are sitting next to you eagerly waiting to hear what you're going to say. Give them a name, for example, Joe, to help make them real.

Ask yourself

• How do I need to tailor my information to meet Joe's needs? For example, do you tell personal stories to illustrate your main points? Absolutely! Yes. This is a very powerful technique. (Click storytelling in speeches to find out more.)
• What type or level of language is right for Joe as well as my topic? For example, if I use jargon (activity, industry or profession specific vocabulary) will it be understood?

Step 3: Writing as you speak

Writing oral language.

Write down what you want to say about your first main point as if you were talking directly to Joe.

If it helps, say it all out loud before you write it down and/or record it.

Use the information below as a guide

(Click to download The Characteristics of Spoken Language  as a pdf.) 

You do not have to write absolutely everything you're going to say down * but you do need to write down, or outline, the sequence of ideas to ensure they are logical and easily followed.

Remember too, to explain or illustrate your point with examples from your research. 

( * Tip: If this is your first speech the safety net of having everything written down could be just what you need. It's easier to recover from a patch of jitters when you have a word by word manuscript than if you have either none, or a bare outline. Your call!)

Step 4: Checking tone and language

The focus of this step is re-working what you've done in Step 2 and 3.

You identified who you were talking to (Step 2) and in Step 3, wrote up your first main point.  Is it right? Have you made yourself clear?  Check it.

How well you complete this step depends on how well you understand the needs of the people who are going to listen to your speech.

Please do not assume because you know what you're talking about the person (Joe) you've chosen to represent your audience will too. Joe is not a mind-reader!

How to check what you've prepared

• Check the "tone" of your language . Is it right for the occasion, subject matter and your audience?
• Check the length of your sentences. You need short sentences. If they're too long or complicated you risk losing your listeners.

Check for jargon too. These are industry, activity or group exclusive words.

For instance take the phrase: authentic learning . This comes from teaching and refers to connecting lessons to the daily life of students. Authentic learning is learning that is relevant and meaningful for students. If you're not a teacher you may not understand the phrase.

The use of any vocabulary requiring insider knowledge needs to be thought through from the audience perspective. Jargon can close people out.

• Read what you've written out loud. If it flows naturally, in a logical manner, continue the process with your next main idea. If it doesn't, rework.

We use whole sentences and part ones, and we mix them up with asides or appeals e.g. "Did you get that? Of course you did. Right...Let's move it along. I was saying ..."

Click for more about the differences between spoken and written language .

And now repeat the process

Repeat this process for the remainder of your main ideas.

Because you've done the first one carefully, the rest should follow fairly easily.

Step 5: Use transitions

Providing links or transitions between main ideas.

Between each of your main ideas you need to provide a bridge or pathway for your audience. The clearer the pathway or bridge, the easier it is for them to make the transition from one idea to the next.

If your speech contains more than three main ideas and each is building on the last, then consider using a "catch-up" or summary as part of your transitions.

Is your speech being evaluated? Find out exactly what aspects you're being assessed on using this standard speech evaluation form

Link/transition examples

A link can be as simple as:

"We've explored one scenario for the ending of Block Buster 111, but let's consider another. This time..."

What follows this transition is the introduction of Main Idea Two.

Here's a summarizing link/transition example:

"We've ended Blockbuster 111 four ways so far. In the first, everybody died. In the second, everybody died BUT their ghosts remained to haunt the area. In the third, one villain died. His partner reformed and after a fight-out with the hero, they both strode off into the sunset, friends forever. In the fourth, the hero dies in a major battle but is reborn sometime in the future.

And now what about one more? What if nobody died? The fifth possibility..."

Go back through your main ideas checking the links. Remember Joe as you go. Try each transition or link out loud and really listen to yourself. Is it obvious? Easily followed?

Keep them if they are clear and concise.

For more about transitions (with examples) see Andrew Dlugan's excellent article, Speech Transitions: Magical words and Phrases .

Step 6: The end of your speech

The ideal ending is highly memorable . You want it to live on in the minds of your listeners long after your speech is finished. Often it combines a call to action with a summary of major points.

Example speech endings

Example 1: The desired outcome of a speech persuading people to vote for you in an upcoming election is that they get out there on voting day and do so. You can help that outcome along by calling them to register their support by signing a prepared pledge statement as they leave.

"We're agreed we want change. You can help us give it to you by signing this pledge statement as you leave. Be part of the change you want to see!

Example 2: The desired outcome is increased sales figures. The call to action is made urgent with the introduction of time specific incentives.

"You have three weeks from the time you leave this hall to make that dream family holiday in New Zealand yours. Can you do it? Will you do it? The kids will love it. Your wife will love it. Do it now!"

How to figure out the right call to action

A clue for working out what the most appropriate call to action might be, is to go back to your original purpose for giving the speech.

• Was it to motivate or inspire?
• Was it to persuade to a particular point of view?
• Was it to share specialist information?
• Was it to celebrate a person, a place, time or event?

Ask yourself what you want people to do as a result of having listened to your speech.

For more about ending speeches

Visit this page for more about how to end a speech effectively . You'll find two additional types of speech endings with examples.

Write and test

Write your ending and test it out loud. Try it out on a friend, or two. Is it good? Does it work?

Step 7: The introduction

Once you've got the filling (main ideas) the linking and the ending in place, it's time to focus on the introduction.

The introduction comes last as it's the most important part of your speech. This is the bit that either has people sitting up alert or slumped and waiting for you to end. It's the tone setter!

What makes a great speech opening?

Ideally you want an opening that makes listening to you the only thing the 'Joes' in the audience want to do.

You want them to forget they're hungry or that their chair is hard or that their bills need paying.

The way to do that is to capture their interest straight away. You do this with a "hook".

Hooks to catch your audience's attention

Hooks come in as many forms as there are speeches and audiences. Your task is work out what specific hook is needed to catch your audience.

Go back to the purpose. Why are you giving this speech?

Once you have your answer, consider your call to action. What do you want the audience to do, and, or take away, as a result of listening to you?

Next think about the imaginary or real person you wrote for when you were focusing on your main ideas.

Choosing the best hook

• Is it humor?
• Would shock tactics work?
• Is it a rhetorical question?
• Is it formality or informality?
• Is it an outline or overview of what you're going to cover, including the call to action?
• Or is it a mix of all these elements?

A hook example

Here's an example from a fictional political speech. The speaker is lobbying for votes. His audience are predominately workers whose future's are not secure.

"How's your imagination this morning? Good? (Pause for response from audience) Great, I'm glad. Because we're going to put it to work starting right now.

I want you to see your future. What does it look like? Are you happy? Is everything as you want it to be? No? Let's change that. We could do it. And we could do it today.

At the end of this speech you're going to be given the opportunity to change your world, for a better one ...

No, I'm not a magician. Or a simpleton with big ideas and precious little commonsense. I'm an ordinary man, just like you. And I have a plan to share!"

And then our speaker is off into his main points supported by examples. The end, which he has already foreshadowed in his opening, is the call to vote for him.

Prepare several hooks

Experiment with several openings until you've found the one that serves your audience, your subject matter and your purpose best.

For many more examples of speech openings go to: how to write a speech introduction . You'll find 12 of the very best ways to start a speech.

That completes the initial seven steps towards writing your speech. If you've followed them all the way through, congratulations, you now have the text of your speech!

Although you might have the words, you're still a couple of steps away from being ready to deliver them. Both of them are essential if you want the very best outcome possible. They are below. Please take them.

Step 8: Checking content and timing

This step pulls everything together.

Check once, check twice, check three times & then once more!

Go through your speech really carefully.

On the first read through check you've got your main points in their correct order with supporting material, plus an effective introduction and ending.

On the second read through check the linking passages or transitions making sure they are clear and easily followed.

On the third reading check your sentence structure, language use and tone.

Double, triple check the timing

Now go though once more.

This time read it aloud slowly and time yourself.

If it's too long for the time allowance you've been given make the necessary cuts.

Start by looking at your examples rather than the main ideas themselves. If you've used several examples to illustrate one principal idea, cut the least important out.

Also look to see if you've repeated yourself unnecessarily or, gone off track. If it's not relevant, cut it.

Repeat the process, condensing until your speech fits the required length, preferably coming in just under your time limit.

You can also find out how approximately long it will take you to say the words you have by using this very handy words to minutes converter . It's an excellent tool, one I frequently use. While it can't give you a precise time, it does provide a reasonable estimate.

Step 9: Rehearsing your speech

And NOW you are finished with writing the speech, and are ready for REHEARSAL .

Please don't be tempted to skip this step. It is not an extra thrown in for good measure. It's essential.

The "not-so-secret" secret of successful speeches combines good writing with practice, practice and then, practicing some more.

Go to how to practice public speaking and you'll find rehearsal techniques and suggestions to boost your speech delivery from ordinary to extraordinary.

The Quick How to Write a Speech Checklist

Before you begin writing you need:.

• Your speech OUTLINE with your main ideas ranked in the order you're going to present them. (If you haven't done one complete this 4 step sample speech outline . It will make the writing process much easier.)
• Your RESEARCH
• You also need to know WHO you're speaking to, the PURPOSE of the speech and HOW long you're speaking for

The basic format

• the body where you present your main ideas

Split your time allowance so that you spend approximately 70% on the body and 15% each on the introduction and ending.

How to write the speech

• Write your main ideas out incorporating your examples and research
• Link them together making sure each flows in a smooth, logical progression
• Write your ending, summarizing your main ideas briefly and end with a call for action
• Write your introduction considering the 'hook' you're going to use to get your audience listening
• An often quoted saying to explain the process is: Tell them what you're going to tell them (Introduction) Tell them (Body of your speech - the main ideas plus examples) Tell them what you told them (The ending)

TEST before presenting. Read aloud several times to check the flow of material, the suitability of language and the timing.

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6 Speech Examples for Student Council

Are you running for student council and need some inspiration for your campaign speech?

Look no further!

As a seasoned speech writer with three decades of experience, I’m here to guide you through the process of crafting a compelling speech that will win over your fellow students.

Speech Examples for Student Council

In this article, you’ll find six sample speeches of varying lengths, each tailored to different occasions and audiences.

Whether you’re aiming for a short and sweet introduction or a lengthier, more detailed address, these examples will provide you with the building blocks to create a speech that truly resonates with your peers.

Let’s explore the sample speeches:

Speech 1: Introducing Yourself and Your Vision

Good morning, everyone! My name is [Your Name], and I’m running for the position of [Position] in our student council. I believe that our school has the potential to be an even more incredible place, and I want to work with all of you to make that happen.

As your [Position], I will focus on three main goals: increasing student engagement, improving communication between the student body and the administration, and creating a more inclusive and welcoming environment for everyone. Together, we can make our school a place where every student feels valued, heard, and supported.

I’m excited to bring my passion, dedication, and leadership skills to this role, and I hope to earn your vote. Let’s work together to build a brighter future for our school community!

— END OF SPEECH —

Commentary: This short speech is perfect for introducing yourself and your vision to the student body. It’s concise, yet it touches on key points that will resonate with your audience. This speech is ideal for a brief campaign introduction or a quick address during a school assembly.

Speech 2: Addressing a Specific Issue

Hello, fellow students. Today, I want to talk about an issue that affects many of us: the lack of healthy food options in our school cafeteria. As your potential [Position], I believe we must work together to ensure that every student has access to nutritious meals that fuel their bodies and minds.

If elected, I will collaborate with the administration and the cafeteria staff to introduce a wider variety of healthy food choices, such as fresh fruits and vegetables, whole grain options, and lean proteins. I will also advocate for the inclusion of vegetarian and vegan options to cater to the diverse dietary needs and preferences of our student body.

Additionally, I plan to organize educational workshops and events that promote healthy eating habits and teach students about the importance of proper nutrition. By working together, we can create a school environment that prioritizes the health and well-being of every student.

Thank you for your time, and I hope to have your support in the upcoming election.

Commentary: This medium-length speech focuses on a specific issue that is relevant to the student body. It demonstrates the candidate’s understanding of the problem and presents concrete solutions. This speech is suitable for a more detailed campaign address or a debate on school-related issues.

Speech 3: Encouraging Student Involvement

Good afternoon, everyone. As we all know, student involvement is the heart and soul of our school community. It’s what makes our school an engaging and meaningful place to learn and grow. That’s why, as your potential [Position], I want to make student involvement my top priority.

If elected, I will work tirelessly to create more opportunities for students to get involved in extracurricular activities, clubs, and events. I believe that every student should have the chance to explore their passions, develop new skills, and connect with like-minded peers.

To achieve this goal, I will collaborate with the administration, faculty, and student leaders to organize a wide range of activities that cater to diverse interests and talents. From sports and arts to community service and academic clubs, there will be something for everyone.

Moreover, I will ensure that these opportunities are accessible to all students, regardless of their background or financial situation. I will advocate for funding and resources to support student-led initiatives and provide the necessary equipment and materials.

By fostering a culture of student involvement, we can create a stronger, more connected school community where every student feels valued and empowered to make a difference.

So, let’s work together to make our school a place where every student can thrive and reach their full potential. Vote for [Your Name] for [Position], and let’s unleash the power of student involvement!

Commentary: This long speech emphasizes the importance of student involvement and presents the candidate’s plan to create more opportunities for students to engage in extracurricular activities. It’s an inspiring and motivational speech that can be used for a longer campaign address or a school-wide event promoting student participation.

Speech 4: Promoting Diversity and Inclusion

Hello, my fellow students. Today, I want to talk about a topic that is close to my heart: diversity and inclusion. As your potential [Position], I believe that our school should be a place where every student, regardless of their race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, religion, or ability, feels welcomed, respected, and valued.

Diversity is what makes our school community rich and dynamic. It brings together different perspectives, experiences, and ideas, which are essential for growth, learning, and innovation. However, diversity without inclusion is meaningless. That’s why we need to actively work towards creating an inclusive environment where every student feels a sense of belonging and has equal opportunities to succeed.

If elected, I will make diversity and inclusion a top priority. I will collaborate with the administration, faculty, and student leaders to develop and implement policies and programs that promote equity and combat discrimination and bias.

Some of the initiatives I plan to introduce include:

• Organizing diversity and inclusion workshops and training sessions for students, faculty, and staff.
• Establishing a diversity and inclusion committee that will work towards identifying and addressing issues related to equity and inclusion in our school.
• Advocating for a more diverse and inclusive curriculum that represents the experiences and perspectives of marginalized communities.
• Creating safe spaces and support groups for students who may feel marginalized or excluded.
• Celebrating diversity through cultural events, festivals, and awareness campaigns.

By working together to promote diversity and inclusion, we can create a school community where every student feels valued, respected, and empowered to be their authentic selves.

So, let’s embrace our differences, celebrate our diversity, and build an inclusive school culture that uplifts and supports every student. Vote for [Your Name] for [Position], and let’s make our school a place where everyone belongs.

Commentary: This long speech addresses the important topic of diversity and inclusion in the school community. It presents a compelling case for why diversity and inclusion matter and outlines specific initiatives the candidate plans to introduce if elected. This speech is suitable for a campaign focused on promoting equity and social justice or for a school event celebrating diversity.

Speech 5: Advocating for Mental Health Support

Good morning, everyone. Today, I want to talk about an issue that affects many of us, yet often goes unspoken: mental health. As students, we face a lot of pressure and stress – from academics and extracurricular activities to social relationships and personal challenges. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed, anxious, or even depressed at times.

That’s why, as your potential [Position], I believe that our school should prioritize mental health support for all students. We need to create a culture where it’s okay to talk about mental health, where seeking help is encouraged, and where resources and support are readily available.

If elected, I will work closely with the administration, counselors, and mental health professionals to develop a comprehensive mental health support system for our school. This will include:

• Increasing access to mental health resources, such as counseling services, support groups, and crisis hotlines.
• Organizing mental health awareness campaigns and events to reduce stigma and promote open conversations about mental health.
• Advocating for the integration of mental health education into our curriculum, so students can learn about coping strategies, stress management, and emotional well-being.
• Creating a peer support network where students can connect with and support each other.
• Ensuring that our school policies and practices prioritize student mental health and well-being.

By prioritizing mental health support, we can create a school environment where every student feels supported, valued, and empowered to take care of their emotional well-being.

So, let’s work together to break the silence around mental health, and build a school community that promotes resilience, compassion, and well-being for all. Vote for [Your Name] for [Position], and let’s make mental health a priority.

Commentary: This lengthy speech tackles the critical issue of mental health support in schools. It highlights the importance of creating a culture that prioritizes mental health and outlines specific initiatives the candidate plans to implement if elected. This speech is suitable for a campaign focused on student well-being or for a school event raising awareness about mental health.

Speech 6: Envisioning a Sustainable Future

Hello, fellow students. As we look to the future, it’s clear that sustainability and environmental responsibility must be at the forefront of our minds. As your potential [Position], I believe that our school has a crucial role to play in shaping a sustainable future – not just for ourselves, but for generations to come.

The challenges we face are difficult – from climate change and resource depletion to pollution and waste. But I believe that our school community has the power to make a difference. By working together, we can transform our school into a model of sustainability and inspire others to follow our lead.

If elected, I will make sustainability a top priority. I will work with the administration, faculty, and student leaders to develop and implement a comprehensive sustainability plan for our school. This plan will include:

• Reducing our school’s carbon footprint by implementing energy-efficient practices, such as using renewable energy sources and improving insulation.
• Promoting waste reduction and recycling through education campaigns and the installation of recycling bins throughout the school.
• Encouraging sustainable transportation options, such as biking, walking, and carpooling, and advocating for better public transportation access.
• Integrating sustainability education into our curriculum, so students can learn about the environmental challenges we face and the solutions we can implement.
• Creating a student-led sustainability committee that will work to identify and address sustainability issues in our school and community.

By taking action on sustainability, we can not only reduce our environmental impact but also create a healthier, more resilient school community. We can inspire others to join us in the fight against climate change and environmental degradation.

So, let’s come together to build a sustainable future – one where we can thrive in harmony with the planet. Vote for [Your Name] for [Position], and let’s make sustainability a way of life at our school.

Commentary: This lengthy speech focuses on the urgent issue of sustainability and environmental responsibility. It presents a vision for transforming the school into a model of sustainability and outlines specific initiatives the candidate plans to implement if elected. This speech is suitable for a campaign centered on environmental issues or for a school event promoting sustainability and eco-friendliness.

To sum up, crafting a compelling student council speech requires a combination of passion, vision, and strategic thinking.

By focusing on issues that matter to your fellow students, presenting concrete solutions, and delivering your message with confidence and authenticity, you can inspire your peers to support your candidacy and join you in creating positive change in your school community.

Keep in mind, that the key to a successful speech is to connect with your audience on a personal level.

Share your own experiences, listen to the concerns of your fellow students, and demonstrate your commitment to making a difference.

Use these sample speeches as a starting point, but don’t be afraid to infuse your personality and unique perspective into your words.

Your speech should reflect who you are and what you stand for.

So, go out there and give it your all! With hard work, dedication, and a compelling message, you can win the hearts and minds of your fellow students and become a strong voice for positive change in your school.

Good luck, and may the best candidate win!

15 Powerful Speech Opening Lines (And How to Create Your Own)

Hrideep barot.

• Public Speaking , Speech Writing

Powerful speech opening lines set the tone and mood of your speech. It’s what grips the audience to want to know more about the rest of your talk.

The first few seconds are critical. It’s when you have maximum attention of the audience. And you must capitalize on that!

Instead of starting off with something plain and obvious such as a ‘Thank you’ or ‘Good Morning’, there’s so much more you can do for a powerful speech opening (here’s a great article we wrote a while ago on how you should NOT start your speech ).

To help you with this, I’ve compiled some of my favourite openings from various speakers. These speakers have gone on to deliver TED talks , win international Toastmaster competitions or are just noteworthy people who have mastered the art of communication.

After each speaker’s opening line, I have added how you can include their style of opening into your own speech. Understanding how these great speakers do it will certainly give you an idea to create your own speech opening line which will grip the audience from the outset!

Alright! Let’s dive into the 15 powerful speech openings…

Note: Want to take your communications skills to the next level? Book a complimentary consultation with one of our expert communication coaches. We’ll look under the hood of your hurdles and pick two to three growth opportunities so you can speak with impact!

1. Ric Elias

Opening: “Imagine a big explosion as you climb through 3,000 ft. Imagine a plane full of smoke. Imagine an engine going clack, clack, clack. It sounds scary. Well I had a unique seat that day. I was sitting in 1D.”

How to use the power of imagination to open your speech?

Putting your audience in a state of imagination can work extremely well to captivate them for the remainder of your talk.

It really helps to bring your audience in a certain mood that preps them for what’s about to come next. Speakers have used this with high effectiveness by transporting their audience into an imaginary land to help prove their point.

When Ric Elias opened his speech, the detail he used (3000 ft, sound of the engine going clack-clack-clack) made me feel that I too was in the plane. He was trying to make the audience experience what he was feeling – and, at least in my opinion, he did.

When using the imagination opening for speeches, the key is – detail. While we want the audience to wander into imagination, we want them to wander off to the image that we want to create for them. So, detail out your scenario if you’re going to use this technique.

Make your audience feel like they too are in the same circumstance as you were when you were in that particular situation.

2. Barack Obama

Opening: “You can’t say it, but you know it’s true.”

3. Seth MacFarlane

Opening: “There’s nowhere I would rather be on a day like this than around all this electoral equipment.” (It was raining)

How to use humour to open your speech?

When you use humour in a manner that suits your personality, it can set you up for a great speech. Why? Because getting a laugh in the first 30 seconds or so is a great way to quickly get the audience to like you.

And when they like you, they are much more likely to listen to and believe in your ideas.

Obama effortlessly uses his opening line to entice laughter among the audience. He brilliantly used the setting (the context of Trump becoming President) and said a line that completely matched his style of speaking.

Saying a joke without really saying a joke and getting people to laugh requires you to be completely comfortable in your own skin. And that’s not easy for many people (me being one of them).

If the joke doesn’t land as expected, it could lead to a rocky start.

Keep in mind the following when attempting to deliver a funny introduction:

• Know your audience: Make sure your audience gets the context of the joke (if it’s an inside joke among the members you’re speaking to, that’s even better!). You can read this article we wrote where we give you tips on how you can actually get to know your audience better to ensure maximum impact with your speech openings
• The joke should suit your natural personality. Don’t make it look forced or it won’t elicit the desired response
• Test the opening out on a few people who match your real audience. Analyze their response and tweak the joke accordingly if necessary
• Starting your speech with humour means your setting the tone of your speech. It would make sense to have a few more jokes sprinkled around the rest of the speech as well as the audience might be expecting the same from you

4. Mohammed Qahtani

Opening: Puts a cigarette on his lips, lights a lighter, stops just before lighting the cigarette. Looks at audience, “What?”

5. Darren Tay

Opening: Puts a white pair of briefs over his pants.

How to use props to begin your speech?

The reason props work so well in a talk is because in most cases the audience is not expecting anything more than just talking. So when a speaker pulls out an object that is unusual, everyone’s attention goes right to it.

It makes you wonder why that prop is being used in this particular speech.

The key word here is unusual . To grip the audience’s attention at the beginning of the speech, the prop being used should be something that the audience would never expect. Otherwise, it just becomes something that is common. And common = boring!

What Mohammed Qahtani and Darren Tay did superbly well in their talks was that they used props that nobody expected them to.

By pulling out a cigarette and lighter or a white pair of underwear, the audience can’t help but be gripped by what the speaker is about to do next. And that makes for a powerful speech opening.

6. Simon Sinek

Opening: “How do you explain when things don’t go as we assume? Or better, how do you explain when others are able to achieve things that seem to defy all of the assumptions?”

7. Julian Treasure

Opening: “The human voice. It’s the instrument we all play. It’s the most powerful sound in the world. Probably the only one that can start a war or say “I love you.” And yet many people have the experience that when they speak people don’t listen to them. Why is that? How can we speak powerfully to make change in the world?”

How to use questions to open a speech?

I use this method often. Starting off with a question is the simplest way to start your speech in a manner that immediately engages the audience.

But we should keep our questions compelling as opposed to something that is fairly obvious.

I’ve heard many speakers start their speeches with questions like “How many of us want to be successful?”

No one is going to say ‘no’ to that and frankly, I just feel silly raising my hand at such questions.

Simon Sinek and Jullian Treasure used questions in a manner that really made the audience think and make them curious to find out what the answer to that question is.

What Jullian Treasure did even better was the use of a few statements which built up to his question. This made the question even more compelling and set the theme for what the rest of his talk would be about.

So think of what question you can ask in your speech that will:

• Set the theme for the remainder of your speech
• Not be something that is fairly obvious
• Be compelling enough so that the audience will actually want to know what the answer to that question will be

8. Aaron Beverley

Opening: Long pause (after an absurdly long introduction of a 57-word speech title). “Be honest. You enjoyed that, didn’t you?”

How to use silence for speech openings?

The reason this speech opening stands out is because of the fact that the title itself is 57 words long. The audience was already hilariously intrigued by what was going to come next.

But what’s so gripping here is the way Aaron holds the crowd’s suspense by…doing nothing. For about 10 to 12 seconds he did nothing but stand and look at the audience. Everyone quietened down. He then broke this silence by a humorous remark that brought the audience laughing down again.

When going on to open your speech, besides focusing on building a killer opening sentence, how about just being silent?

It’s important to keep in mind that the point of having a strong opening is so that the audience’s attention is all on you and are intrigued enough to want to listen to the rest of your speech.

Silence is a great way to do that. When you get on the stage, just pause for a few seconds (about 3 to 5 seconds) and just look at the crowd. Let the audience and yourself settle in to the fact that the spotlight is now on you.

I can’t put my finger on it, but there is something about starting the speech off with a pure pause that just makes the beginning so much more powerful. It adds credibility to you as a speaker as well, making you look more comfortable and confident on stage. 

If you want to know more about the power of pausing in public speaking , check out this post we wrote. It will give you a deeper insight into the importance of pausing and how you can harness it for your own speeches. You can also check out this video to know more about Pausing for Public Speaking:

9. Dan Pink

Opening: “I need to make a confession at the outset here. Little over 20 years ago, I did something that I regret. Something that I’m not particularly proud of. Something that in many ways I wish no one would ever know but that here I feel kind of obliged to reveal.”

10. Kelly McGonigal

Opening: “I have a confession to make. But first I want you to make a little confession to me.”

How to use a build-up to open your speech?

When there are so many amazing ways to start a speech and grip an audience from the outset, why would you ever choose to begin your speech with a ‘Good morning?’.

That’s what I love about build-ups. They set the mood for something awesome that’s about to come in that the audience will feel like they just have to know about.

Instead of starting a speech as it is, see if you can add some build-up to your beginning itself. For instance, in Kelly McGonigal’s speech, she could have started off with the question of stress itself (which she eventually moves on to in her speech). It’s not a bad way to start the speech.

But by adding the statement of “I have a confession to make” and then not revealing the confession for a little bit, the audience is gripped to know what she’s about to do next and find out what indeed is her confession.

11. Tim Urban

Opening: “So in college, I was a government major. Which means that I had to write a lot of papers. Now when a normal student writes a paper, they might spread the work out a little like this.”

12. Scott Dinsmore

Opening: “8 years ago, I got the worst career advice of my life.”

How to use storytelling as a speech opening?

“The most powerful person in the world is the storyteller.” Steve Jobs

Storytelling is the foundation of good speeches. Starting your speech with a story is a great way to grip the audience’s attention. It makes them yearn to want to know how the rest of the story is going to pan out.

Tim Urban starts off his speech with a story dating back to his college days. His use of slides is masterful and something we all can learn from. But while his story sounds simple, it does the job of intriguing the audience to want to know more.

As soon as I heard the opening lines, I thought to myself “If normal students write their paper in a certain manner, how does Tim write his papers?”

Combine such a simple yet intriguing opening with comedic slides, and you’ve got yourself a pretty gripping speech.

Scott Dismore’s statement has a similar impact. However, just a side note, Scott Dismore actually started his speech with “Wow, what an honour.”

I would advise to not start your talk with something such as that. It’s way too common and does not do the job an opening must, which is to grip your audience and set the tone for what’s coming.

13. Larry Smith

Opening: “I want to discuss with you this afternoon why you’re going to fail to have a great career.”

14. Jane McGonigal

Opening: “You will live 7.5 minutes longer than you would have otherwise, just because you watched this talk.”

How to use provocative statements to start your speech?

Making a provocative statement creates a keen desire among the audience to want to know more about what you have to say. It immediately brings everyone into attention.

Larry Smith did just that by making his opening statement surprising, lightly humorous, and above all – fearful. These elements lead to an opening statement which creates so much curiosity among the audience that they need to know how your speech pans out.

This one time, I remember seeing a speaker start a speech with, “Last week, my best friend committed suicide.” The entire crowd was gripped. Everyone could feel the tension in the room.

They were just waiting for the speaker to continue to know where this speech will go.

That’s what a hard-hitting statement does, it intrigues your audience so much that they can’t wait to hear more! Just a tip, if you do start off with a provocative, hard-hitting statement, make sure you pause for a moment after saying it.

Silence after an impactful statement will allow your message to really sink in with the audience.

Related article: 5 Ways to Grab Your Audience’s Attention When You’re Losing it!

15. Ramona J Smith

Opening: In a boxing stance, “Life would sometimes feel like a fight. The punches, jabs and hooks will come in the form of challenges, obstacles and failures. Yet if you stay in the ring and learn from those past fights, at the end of each round, you’ll be still standing.”

How to use your full body to grip the audience at the beginning of your speech?

In a talk, the audience is expecting you to do just that – talk. But when you enter the stage and start putting your full body into use in a way that the audience does not expect, it grabs their attention.

Body language is critical when it comes to public speaking. Hand gestures, stage movement, facial expressions are all things that need to be paid attention to while you’re speaking on stage. But that’s not I’m talking about here.

Here, I’m referring to a unique use of the body that grips the audience, like how Ramona did. By using her body to get into a boxing stance, imitating punches, jabs and hooks with her arms while talking – that’s what got the audience’s attention.

The reason I say this is so powerful is because if you take Ramona’s speech and remove the body usage from her opening, the entire magic of the opening falls flat.

While the content is definitely strong, without those movements, she would not have captured the audience’s attention as beautifully as she did with the use of her body.

So if you have a speech opening that seems slightly dull, see if you can add some body movement to it.

If your speech starts with a story of someone running, actually act out the running. If your speech starts with a story of someone reading, actually act out the reading.

It will make your speech opening that much more impactful.

Related article: 5 Body Language Tips to Command the Stage

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Final Words

So there it is! 15 speech openings from some of my favourite speeches. Hopefully, these will act as a guide for you to create your own opening which is super impactful and sets you off on the path to becoming a powerful public speaker!

But remember, while a speech opening is super important, it’s just part of an overall structure.

If you’re serious about not just creating a great speech opening but to improve your public speaking at an overall level, I would highly recommend you to check out this course: Acumen Presents: Chris Anderson on Public Speaking on Udemy. Not only does it have specific lectures on starting and ending a speech, but it also offers an in-depth guide into all the nuances of public speaking. 

Being the founder of TED Talks, Chris Anderson provides numerous examples of the best TED speakers to give us a very practical way of overcoming stage fear and delivering a speech that people will remember. His course has helped me personally and I would definitely recommend it to anyone looking to learn public speaking. 

No one is ever “done” learning public speaking. It’s a continuous process and you can always get better. Keep learning, keep conquering and keep being awesome!

Lastly, if you want to know how you should NOT open your speech, we’ve got a video for you:

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How to Write a Speech

Last Updated: June 24, 2024 Approved

This article was co-authored by Patrick Muñoz . Patrick is an internationally recognized Voice & Speech Coach, focusing on public speaking, vocal power, accent and dialects, accent reduction, voiceover, acting and speech therapy. He has worked with clients such as Penelope Cruz, Eva Longoria, and Roselyn Sanchez. He was voted LA's Favorite Voice and Dialect Coach by BACKSTAGE, is the voice and speech coach for Disney and Turner Classic Movies, and is a member of Voice and Speech Trainers Association. There are 7 references cited in this article, which can be found at the bottom of the page. wikiHow marks an article as reader-approved once it receives enough positive feedback. This article has 22 testimonials from our readers, earning it our reader-approved status. This article has been viewed 2,983,049 times.

Giving an original speech for a class, event, or work presentation can be nerve-wracking. However, writing an effective speech can help to bolster your confidence. With careful planning and an eye for detail, you can write a speech that will inform, persuade, motivate, or entertain! Give yourself plenty of time to craft your speech and practice it several times for best results.

Sample Speeches

Drafting an Effective Speech

• If you are writing a speech for a class, make sure to check with your teacher to get details about the number and acceptable types of sources.

• If you are writing an informative or persuasive speech, then plan to arrange your speech with a problem and solution structure. Start the speech by talking about what is wrong, then explain how to fix the problem in the second half of your speech. [4] X Research source

Tip : Keep in mind that you can always refine your outline later or as you draft your speech. Include all of the information that seems relevant now with the expectation that you will likely need to pare it down later.

• For example, if you are writing a motivational speech about weight loss, then you might say something like, “Five years ago, I could not walk up a flight of stairs without needing to take a break halfway up.”
• If you hope to persuade audience members to reduce their use of fossil fuels, then you might start off by saying, “Gas-powered vehicles are the reason why global warming is threatening to destroy our planet.”

• For example, if you are giving a speech on increasing funding for Alzheimer’s research, it would be helpful to provide information on how common Alzheimer’s disease is and how it affects families. You could accomplish this with a combination of a statistic and an anecdote.

Tip: Keep your introduction less than 1 paragraph or 1 double-spaced page long. This will help to ensure that you do not spend too much time on the context and background before getting to the meat of your topic. [7] X Research source

• For example, in a speech about ending animal testing for cosmetics, you might start with a point about how animal testing is cruel, then explain that it is unnecessary, and then talk about the alternatives to animal testing that make it obsolete.

• For example, if you are about to cover the concept of delayed onset muscle soreness (also known as DOMS), then explain what it is in a nutshell first, then go into more detail about it and how it relates to your point, then end that section of your speech with a brief summary of the main point you are trying to make.

• In that moment
• The following week

• For example, if you have just described the effects of global warming on the polar bear population, conclude your speech by telling your audience about non-profit organizations that are working to protect the environment and the polar bear population.
• If you have just shared your weight loss story to motivate your audience, tell them what they can do to start their own weight loss journey and share resources that you found helpful.

Making Your Speech More Engaging

• For example, instead of saying, “Achieving and maintaining a healthy body weight is the pinnacle of human existence because it enables you to accomplish physical feats that boost your confidence and give you a sense of accomplishment,” say, “A healthy body weight allows you to do more physically, and this may make you happier overall.”
• Keep in mind that it is also important to vary your sentence structure. You can include a longer sentence once or twice per page to add variety to your speech. Just avoid using lots of long sentences in your speech. [15] X Research source

• For example, if you are giving a speech for a group of sales associates who are trying to increase sales of a new product called “Synergy,” then you might repeat a simple phrase to that effect, such as “Tell your customers about Synergy,” or you could simply say, “Synergy” a few times during your speech to remind your audience of this product.
• If you are writing a motivational speech about how running can help people to overcome emotional hurdles, then you might repeat a phrase in your speech to emphasize this idea, such as, “Run through the pain.”

• For example, if you are giving a speech about moose mating patterns, 2 numbers that show the decline in the moose population over a 50 year period may be a striking addition to your speech. However, sharing a complex set of moose population statistics would be less compelling and possibly even confusing to your audience.
• Choose quotes that are easy to follow and make sure that you explain how each quote you use supports to your argument. Try to stick with quotes that use simple language and take up no more than 2 lines on your page.

• For example, when describing your love of food in a motivational speech about becoming a chef, you might decide to include a joke and say something like, “I always wanted to become a chef, ever since I was a little kid and I discovered that people actually make donuts and they don’t just randomly fall from the sky.”

• Avoid relying on the slides to make the speech for you. You will still need to deliver your speech in an engaging manner. Only use the slides as a complement to your words.

• Make sure to read your speech out loud when you review it! This will help you to determine if it sounds natural and if there are any awkward sections that you can cut, smooth out, or explain more clearly. [22] X Research source

Expert Q&A

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• ↑ http://teacher.scholastic.com/writewit/speech/tips.htm
• ↑ Patrick Muñoz. Voice & Speech Coach. Expert Interview. 12 November 2019.
• ↑ https://www.write-out-loud.com/howtowritespeech.html
• ↑ https://www.academicwritingsuccess.com/7-sensational-essay-hooks/
• ↑ https://writingcenter.unc.edu/tips-and-tools/speeches/
• ↑ https://www.unr.edu/writing-speaking-center/student-resources/writing-speaking-resources/speech-introductions
• ↑ https://pac.org/content/speechwriting-101-writing-effective-speech

About This Article

To write a speech, start off with an attention-grabbing statement, like "Before I begin my speech, I have something important to say." Once you've gotten everyone's attention, move on to your strongest argument or point first since that's what audiences will remember the most. Use transitions throughout your speech, like "This brings us back to the bigger picture," so the audience doesn't get lost. To conclude your speech, restate the key points and leave your audience with a question or something to think about. To learn how to edit your first draft, scroll down! Did this summary help you? Yes No

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Public Speaking Tips & Speech Topics

“How To” Speech Topics, Ideas & Examples

Amanda Green was born in a small town in the west of Scotland, where everyone knows everyone. I joined the Toastmasters 15 years ago, and I served in nearly every office in the club since then. I love helping others gain confidence and skills they can apply in every day life.

Want to speak in front of an audience but are terrified of freezing or being boring? I know the feeling. If you’ve ever had to give a “how-to” speech, you know that it can be incredibly intimidating. It also entails coming up with how-to speech ideas and creative examples.

After all, how will they finish listening if the audience isn’t hooked by what you’re saying right away? To help ease your worries (and inspire those ideas!), here’s everything you need on “how-to” speeches: topics, samples & potential pitfalls — so read ahead!

Writing a How-to Speech

The speaker needs to consider several important factors when preparing to give a how-to speech. The how-to speech should identify the problem that needs to be resolved, explain how the problem can be fixed with a step-by-step approach, and list any potential obstacles the audience may face.

It is also important for speakers to choose how-to speech topics that are of interest or relevance to their target audience. This will ensure maximum engagement and retention throughout the speech.

How-to Speech Ideas That Are Funny

When it comes to funny “how-to” speeches, the possibilities are endless! Whether talking about how to make a perfect paper airplane or how to be the life of the party, humor can enhance your presentation and help keep your audience engaged.

Try using puns, silly props, or even anecdotes that provide insight into the process while still making people laugh. The goal is to not only impart valuable knowledge but also entertain your listener.

With some creativity, you can develop a humorous speech that achieves a comedic effect and explains its topic.

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Interesting How-to Topics

When asked to present a speech, many people immediately search for the most interesting ideas for a how-to speech. From tidying up after the biggest mess to baking a delicious cake, speeches about how to do something can be informative and entertaining.

While it may seem challenging to come up with fresh ideas, an infinite number of topics could be used. Some great suggestions include teaching viewers how to create a simple budget plan , explaining plant-based diets and their benefits, explaining how to instruct others effectively, or even how to ace an interview.

No matter what topic you go with, remember that the important thing is to be passionate and provide audiences with detailed instructions. When done correctly, choosing an interesting “how-to” topic for your speech will surely have your audience applauding in no time!

Choosing a Demonstration Speech Topic

Choosing a demonstration speech topic may seem daunting, but it can be simple and enjoyable with the right guidance. Identifying the topics appropriate for a demonstration speech is the first step in navigating this process.

Demonstration topics should be grounded in facts and provide pertinent knowledge about your expertise or interest. They should also focus on something that can be demonstrated in a tangible way, such as making a craft or performing an experiment.

• Your Interests

Choosing engaging good how-to speech topics based on one’s interests can be daunting yet rewarding. Taking the time to reflect on potential topics and thinking carefully about what topics truly interest you is fundamental to assembling a captivating presentation.

As such, it is paramount to begin by reflecting upon your hobbies and leisure activity ideas that you find most intriguing, as well as any activities or tasks you feel passionate about sharing with others.

Additionally, curating ideas from other media sources, such as newspaper articles or magazines, helps provide further insight into new and novel subjects or angles that can motivate your research process.

Only through this deliberate effort to understand our interests and apply them creatively towards developing a worthwhile “how-to” speech topic can we find the contentment of presenting a presentation with which listeners will engage.

• Who the Speech Is For

Choosing a “how-to” speech topic is critical in delivering an effective presentation. When selecting your topic, it’s important to keep the audience in mind.

Decide who your speech is for and make sure it is relevant to their interests. Select something specific that can benefit them or be beneficial in a general sense. Choose something the audience wants to learn about and that you are comfortable presenting. This will ensure your presentation skills are on display, as well as your knowledge about the topic.

Ensure your topic has enough depth for you to use additional research as support. This will strengthen the content of your presentation and demonstrate personal effort.

Ultimately, with careful consideration of who your speech is addressed to, you can craft a “how-to” topic that adds value both for yourself and your audience.

• The Setting of the Speech

Choosing a “how-to” speech topic based on the setting of the speech is an important step in preparing for an effective presentation.

It is essential to consider the purpose of the speech, the audience’s interests and needs, and any limitations or restrictions that may be present to construct an appropriate topic and choose relevant information to include.

Anticipating questions or topics of interest related to the audience is helpful when selecting a relevant topic.

• The Time You’ve Got to Prepare the Speech

Deciding on a “how-to” speech topic can be daunting. But the task becomes much more manageable, considering how much time you have to prepare for the presentation. Start by narrowing down the possibilities based on how much time you have.

If you have more time to prepare, opt for something more challenging. If you have only a short amount of time, choose a simpler topic.

Once you have determined the complexity level and estimated preparation time, consider your interests to find a topic that is both engaging to yourself and hopefully your audience.

As with any speech or presentation, researching and practicing before the actual event will greatly benefit your delivery and engagement with your audience.

Although finalizing a speech topic for a “how-to” presentation can be stressful, understanding constraints and utilizing interests will help make this process easier.

• The Time You’ve Got to Give the Speech

When selecting a “how-to” speech topic, the amount of time you have to give the presentation should be considered. It is wise to carefully analyze the time frame constraints of the assignment and assess which topics can be thoroughly explored in the allocated duration.

Attempting to cover too much material within a limited timeframe may lead to rushed communication and limit your opportunity to expand on the subject matter. Instead, select a focus that allows space for further discussion but remains concise enough to explore properly within your allotted time.

It is also advantageous to choose a topic that naturally interests you. This will heighten enthusiasm and engagement throughout your presentation, thus helping create an impactful delivery. Doing so will ensure you stay on track and avoid exceeding the assigned timeframe.

• The Guidelines for Assessment

When choosing a “how-to” speech topic, it is important to ensure that the topic meets all of the guidelines for assessment. It is a good idea to consider current and relevant topics, informative, interesting, and new, demonstrating the speaker’s understanding of their subject matter.

Choosing a topic with an appropriate difficulty level can help ensure that your speech will be comprehensive and engaging for your audience.

Demonstrative Speech Topics

Selecting topics for speeches comes down to choosing something you both know and can present effectively. As you brainstorm possible show-and-tell ideas, narrow the topics until you arrive at one that is interesting to you and your audience and fulfills all criteria needed for an effective demonstration presentation.

Once you’ve chosen a successful topic, preparing the speech will become much simpler, allowing you to demonstrate confidently and successfully.

Here are some easy demonstrative speech ideas for how-to.

Animals/Pets

Giving a speech to educate an audience about how to care for animals/pets can be an enriching experience.

It is important to research and thoroughly understand the topic to provide the audience with accurate and applicable information. This will entail researching different animal species and their specific characteristics, needs, and behaviors.

Moreover, ample time must be allocated for preparation so all aspects of proper pet-keeping can be explained clearly and confidently.

Topics ideas could range from a persuasive speech on how to pick the best breed to an informative speech on pet health. 

Gardens/Yards

Talking about creating and maintaining a garden or a yard requires proper preparation to ensure that the information relayed is accurate and beneficial. Researching various gardening elements beforehand will provide a strong base for discerning audiences to build on.

Be sure to present topics such as plant selection, design ideas, pest prevention, watering methods, and other environmental factors in an organized fashion that is easy for your listeners to follow.

Offering clear instructions throughout the speech with examples showing the steps in action can help ensure that your audience walks away feeling confident about their newly acquired knowledge.

Topics could cover how to identify poisonous plants, how to get rid of garden pests, how to make an indoor herb garden, and even how to make garden art. 

To give an effective “how-to” speech about crafts, the speaker should start by introducing themselves and properly framing the topic. They should provide a brief overview of what the audience will learn in their presentation and then begin with the most basic information, slowly building up to more complex concepts.

Crafting often has visual aid speech topics. At every stage of presenting, visuals should be provided for illustration. Visuals could range from diagrams or step-by-step photographs showing how a craft is made to video or actual physical models.

Once all of this information has been presented, the speaker should summarize the key points covered and allow time for questions from the audience before concluding their presentation.

Games/Sports

Giving a “how-to” speech about games/sports is an excellent way to share knowledge and teach important concepts. It requires the speaker to do comprehensive research and prepare in advance.

To give an effective “how-to” speech, start by introducing the game/sport accurately and make sure to tailor the presentation for your specific audience. Additionally, focus on one topic at a time, explain each step with vivid examples, and use visuals like charts or diagrams if possible.

Once you have covered all steps necessary for playing the game/sport, end the speech concisely and provide resources that can be used after the presentation.

Topics here could range from how to perfect your golf swing to even how to teach basketball.

Food And More

Delivering a successful “how-to” speech about food and drinks requires careful preparation. First, it is important to do research on the topic so that you have an understanding of the background information.

Once this has been accomplished, the next step should be to focus on a specific field within the topic and craft your presentation around this selected focus. Be sure to collect illustrations, charts, or photographs relevant to your chosen material, as these visual elements can make all the difference in bringing your words to life.

How to Structure a How-to Speech

Structuring a “how-to” speech can seem intimidating, but it doesn’t have to be. Firstly, you should brainstorm the steps needed to accomplish your desired outcome with as much detail as possible. Secondly, organize the steps in chronological order.

This will give the rhythm of your speech a natural flow. Then, begin by introducing yourself and the topic by providing background information on why it is important.

Following completion of the step-by-step instructions, summarize what was just explained and explain why it matters in general terms. Finally, address any foreseeable issues and offer solutions to avoid them.

How-to Speech Template

A “how-to” speech template is an effective method to prepare a speech. This is especially useful when speaking on topics that may be largely unfamiliar to the audience, as it provides a straightforward structure for organizing the material.

The basic format of this type of speech involves:

• Introducing the topic.
• Describing the purpose and benefits of knowing more about it.
• Decomposing the subject matter into easily digestible sections.
• Concluding with a summary and reflection on what has been covered.

Additionally, including visual aids and personal anecdotes can further add interest and clarity to speeches, helping ensure everyone remains engaged throughout the presentation. Use this blank demonstration speech outline to craft your own any time!

To Sum It Up

Giving a great how-to speech is mostly about choosing the right topic. As how-to speeches often require visuals such as PowerPoint slides and handouts, these should be reviewed pre-speech to guarantee smooth delivery during the presentation itself. Speaking confidently and clearly while allowing time for questions and feedback is also essential in delivering an effective how-to speech.

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Written Samples

10 short acceptance speech samples.

An acceptance speech is more than a mere formality following an award or honor. It’s a unique opportunity to express gratitude, share values, and inspire others, all while acknowledging the collective effort that led to the individual achievement.

The speeches compiled here represent a range of scenarios — from industry awards to community honors, and personal achievements.

Short Acceptance Speech Samples

Each is crafted to not only express thanks but to resonate with the audience, leaving a lasting impression of the occasion and the individual honored.

Speech 1: Accepting a Lifetime Achievement Award

“a journey of persistence and passion”.

As I stand before this distinguished gathering, my heart swells with gratitude. This Lifetime Achievement Award is not just a recognition of my individual efforts but a testament to the enduring spirit of perseverance and dedication. I remember starting out in this field, fueled by nothing but a dream and an unwavering resolve. Today, as I look back at the decades of challenges and triumphs, I am reminded of the countless individuals who supported me — my mentors who believed in me, my team who stood by me, and my family who sacrificed alongside me. This award is yours as much as it is mine.

Speech 2: Accepting an Industry Innovator Award

“innovation: a collective endeavor”.

Thank you for this honor. Being recognized as an Industry Innovator is a humbling experience. Innovation is not born in a vacuum; it is the outcome of relentless questioning and collaborative problem-solving. I stand here because of a culture that values bold ideas and the freedom to pursue them. This award reflects our shared commitment to pushing boundaries and creating something truly remarkable. To all aspiring innovators, let this be a reminder: your ideas have the power to shape the future.

Speech 3: Accepting a Community Service Award

“service: the fabric of our community”.

Today, I am deeply honored to accept this Community Service Award. Service, to me, is the very fabric that holds our community together. It’s about seeing a need and responding with compassion and action. This recognition is not for me alone but for all who have worked tirelessly to uplift and support our community. From organizing local drives to advocating for change, every effort counts and reflects our collective commitment to making a difference. This award is a celebration of our united spirit of service.

Speech 4: Accepting a Courageous Leadership Award

“leading with courage and conviction”.

Receiving the Courageous Leadership Award is a profoundly humbling experience. Leadership is not about titles or accolades; it’s about making decisions that are guided by courage and conviction, especially in the face of adversity. It’s about standing up for what is right, even when it is not easy. This award is a tribute to all the unsung heroes who lead by example every day, making our world a better place. I accept this with a promise to continue leading with integrity and courage.

Speech 5: Accepting an Artistic Excellence Award

“art as a mirror of society”.

Art is not just a form of expression; it’s a mirror of society, reflecting its beauty and complexities. As an artist, I am deeply honored to receive this Artistic Excellence Award. This journey has been one of constant exploration and expression, driven by an insatiable desire to evoke emotion and provoke thought. This recognition belongs to everyone who has ever dared to dream and create. May we continue to use our art to inspire, challenge, and bring about change.

Speech 6: Accepting a Best Educator Award

“educating for a better tomorrow”.

I am truly honored to accept the Best Educator Award. Education is the cornerstone of progress, and as educators, we have the privilege and responsibility to shape minds and nurture dreams. This award is not mine alone but belongs to all the educators who spend countless hours preparing the next generation for the challenges and opportunities ahead. Together, we are building a brighter future, one student at a time.

Speech 7: Accepting a Sportsmanship Award

“the true spirit of competition”.

Today, I stand here honored to accept the Sportsmanship Award. In the realm of sports, competition is intense, but the true spirit lies in how we play the game. It’s about respect, integrity, and fairness, both on and off the field. This award is a reminder that while winning is celebrated, how we conduct ourselves is what truly defines us. To my fellow athletes, let’s continue to uplift each other and honor the true spirit of sportsmanship.

Speech 8: Accepting a Breakthrough Scientific Award

“science: a beacon of hope and innovation”.

Receiving the Breakthrough Scientific Award is a moment of great pride and responsibility. Science is our beacon of hope and innovation, guiding us towards a better understanding of the world and opening doors to new possibilities. This award is a recognition of our collective quest for knowledge and our commitment to improving lives through discovery and innovation. To the scientific community, let this fuel our continued pursuit of answers and solutions.

Speech 9: Accepting a Philanthropy Award

“philanthropy: a commitment to humanity”.

It is with a profound sense of gratitude that I accept this Philanthropy Award. Philanthropy is about more than just giving; it’s a commitment to humanity, to easing suffering and creating opportunities for those in need. This award is a testament to what we can achieve when we channel our resources and energy towards the greater good. Let us continue to work together, for together, we can build a world of hope and shared prosperity.

Speech 10: Accepting a First Responder Bravery Award

“bravery in the face of adversity”.

Accepting the First Responder Bravery Award is an honor that I share with all first responders who put their lives on the line every day. Bravery is not the absence of fear but the strength to confront it, to run towards danger when every instinct tells you to run away. This award is dedicated to the courageous men and women who face adversity with valor and determination, ensuring safety and providing hope in our most critical moments. Your bravery is an inspiration to us all.

These speeches serve as templates, each reflecting the essence of its respective award while offering a personal touch that resonates with audiences. The goal is to inspire, to celebrate, and to remind us of the values that bring us together in recognition and gratitude.

Speech Generator

Writing a  welcome speech  can be a tricky task. There are multiple bases that need to be covered and you have to make sure you don’t lose track of the main point. With a constant flow of ideas, it’s natural for one to get sidetracked so easily. It’s important for you to organize your thoughts properly.

• Republic Day Speech Examples

To deliver the perfect speech is a whole other challenge. You need to develop a set of speech skills for your speech template to receive its desired impact. It can be nerve-racking to speak in front of an audience. It requires constant practice and constructive criticism to become better.

What is Speech Definition & Meaning Speech refers to the expression of thoughts and feelings through spoken language. It is the act of talking and communicating verbally with others, using words to convey ideas, information, or emotions. Speech can range from everyday conversation to formal presentations and public speaking. It’s a primary way humans interact and share information with one another.

Download Speech Example Bundle

Speech template has been part of our life since we were young. It is the first thing that we learn and taught to us. It is our main form of communication and without it, we could not achieve diplomacy. Without speech, there will be no world peace. Yes, speech has been known to create peace in our time. Remember Martin Luther King? His speech “I Have A Dream” that inspires millions of people. That alone is leadership speech that convinces people to stand up and fight for what is right. A speech no matter, how short can have a huge impact on the one listening.

Speech Example

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Speech For Students

Speech for School

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College Farewell

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Sample Farewell Speech

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Informative Speech Outline

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Expository Speech Outline

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Graduation Speech Example

Student graduation speech.

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Nursing School Graduation Speech

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University Graduation Speech

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Graduation Welcome Speech

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Graduation Party Speech

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High School Graduation

What Is a Speech?

A start a speech, as defined by most website dictionary is a communication or expression of thoughts in spoken words. But most expert orators and speech writer define speech as a formal address given to a large number of people that the purpose of is to persuade, inform, convince, and seek to inspire the people.

However, speech these days, are used to inform people about something or someone. To give them knowledge and information about something that has not been known or is hidden from them. A informative speech is also used to express an emotion and to make a strong stand about one’s belief.

How to Outline a Speech

Speech outline can be a great tool for you to manage your speech and how you will deliver it. Especially if you have trouble in creating and delivering a speech. Here are the steps on creating a speech outline. Basically, a speech outline has 4 essential steps:

Preparation

• This is the part where you decide your topic and your main subjects.
• Determine your audience.
• Identify your purpose.

Introduction

• Create a compelling and attention-getter introduction speech .
• State your main subjects and main points.
• An overview of your whole speech
• Use a transition statement to connect your body to the introduction.
• Discuss your main subject.
• Use supporting details.
• The summary of your speech
• Strong closing statement.

Speech Outline

Persuasive speech.

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Informative Outline

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Components of Speech

Effective verbal communication of your ideas and thoughts to others is the general aim for speech classes. Before that, let us take a closer look at the components of writing a speech:

From the moment we first draw breath and announce our arrival into the world, our voice comes into play, a unique amalgamation of our vocal folds and breath to produce sound. This essential aspect of communication, varying distinctly from person to person, is shaped by a myriad of factors including our physiological makeup. It’s particularly pivotal in presentation speech , where the voice becomes more than just a tool for sound; it’s a medium for conveying ideas, emotions, and intentions. In the realm of public speaking or presentation, the voice serves as a powerful instrument, capable of influencing, persuading, and engaging audiences, transforming the mere act of speaking into an art form that resonates and leaves a lasting impact.

2. Articulation

Another component for speech which is equally important is our ability to articulate or control our voice. Meaning how we make the sound of something. Proper articulation also effective leadership speech or oral communications.

Fluency in speech, akin to rhythm in music, is a skill honed through practice. It encompasses the ability to modulate speaking pace, balancing speed with necessary pauses and breaks. This aspect of verbal communication is crucial in special occasion speeches , where the flow and tempo of words significantly impact the effectiveness of the message conveyed. Mastery of fluency transforms speeches into captivating performances, engaging audiences and delivering messages with clarity and impact.

Tips for Giving a Speech

To deliver a powerful and meaningful speech, take note of our hand-picked tips on giving a welcome speech. This is specially made for both newbie and veteran when it comes to giving a speech to the audience.

• Prepare ahead of time . This is important for you to reduce your anxiety and the nerve-wracking feeling.
• Determine your topic . Before giving a speech, you must know and master your topic and the material that comes with it. It is best if you pick a topic that you are interested in or you have a massive background about it.
• Know your audience . When it comes to giving speeches, the best thing to do is to have a little background check of who will be your potential audiences. That way you will know if you could use some s elf-introduction speech .
• Have a quick tour of the room or place where you will give your speech . So that, when the time comes you can maximize your placement on the stage and you will know where to go and face the audience.
• Think like a performer . With the above said that you have to maximize the stage, you also have to walk around, speak to the audience, and use hands gesture to signify your strong emotion about your speech.
• Practice makes (almost) perfect . The keynote speech to every successful speech is practice. Rehearse your speech over and over again to find any mistakes and awkward moments. It is also best to practice your speech in front of your friends or family to give you the feeling of what it is to be in the real situation.
• Be confident . You have to believe in yourself that you can give a successful speech so that the audience will also believe in that too.

Follow those tips and you are good to go. Also, if you want to know more about how you can give an amazing speech, you can browse our speech templates and examples here.

What Is a Speech Template For?

A speech template serves as a guide to simplify speech writing. It does not contain the word-for-word details of the speech outline its basic parts. Common speech examples contain these three essential parts:

• Introduction – It often starts with a quote, a question, or a story.
• Body – This is where the topic’s main points are thoroughly discussed. A written copy of the speech should present important phrases only.
• Conclusion – A summary of what was presented is given. A remark or a call to action serves as thestatement of  conclude speech .

How to Start a Speech

To start a speech , you must know the purpose of the speech you are making.

Is it a speech for special occasions? Should it be serious or can it be playful? A special occasion speech has the power to set a mood in a room. For instance, a graduation speech must be encouraging and inspiring. It must be able to garner attention from an audience.

Once you are able to determine the purpose of the speech, it would be easier for you to organize your words into the main parts of the speech.

How to Give a Professional Persuasive Speech

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3 Minute Speech Example

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Tribute Speech Example

Tribute on retirement.

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Parent Tribute Speech

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Types of Speech

Speeches are divided into three types: Informative, persuasive, and impromptu.

• Informative speech.  This speech focuses on giving the audience complete (or partial) information about people, events, things, and life. Informative speeches are often used in curricular activities.
• Persuasive speeches.  Persuasive speech talks about facts, opinions, the point of views about issues or controversies. The speech must tailor the message to the audience for it to become effective.
• Impromptu speech .  This speech is done with little or without preparation. A high speech skill is required when giving this speech.

You can check out our examples speeches here to give you more ideas about the three types of speeches. You can use it in your graduation speech or in your  thank-you speech .

Importance of a Good Speech

There are numbers of reason why a good speech is important. There’s a lot actually. I could only name 3 on top of my head.

• It can gain positive perception and opinion from the audience . A good speech does not only make the audience “wow,” it can also give you significant feedbacks from them that you can use in your future development.
• It can express fully your emotion and feelings . You can express what you really want the audience to feel about your speech.
• It can provide complete information . Having said that, a good speech will also make the audience understand and comprehend of the topics you have discussed.

Retirement Speech

Teacher retirement speech.

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For the Retirement of Administrative Assistant

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Farewell Speech Example

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Salutatorian Speech Example

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Guidelines for Creating a Speech Outline

As a speaker, you are given the floor to discuss a particular topic over a span of time. Regardless of the type of audience you may face, it’s always best to come prepared. One way is by constructing a speech template as your guide. Here are some guidelines you can take note of when making your s peech template:

• State the purpose of your speech. Whether you wish to inform, to persuade, or to pay tribute to something, determining your purpose will make it easier for you to approach a topic.
• Set a time frame. It’s easy to get carried away while speaking in front of a crowd. Allocating a time limit for the main parts of your speech is a good way to stay on sample schedule .
• Identify the main idea. The main idea will serve as a basis for your thoughts. This will guide you in crafting the main points and the sub points of your speech.
• Include an attention-getter. This is usually found at the start of your speech. It could be a compelling question or a witty story, anything that is sure to grab everyone’s attention from the very start.
• Keep it structured. An effective way is by using roman numerals instead of bullet points. It presents a step by step guide for important details to remember and include in your speech.
• Avoid sequencing your main points in a random order. This is to avoid confusion especially when presenting conflicting statements.
• Observe proper transitions. Transitioning statements and ideas can be challenging. You must be able to gradually transition one point to another.
• Present supporting evidences. If necessary, it’s good to state facts and their sources especially when delivering an informative speech. This is to establish credibility in your speech.

Examples of Introduction Speech

Self introduction sample.

Informative Speech Concept Example

Informative speech for a group.

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Welcome Speech Example

Wedding welcome.

Formal Welcome Speech

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Public Speech Example

Awareness speech.

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Purpose of a Speech Template

To deliver a good speech, it’s important to come prepared. For instance, you were asked to prepare a presentation speech about your boss. You don’t know a lot about him, so you need to conduct your research on that matter. Of course, it can also be intimidating to present a significant individual in front of a large audience. A speech template will allow you to keep important notes and details on hand. It also creates structure for your speech and it ensures that your ideas flow smoothly.

Importance of a Speech Template

A motivational speech requires a lot of time and effort to make. A lot of people would prefer to just wing it instead of taking the time to create one. But the truth is, a speech template will save you time when delivering your speech and it will help avoid any problems caused by inadequate preparation.

A speech template will allow you to sequence information effectively. There’s nothing worse than experiencing dead air while delivering your speech just because you blacked out on what you were supposed to say. You can find various keynote speech examples that can serve as your guide for creating your template.

Motivational Speech Example

Motivational sports speech.

Wedding Speech

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Groom Wedding Speech

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What is the Purpose of a Speech?

A speech is generally given to satisfy the following points:

1. Informational

Most speeches are about providing more information about a certain topic or subject. These types of speeches are closely related to lectures but are shorter in nature and provide a brief discussion regarding main points of a topic or subject. You may also see speech examples for students .

2. Persuasive

Sales presentations and demonstrations are the type of speeches that aim to entice the audience into taking the desired action after the persuasive speech . Most sales and marketing personnel make use of such speeches with the aim of having the listeners purchase a product or service.

3. Entertainment

Some presentation speeches are made to serve as form of entertainment during functions or events. An example to such are those speeches on weddings or speech intermissions during programs.

4. Inspirational

Inspirational speeches, often delivered during graduations, sermons, and notably in wedding speeches , are crafted to touch the hearts of listeners and motivate them. Their core purpose is to uplift, instill hope, and encourage resilience in facing life’s challenges, whether they seem insurmountable or not. These speeches serve as a beacon of inspiration, guiding individuals to overcome obstacles and find strength in everyday struggles, making them a cherished element of special occasions.

Elevator Speech Examples

Elevator speech for college.

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Personal Elevator Speech

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Leadership Speech

Leadership skills speech.

tomcoyne.org

Size: 66 kB

Presentation Speech Example

Award presentation speech.

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Size: 287 kB

Thank You Speech

Wedding thank you.

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Formal Thank You Speech Outline

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Award Thank You

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Benefits of Speech

Constant exposure and practice in making and delivering speeches produces many benefits and gains to an individual such as the following:

1. Self Esteem

Being exposed to public speaking boosts confidence in your self and in your skills. In fact, speech therapy is recommended for people having issues fitting in society or getting along with people.

2. Self Expression

Self introduction speech provide a venue for an individual to express their opinion and ideas about a chosen topic or subject. This also makes others aware of what that individual feels or thinks about the topic or subject.

3. Personal Development

Writing and delivering speeches eventually increases your knowledge of persuasive strategies and in organizing thoughts for a certain topic or subject improving your critical thinking abilities. You may also see farewell speech examples .

4. Personal Evaluation

Being able to speak in public helps an individual gauge his communication skills and get ideas on how to improve them.

5. Network Connections

Through speaking engagements, an individual can vastly improve connections whether for his personal, social, or professional goals. You may also like dedication speech examples .

6. Career Advancement

Delivering speeches gets the attention of management specially if an individual is adept and skillful at doing so. A good speaker is in turn a good motivator and leader.

effective speech-making is a skill that combines thorough preparation, engaging content, and confident delivery. For a deeper understanding of how to structure a speech, including the introduction, body, and conclusion, the  Grand Valley State University Speech Lab  provides a helpful guide here. This resource can assist in crafting speeches that are coherent, impactful, and memorable.

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Write a Speech on the importance of community service.

Create a Speech about the power of positive thinking.

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What is a Speech Act?

A speech act is an utterance that serves a function in communication. We perform speech acts when we offer an apology, greeting, request, complaint, invitation, compliment, or refusal. A speech act might contain just one word, as in "Sorry!" to perform an apology, or several words or sentences: "I’m sorry I forgot your birthday. I just let it slip my mind." Speech acts include real-life interactions and require not only knowledge of the language but also appropriate use of that language within a given culture.

Here are some examples of speech acts we use or hear every day:

Greeting:   "Hi, Eric. How are things going?" Request:   "Could you pass me the mashed potatoes, please?" Complaint:   "I’ve already been waiting three weeks for the computer, and I was told it would be delivered within a week." Invitation:   "We’re having some people over Saturday evening and wanted to know if you’d like to join us." Compliment:   "Hey, I really like your tie!" Refusal:   "Oh, I’d love to see that movie with you but this Friday just isn’t going to work."

Speech acts are difficult to perform in a second language because learners may not know the idiomatic expressions or cultural norms in the second language or they may transfer their first language rules and conventions into the second language, assuming that such rules are universal. Because the natural tendency for language learners is to fall back on what they know to be appropriate in their first language, it is important that these learners understand exactly what they do in that first language in order to be able to recognize what is transferable to other languages. Something that works in English might not transfer in meaning when translated into the second language. For example, the following remark as uttered by a native English speaker could easily be misinterpreted by a native Chinese hearer:

Sarah: "I couldn’t agree with you more. " Cheng: "Hmmm…." (Thinking: "She couldn’t agree with me? I thought she liked my idea!")

An example of potential misunderstanding for an American learner of Japanese would be what is said by a dinner guest in Japan to thank the host. For the invitation and the meal the guests may well apologize a number of times in addition to using an expression of gratitude (arigatou gosaimasu) -- for instance, for the intrusion into the private home (sumimasen ojama shimasu), the commotion that they are causing by getting up from the table (shitsurei shimasu), and also for the fact that they put their host out since they had to cook the meal, serve it, and will have to do the dishes once the guests have left (sumimasen). American guests might think this to be rude or inappropriate and choose to compliment the host on the wonderful food and festive atmosphere, or thank the host for inviting them, unaware of the social conventions involved in performing such a speech act in Japanese. Although such compliments or expression of thanks are also appropriate in Japanese, they are hardly enough for native speakers of Japanese -- not without a few apologies!

Back to Speech Acts .

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Bayesian Example Selection Improves In-Context Learning for Speech, Text, and Visual Modalities

Large language models (LLMs) can adapt to new tasks through in-context learning (ICL) based on a few examples presented in dialogue history without any model parameter update. Despite such convenience, the performance of ICL heavily depends on the quality of the in-context examples presented, which makes the in-context example selection approach a critical choice. This paper proposes a novel Bayesian in-Context example Selection method (ByCS) for ICL. Extending the inference probability conditioned on in-context examples based on Bayes' theorem, ByCS focuses on the inverse inference conditioned on test input. Following the assumption that accurate inverse inference probability (likelihood) will result in accurate inference probability (posterior), in-context examples are selected based on their inverse inference results. Diverse and extensive cross-tasking and cross-modality experiments are performed with speech, text, and image examples. Experimental results show the efficacy and robustness of our ByCS method on various models, tasks and modalities.

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• Published: 24 September 2024

Consonant lengthening marks the beginning of words across a diverse sample of languages

• Frederic Blum   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-2936-0275 1 , 2 ,
• Ludger Paschen   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-7176-8576 3 ,
• Robert Forkel   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-1081-086X 1 ,
• Susanne Fuchs   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-6751-9286 3 &
• Frank Seifart   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-9909-2088 4 , 5  

Nature Human Behaviour ( 2024 ) Cite this article

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Speech consists of a continuous stream of acoustic signals, yet humans can segment words and other constituents from each other with astonishing precision. The acoustic properties that support this process are not well understood and remain understudied for the vast majority of the world’s languages, in particular regarding their potential variation. Here we report cross-linguistic evidence for the lengthening of word-initial consonants across a typologically diverse sample of 51 languages. Using Bayesian multilevel regression, we find that on average, word-initial consonants are about 13 ms longer than word-medial consonants. The cross-linguistic distribution of the effect indicates that despite individual differences in the phonology of the sampled languages, the lengthening of word-initial consonants is a widespread strategy to mark the onset of words in the continuous acoustic signal of human speech. These findings may be crucial for a better understanding of the incremental processing of speech and speech segmentation.

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Speech is a continuous stream of acoustic signals that transmit linguistic meaning with the purpose of spoken communication. The intricate process of comprehending speech demands the sequential segmentation of the acoustic signal into discrete units such as words and phrases, which are the basic building blocks of language 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 . This segmentation is supported by a complex interaction of factors that operate on the levels of sound structure, lexicon and grammar, both for the speaker and for the listener. Several of these factors have been identified in previous research, but few have been studied across a wide range of languages. Most previous studies on speech production and processing focus on ‘Western, European, industrial, rich and democratic (WEIRD)’ people and their languages, which undermines the potential to make species-wide generalizations about human language and cognition 5 , 6 . For the factors that affect speech production, this emerges as a particularly severe limitation in light of the huge variability of grammars and sound systems of the world’s ~7,000 languages 7 , 8 , 9 .

Word onsets play a special role in speech segmentation and word recognition. In the lexicon, word-initial segments are known to be more informative than later segments for distinguishing the intended word from other words 10 , and listeners exploit this for continuously updating hypotheses regarding word identity and boundaries as the phonetic signal progresses 11 . At the level of phonology, word-initial positions generally exhibit more ‘fortition’ (stronger articulation) and fewer ‘lenition’ (weaker articulation) processes than word-internal or word-final positions and are thus assigned a prominent status in phonological theories 12 , 13 , 14 , 15 . Complex consonant clusters that are restricted to word onsets through phonotactic constraints may serve as additional cues for word segmentation 16 . However, there is considerable cross-linguistic variation in this respect, and many languages lack consonant clusters altogether. This implies that clusters cannot be a universal method to segment speech into word units. Other, more general strategies may be more relevant instead.

Acoustic features such as modulations of segment duration and changes in fundamental frequency play a major role in structuring speech into different units. Among these features, the lengthening of vowels at the ends of prosodic phrases, clauses or utterances is attested across a wide variety of languages 17 , 18 and is often assumed to be universal 19 . At the word level, the acoustic properties of word-initial phones have been argued to be particularly relevant for the prosodic organization of some languages, including English, Korean and French 19 , 20 , 21 . The realization of these word-initial phones may depend on language-specific properties, such as prosodic systems and consonant inventories, but also on between-speaker variation 22 , 23 . However, so far most of the evidence for these features comes from a handful of languages, most of them Indo-European.

Two closely related features of word-initial phones that have been reported for individual languages are initial lengthening and strengthening. While initial strengthening implies a stronger articulation 19 , 23 , 24 , initial lengthening refers to the duration of consonants. This is illustrated in Fig. 1 from the Amazonian language Mojeño Trinitario, which is also included in our sample. The example illustrates the same consonant /n/ in three different positions: utterance-initial (50 ms), word-internal (50 ms) and word-initial (100 ms). In artificial language learning experiments, it has been shown that speakers of Hungarian, Italian and English can use word-initial consonant lengthening as a cue to locate word boundaries 21 . Similarly, word-initial strengthening has been found to facilitate disambiguation between similar lexical items 25 . However, very little is known about the extent and degree of word-initial lengthening across languages. For words in utterance-initial position, it is not clear whether they display any additional temporal changes. In previous studies, utterance-initial consonants have been found to sometimes be lengthened or shortened, but with an overall small change in duration 26 , 27 . Indeed, from a functional perspective, it makes sense that no additional cue to word segmentation is necessary at the beginning of utterances, especially after a pause 26 , 28 . To our knowledge, the cross-linguistic evidence for initial lengthening processes remain scarce, and neither word- nor utterance-initial lengthening has been investigated in a worldwide sample of languages.

a , The geographic distribution of the 51 languages in our sample. The colors indicate the 30 different language families in the sample. b , The workflow from fieldwork-based language documentation to the data sample analysed in the present study. c , An example (doreco_trin1278_T06, from second 188.17 to 189.81.) of word-initial lengthening in Mojeño Trinitario, an Arawakan language spoken in the Amazonian region of Bolivia 96 .

Our main research question is whether we can find cross-linguistic evidence for word-initial lengthening or shortening effects in observed speech across a wide range of languages. We also investigate whether we can find such an effect at utterance-initial positions. Following this, we analyse the cross-linguistic distribution of any emergent effects. To be able to make valid generalizations across languages, we also control for between-speaker variability and analyse the lengthening and shortening effects across segments with different places and manners of articulation.

Evidence for word-initial lengthening across languages

We used a comprehensive corpus consisting of spontaneous speech from 51 languages, shown in Fig. 1a , recorded from 393 speakers (195 female, 198 male) of an age range between 16 and 100 years 29 . Of these 51 languages, 49 are spoken by non-WEIRD populations 5 , 6 . The languages in our sample display a wide range of sound inventories and prosodic systems and cover a wide spectrum of grammars. The main units of our analysis are phones (discrete segments of speech); words, as defined by experts on each language; and utterances, which we define as interpausal units—that is, chunks of speech that are not interrupted by a silent pause. The entire corpus consists of over two million phones, all of which have been time-aligned semi-automatically 30 . Of these, we used 874,627 phones for this study (see Methods for information on data filtering). For 49 of 51 languages, our analysis included more than 10,000 data points.

We used Bayesian linear regression to estimate the effect of word-initial and utterance-initial positions on the duration of consonants, compared with word-internal positions. We modelled the effect of both positions with a population-level estimate that is allowed to vary between all languages in the sample. For a more conservative analysis, we allowed for variation of the effects between speakers of the same language. This ensures that any inference drawn from the model can be generalized over different speakers. Similarly, we allowed the model to vary between segments of different places and manners of articulation since lengthening effects influence each kind of segment differently 20 . We also controlled for consonant clusters and distinguished between three levels: the consonant is (1) at the beginning of a cluster, (2) in a cluster but not at the beginning or (3) not in a cluster. All levels are modelled as varying between each language. As fixed parameters, we controlled for word length (the number of phones in a word), word form frequency (of forms in the DoReCo corpus of each language) and local speech rate. The full model including prior distributions and likelihood function is given as Fig. 2 . The likelihood function defines the response variable using a gamma distribution, which transforms the response variable (duration in milliseconds) to a log scale. Converting to a log scale is a common transformation for duration measures in linguistics to compare orders of magnitude instead of comparing absolute differences in milliseconds 31 . The posterior distributions of parameter values in Bayesian regression studies are defined via their highest posterior density interval (HPDI), which describes the area of the distribution in which most of the sampled posterior values are represented 32 , 33 , 34 . In Bayesian statistics, the type S error rate for the posterior intervals is much lower than in comparable frequentist methods 35 . Another measure to exclude spurious effects and to produce reliable results is to include a region of practical equivalence to 0 (ROPE) 36 . The ROPE is values near 0 (−0.01 to 0.01 on the log scale) that we consider not to be meaningful. In the complete absence of an effect, the posterior distribution would be fully within the ROPE 37 . We interpret 89% HPDIs not overlapping the ROPE as evidence in favour of an effect. If the 89% HPDI overlaps the ROPE, we take the evidence as inconclusive.

Fixed and varying effects of all parameters in the model including their prior distributions. The prior for the varying slopes is given as Lewandowski-Kurowicka-Joe (LKJ) distribution. The colored boxes indicate the various slopes that were added to the model, varying per language.

The fitted model shows evidence for the word-initial lengthening of consonants in utterance-medial position for 43 of the 51 sampled languages. No language shows evidence in favour of word-initial shortening. For the languages for which we have evidence, the 89% HPDI does not intersect with zero or the values defined in the ROPE. The mean of the HPDI for the 43 languages ranges mostly between 0.1 and 0.3 on the log scale, which translates to an average effect between 8 ms and 18 ms for a segment 84 ms long (the mean duration of phones in the data). The cross-linguistic distribution provides us with high confidence in the reliability of our results. They strongly imply that the observation of lengthening of word-initial consonants in comparison with their word-internal counterparts can be generalized across languages. We show the posterior distributions for the word-initial parameter in all languages in Fig. 3 .

The value on the x-axis indicates the lengthening effect of the word-initial position on the log-scale. Mean (vertical line), 89% HPDI (box) and 95% HPDI (error bars) ( n  = 6,000 Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) samples) of the posterior distribution for word-initial lengthening across 51 languages. Faded colouring indicates that the 89% posterior interval intersects with the ROPE (grey shading).

Regarding utterance-initial positions, no language in our sample shows evidence in favour of lengthening. However, 15 languages show evidence for utterance-initial shortening. In these languages, the duration of consonants tends to be shorter in utterance-initial than in utterance-medial or final position. For the other 36 languages, the results are inconclusive. The HPDI of this distribution displays a weak tendency towards the shortening of utterance-initial consonants for some languages, but for others, the HPDI indicates a weak tendency towards their lengthening. None of those are interpretable, and no uniform cross-linguistic pattern emerges across the sample. We present the individual posterior distributions in Fig. 4 .

The value on the x-axis indicates the shortening or lengthening effect of the utterance-initial position on the log-scale. Mean (vertical line), 89% HPDI (box) and 95% HPDI (error bars) ( n  = 6,000 MCMC samples) of the posterior distribution for effects in utterance-initial position across 51 languages. Faded colouring indicates that the 89% posterior interval intersects with the ROPE (grey shading).

Posterior distribution of control variables

The distribution of parameter values across the whole dataset is presented in Fig. 5 . All values are on the log scale. Since the model was parameterized as treatment coding, the ‘non-initial’ level is modelled as the intercept, and both ‘utterance-initial’ and ‘word-initial’ compare directly to the ‘non-initial’ baseline. For the average consonant of 84.35 ms in our data, a lengthening on the log scale of 0.14 (the mean of the word-initial parameter) results in a lengthening of ~13 ms.

The boxes show the 89% HPDIs ( n  = 6,000 MCMC samples) of the posterior distribution for all parameters at the population level. The point estimates represent variation of less than 0.02 in the estimate of the posterior distribution.

Word-form frequency has a small negative effect on duration with a mean of −0.02 (95% HPDI from −0.02 to −0.02) on the log scale. Similarly, word length in phones, measured as phones per word, has a small negative effect on duration with a mean of −0.03 (95% HPDI from −0.03 to −0.03) on the log scale. This is exactly as predicted: segments in longer words are shortened (polysyllabic shortening), and more frequent words are uttered faster. There is a strong correlation ( ρ  = 0.61) between both parameters 31 , in that many phones per word correlates with a lower word-form frequency. Incidentally, this confirms the cross-linguistic validity of Zipf’s law of abbreviation that more frequently used words are shorter 38 , 39 , 40 , 41 . Given the strong correlation between both parameters, the effects in the model should not be interpreted separately but should always be considered together statistically. Local speech rate has the expected large effect on duration in the model (−0.19, 95% HPDI from −0.20 to −0.19). As duration per sound is a central part of calculating speech rate, it is not surprising that this predictor is the strongest of all three. It is important to remember that all three predictors are modelled to be uniform across the whole dataset—that is, they are modelled not to vary between individual languages. The effects for cluster-internal consonants show more variation. Consonants outside of a cluster are shorter (−0.03, 95% HPDI from −0.05 to −0.00) than consonants at the beginning of a cluster. Consonants within a cluster are even shorter (−0.07, 95% HPDI from −0.09 to −0.04). The results per language are presented in Supplementary Information section B . Figure 5 further shows that the utterance-initial and word-initial parameters have a large standard deviation at the population level. This indicates that these predictors do not behave uniformly across languages, as we have already seen for the language-specific distributions.

Posterior evaluation of the model

We ran posterior predictive simulations to confirm that on average, we expect word-initial consonants to be longer than consonants in other positions. A common way to evaluate a Bayesian linear regression model is to run posterior predictions with simulated data 33 , 34 . We present such posterior predictions in Fig. 6 , where we can observe a higher average duration for word-initial consonants than for the other positions. On average, the word-initial consonants in the simulated dataset are expected to be around ~13 ms longer (~106 ms) than consonants in other positions (~93 ms). Full posterior predictive checks according to the Bayesian Analysis Reporting Guidelines 42 are presented in Supplementary Information section B .

Posterior predictions for expected draws ( n  = 6,000 draws from the posterior distribution) given the fitted model and simulated data. The horizontal bar represents the mean with the value printed above it, the box represents the 25th and 75th percentiles, and the violin represents the whole estimated distribution for each parameter. Note that the y axis is log scaled.

To control for possible non-independence of data points, we carefully analysed the genealogical and spatial relations in our dataset. Our sample includes data from 30 different language families. While eight language families are represented by multiple languages (for example, seven Austronesian, four Indo-European and four Sino-Tibetan languages), there are 22 language families with only one language in our sample. In the model, we added a varying intercept per language family, which shows a very small variance between language families (0.04 on the log scale). This shows that the model cannot identify systematic patterns across language families and attributes most of the durations to variation between languages, segments or speakers. Further approximations of potential correlations between language families are provided by controlling for spatial autocorrelation, since most of the languages in our sample that are related to each other genealogically (especially Austronesian, Indo-European and Sino-Tibetan languages) are also geographically close to each other.

We also verified that the model is not biased through spatial autocorrelation. This type of bias is frequent in linguistic typology and can arise through the borrowing of structural features between languages 43 , 44 . The amount of spatial autocorrelation in data used for regression models can be measured through the Moran coefficient 45 , 46 , 47 , 48 , 49 . We based the computation of the Moran coefficient on the geodesic distance between the language coordinates as provided by Glottolog 50 , following suggestions in the literature 51 . We computed this coefficient using the geostan package 46 . In all cases, the coefficient was close to 0, indicating very little or no spatial bias in our data. The full report for each macro area is presented in Supplementary Information section B .

The current study reports acoustic evidence that speakers from vastly different cultural, geographic and linguistic backgrounds produce longer word-initial consonants. While languages differed in the magnitude of lengthening, evidence could be observed across a large part of the sample: 43 languages provided evidence in favour of word-initial lengthening, and none provided evidence for word-initial shortening. The effect in those languages was observed while controlling for the known between-speaker variability in prosodic boundary marking 23 and the intrinsic differences of lengthening effects of different segments. Since the current study is based on a comprehensive dataset consisting of languages from predominantly non-WEIRD communities from all parts of the world, the distribution of the effect indicates a universal tendency in spoken languages.

Our findings are consistent with models that argue for the dual importance of word-initial lengthening for segmenting speech. First, word-initial lengthening might directly indicate word boundaries. Second, lengthening would facilitate word recognition through the prominent pronunciation of word-initial segments, which are the most informative ones for word identification 10 , 21 . One potential reason why speakers’ word-initial lengthening is so widespread is that it can promote these two processing requirements for the listener simultaneously 11 . There may be additional articulatory reasons for slowing down in the vicinity of boundaries, but how exactly language comprehension and production interact in this respect remains unclear 28 , 52 . While the influence of initial lengthening on speech processing has been shown in experimental studies for speakers of some languages 21 , the cross-linguistic evidence for the role of initial lengthening in speech processing would ultimately have to be confirmed in perception studies. Word-initial lengthening could then emerge as an additional key factor for the segmentation of speech in the multi-faceted process of speech recognition 53 .

Regarding speech production, our results partially support and partially contradict predictions made by current models of articulatory phonology, such as the π-gesture model. This model predicts that articulatory gestures are slowed down at prosodic boundaries, manifested in acoustic data as lengthening effects 52 , 54 . Our findings are, in general, consistent with this view. For larger prosodic boundaries in contrast to smaller ones, the π-gesture model would predict longer durations. If we assume that a word boundary after a pause corresponds to a major prosodic boundary compared with a word boundary with no preceding pause, longer durations should be found in the former than in the latter. However, we did not find a lengthening effect for consonants utterance-initially compared with word-initial positions. For 15 of 51 languages, we even found evidence for shortening of utterance-initial consonants. These findings go against the π-gesture model predictions. The findings do, however, mirror reports on the disappearing effect of final lengthening at strong prosodic boundaries with long pauses 18 . This suggests that speakers systematically modulate the segmental duration of initial consonants at the word level but do not always mark boundaries of higher prosodic levels at the beginning of an utterance. The absence of additional lengthening in utterance-initial position suggests that consonant lengthening is more closely linked to the segmentation and identification of word units than to prosodically structuring speech into larger units such as prosodic phrases. Since utterances are operationalized as chunks of speech surrounded by silent pauses in our study, we interpret the lack of an effect as being related to the lack of functional ambiguity: the first segment following a pause will necessarily also be the first segment of a word, without the need for further segmentation.

Our findings align with several strands of linguistic research about the phonological role of initial segments. At the level of the syllable, onsets have long been recognized as privileged positions. They show several characteristics that other positions do not show, such as resistance to phonological change 15 , 16 , 55 . From a diachronic perspective, word-initial consonants tend to be more resistant to phonemic change than consonants in other positions. For example, initial consonant retention is far more typical than initial consonant loss, with some notable exceptions found in Indo-European and across Australian languages 56 , 57 , 58 . Initial consonant deletion as a productive synchronic process is even less common (but see ref. 59 for a counterexample). Regarding explanations for such asymmetries, our results lend support to models of evolutionary phonology that view initial strengthening as a cause for the historical development and preservation of ‘strong’ and distinctive word-initial sounds in the phonology and lexicon 60 . There have also been attempts to relate the role of phonological properties to the functional load of syllable onsets compared with syllable codas, and the word-initial position compared with the word-final position 61 , 62 , 63 . One such study investigated the lexical inventories of 12 mostly Indo-European languages and found that syllable onsets have a considerably higher functional load, giving them an extraordinary status 61 . Conversely, word-final positions have been shown to have a reduced degree of structural complexity 63 . These long-term evolutionary processes are consistent with the special role of word-initial segments during the online incremental processing of words.

While the data showed a clear cross-linguistic trend for lengthening at the beginning of words, 8 of 51 languages showed a certain degree of resistance to durational modulations at word-initial position, as evidenced by the intersection of the 89% HPDI with the ROPE (Fig. 3 ). While this apparent resistance could be explained by insufficient or noisy data, it is also possible that these languages lack word-initial lengthening. Language-specific factors that could affect the degree of lengthening and deserve further attention in future research include the phoneme inventory of the language, the distribution of segments with variable pronunciations (in particular glottal stops), phonological length distinctions (singletons versus geminates) and lexical stress.

Some inevitable limitations might influence the interpretation and generalizability of our findings. First, one limitation of this study lies in the corpus-based approach using aggregated language documentation data and recordings of natural speech. While these data sources provide an ecologically valid and rich set of linguistic samples, they are susceptible to noise and variability inherent in natural speech recordings. They were created over several decades, using different recording equipment and protocols, leading to potential inconsistencies in audio quality. Despite efforts in preselecting high-quality audio for the corpus 30 , the inherent variation in recording conditions remains a concern. However, the corpus-based approach offers the advantage of observing effects in spontaneously produced speech, outside of a strict experimental setting with a less varied sample of texts and speakers.

Second, the sample size, although comprising 51 diverse languages from 30 different language families, still poses a limitation. For some of these languages, we have data from only one (Kamas, Texistepec Popoluca and Yongning Na) or two speakers (Tabasaran, Northern Alta, Kurmanji and Southern British English), while for many other languages, we have data from more than ten speakers. In an ideal scenario, a larger sample size would enhance the study’s generalizability across an even broader spectrum of languages and language families, as well as speakers 64 , 65 . However, while other multilingual speech corpora are available 66 , 67 , 68 , none of these corpora, in our view, achieve the necessary balance between corpus size, detailed annotation of relevant features and metadata, and expert-informed processing allowing for reliable alignments across a multitude of low-resourced languages that are offered by DoReCo.

A third limitation of the present study lies in its simplistic view of consonant duration. Consonant duration is a multifaceted phenomenon encompassing various acoustic components such as burst, frication, voice onset time and formant transition periods. This also resonates with previous calls for acknowledging the importance of fine phonetic detail for social aspects of communication 69 . Complementing the study with a detailed articulatory perspective that includes annotation of articulatory gestures in the production of consonants could add more depth to our understanding of the underlying principles of word-initial consonant lengthening for specific languages. However, recording and annotating this kind of complex articulatory data is outside the scope of this study. Another limitation related to the previous one is the lack of accounting for word-level prominence in our analysis. Our corpus data are not annotated for suprasegmental features such as stress or tone. However, on the basis of available phonological descriptions, only 4 of the 51 languages can with some certainty be considered to have fixed initial word stress, while most other languages are either tone languages or stress languages with non-initial stress (Supplementary Information section B ). In our model, those four languages do not seem to show any patterns for initial-lengthening effects that distinguish them from the other languages. It therefore seems unlikely that our overall results are skewed by not taking word-initial prominence into account.

Despite these limitations, the evidence across a worldwide sample of languages suggests that the lengthening of word-initial consonants is a potentially fundamental process structuring human speech. This strong effect emerges while carefully controlling for between-speaker variability and variability across segments, which adds additional credence to this conclusion. Given the diverse sample of languages in our study, we predict that this effect is replicable for other languages and datasets.

Language sample

Our study uses data from the DoReCo corpus (v.1.2) 29 . The corpus contains time-aligned transcriptions and annotations that mostly originated from language documentation collections covering a wide range of typologically diverse languages. In total, DoReCo v.1.2 contains corpora from 51 languages from 30 language families. All corpora are comparable in size and include at least 10,000 phones (before filtering). A detailed account of the individual corpora and their sources are presented in Extended Data Table 1 . Word units in our data were defined and annotated by the language experts who contributed data to DoReCo (Extended Data Table 1 ), on the basis of current standards in descriptive linguistics. Within DoReCo, the heterogeneous documentation data were processed using a combination of automatic and manual techniques. Forced time alignments were created using the WebMAUS service 70 first for start and end times of words, which were then corrected manually for the whole corpus 30 . Following this, the updated alignments were used as input to create automatic alignments at the segment level.

We have converted the corpus data to the Cross-Linguistic Data Format (CLDF) 71 , 72 to facilitate the reuse of the data and replication of our results. A detailed description of using the corpus as a CLDF dataset is provided as Supplementary Information section A . All preprocessing steps were handled using an SQLite query that is based on the CLDF dataset. Before fitting the models, we cleaned the data by excluding certain observations. Since we are interested only in the lengthening of initial consonants, we removed all vowels from the data. We also removed geminates (that is, phonologically long consonants) due to their intrinsic lengthening. Utterance-initial stops have been excluded because their initial closure period following a pause is unmeasurable 73 . We excluded sounds with a duration equal to or below 30 ms, which was set as the minimum duration by the MAUS aligner, with shorter durations being indicative of imprecise last-resort alignments 30 . Lastly, we excluded outliers beyond three standard deviations of the mean for each speaker. For most speakers, this resulted in an upper threshold of around 300 ms, which is a very conservative threshold concerning the expected duration of individual segments. Random samples of excluded segments showed that these cases are mostly transcription or alignment errors and have been correctly excluded.

Causal effects on segment duration

In our model, we controlled for several known causal effects on the duration of phones. We controlled for inter- and intra-speaker variation in speech rate through the proxy variable ‘local speech rate’, which is equal to the average duration of phones per utterance. We also controlled for the number of phones per word and the word-form frequency as fixed effects. The word-form frequency is computed as the frequency of each form within the DoReCo corpus core set of each language. Both parameters are predicted to be highly correlated. For frequency of occurrence, more frequent words are known to be shorter (Zipf’s law of abbreviation) 74 , 75 , 76 , 77 . Longer words have been shown to have shorter components, most crucially shorter affixes and shorter phones in specific conditions such as under phrasal accent (Menzerath’s law or polysyllabic shortening) 26 , 39 , 41 , 78 , 79 . In our model, these three variables were log-scaled and standardized for each language.

The effect for word- and utterance-initial position was modelled with varying intercepts and slopes across all languages. This ensured that we could assess the effects in all languages, instead of interpreting the effect on the population level as being true for all languages 80 , 81 . We also included ‘speaker’ as a varying effect in our model, as there are huge amounts of variation between speakers in all linguistic domains 82 , 83 , 84 . It is necessary to control for this kind of variation to make valid generalizations about language 64 , 65 . Finally, we controlled for variation of the effect across different segments since there might be variation in the elasticity of segments depending on their place and manner of articulation. In total, the corpus includes 191 different segment types, which are mapped from their X-Sampa representation in DoReCo to the Cross-Linguistic Transcription Systems standard 85 , 86 .

Model fitting and evaluation

The reason for choosing a Bayesian approach is the wide range of tools to include prior knowledge of the world in the model and to develop a transparent and reliable model output that is explicit about any uncertainty involved in the inference 87 , 88 . The goal of our analysis is to determine the effect size of the word-initial position of phones in speech. Given that we know quite a lot about speech sounds in general, such as expected duration and known causal influences, we can add this prior knowledge directly into the model. Bayesian regression offers several well-designed measures for enabling transparency of the workflow 89 , 90 . We report on all relevant points of the Bayesian Analysis Reporting Guidelines 42 either in the main text or in the Supplementary Information . We did not include a large-scale sensitivity analysis for our prior distributions, due to the large and energy-intensive computing times. We hope that the prior predictive checks provide sufficient information for the credibility of our prior distributions. We further excluded the points that relate to hypothesis testing with Bayes factors since no model comparison was done in our study. Instead of doing a model comparison or null-hypothesis significance test, we analysed the effect size of our target parameter while controlling for known causal factors.

The model was fit using brms 91 , 92 , a package in R 93 that uses cmdstanR as a backend. The model was run with 4,000 MCMC iterations (2,500 for warm-up) on four parallel chains. A computational and visual confirmation of model convergence as well as prior and posterior predictive checks are presented in Supplementary Information section B .

Reporting summary

Further information on research design is available in the Nature Portfolio Reporting Summary linked to this article.

Data availability

For this study, we used data from the DoReCo corpus (v.1.2) and converted them to a CLDF dataset (v.1.2.1) 29 , 94 . While the data are available as Open Access, some files come with a non-derivative restriction. We have therefore added instructions for an automated workflow of downloading the data and converting it to an SQlite database via CLDF instead of providing the data directly 71 , 72 , thereby adhering to the non-derivative restrictions. To reproduce the exact steps, please follow the instructions provided in our GitHub repository ( https://github.com/FredericBlum/initial_lengthening/blob/v1.0/README.md ).

Code availability

The current version of the code (v.1.0) is available via Zenodo at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.13141902 (ref. 95 ) and curated on GitHub ( https://github.com/FredericBlum/initial_lengthening/tree/v1.0 ). We provide full instructions to reproduce our results in a README.md in the shared repository. The models have been uploaded to an OSF directory ( https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/TC9ZX ) since we could not upload them to GitHub due to their large file size.

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Acknowledgements

We thank L. Dees, J. Krivokapić, J. Mansfield, A. Wedel and S. Wichmann for their helpful comments. We thank C. Rzymski for an extensive review of our code and for providing support with the HPC cluster. We thank M. Mertner for suggestions on analysing possible spatial dependencies. All remaining errors are our responsibility. This study was partially supported by the Max Planck Society Research Grant ‘Beyond CALC: Computer-Assisted Approaches to Human Prehistory, Linguistic Typology, and Human Cognition (CALC 3 )’ (F.B.), awarded to J.-M. List (2022–2024), and DFG grants SE 1949/3-1 and SE 1949/5-1 awarded to F.S. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish or preparation of the manuscript.

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Frederic Blum & Robert Forkel

Chair for Multilingual Computational Linguistics, University of Passau, Passau, Germany

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Leibniz-Zentrum Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft, Berlin, Germany

Ludger Paschen & Susanne Fuchs

Structure et Dynamique des Langues, CNRS, INALCO, IRD, Villejuif, France

Frank Seifart

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F.B. conceptualized the study under the supervision of F.S. and S.F. F.B. designed and analysed the statistical model. R.F. provided the conversion of the raw data to CLDF as well as the preprocessing of the data. F.B., S.F. and F.S. wrote the initial draft of the Introduction. F.B. wrote the initial draft of the Results. L.P. wrote the initial draft of the Discussion. F.B. and L.P. wrote the initial draft of the Methods. R.F. wrote the usage guide (Supplementary Information section A ). F.B. and L.P. wrote Supplementary Information section B . All authors have read, commented on and approved the manuscript.

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Blum, F., Paschen, L., Forkel, R. et al. Consonant lengthening marks the beginning of words across a diverse sample of languages. Nat Hum Behav (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-024-01988-4

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Received : 20 December 2023

Accepted : 14 August 2024

Published : 24 September 2024

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-024-01988-4

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