nonverbal communication in speech delivery

Delivering your speech: the power of nonverbal communication

When I say “public speaking” what comes to mind? Dread? Nervousness? Excitement? “Public speaking” often brings uneasy feelings to first year students, as standing in front of a classroom ranging from first year to fourth years may seem a lot more intimidating than one full of your long-time high school classmates. You have a well-written and researched speech and you have already sought out a peer review from the Writing and Communication Centre, but the easy part is over. Delivering your speech involves more than a professional tone and a confident voice; you will convey the real impact of your message through nonverbal communication. Nonverbal communication is the communication we engage in that isn’t written or spoken language, but still creates meaning.

Eye contact, one of the most important nonverbal cues, keeps your audience engaged, makes you believable, and opens up communication. Looking at individual members of the audience establishes an interpersonal connection with them. While maintaining eye contact is important, gestures are useful when emphasizing certain points. Gestures are an excellent way to channel your nerves into movement, as long as you ensure they are not repetitive or taking away from your message.  Using immediacy behaviours, that is, literally or psychologically making your audience members feel closer to you, can establish more relationships as a speaker. Moving closer to your audience or smiling are simple ways to create a closer relationship between you and your listeners.

The audience sees your face before they are going to hear your voice and thus, you have the opportunity to set an emotional tone before you even start speaking. As a speaker, you can decide how your facial expression can alter the atmosphere of your speech in a meaningful way. In many instances, audience members will mimic your emotions, so if you want your audience to feel a certain emotion, its best to express that emotion yourself. Although your face and voice play a major role in communicating a specific emotion, your posture will communicate the intensity of that emotion.

You might be overwhelmed at the long list of unconscious habits to consider when delivering a speech. Delivering a hard hitting, persuasive or informative speech is not easy, but it is an important and useful skill for your post-secondary education and beyond. If you need ideas, feedback, or strategies in creating and delivering a speech, the Writing and Communication Centre is a hub for practice, development and collaboration that can work with you to help develop your individual voice in your academic work. With practice, knowledge and a bit of help, public speaking does not have to be a daunting task, but an opportunity to share your ideas and leave a memorable impression as a speaker.

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• Future undergraduate students

28 Nonverbal Aspects of Delivery

Learning Objectives

• Demonstrate nonverbal delivery by utilizing key elements of professional appearance, body language, facial expressions, gestures, and eye contact to deliver an effective extemporaneous speech.

​Nonverbal Aspects of Delivery

While we are focusing on online delivery in this course, you must consider the same aspects as you would for a face to face delivery. We will discuss these aspects generally first, then address any differences for online delivery as necessary.

Nonverbal cues account for much of the content from which we form initial impressions, so it’s important to know that people make judgments about our identities and skills after only brief exposure. Our competence regarding and awareness of nonverbal communication can help determine how an interaction will proceed and, in fact, whether it will take place at all. People who are skilled at encoding nonverbal messages are more favorably evaluated after initial encounters. This is likely due to the fact that people who are more nonverbally expressive are also more attention getting and engaging and make people feel more welcome and warm due to increased immediacy behaviors, all of which enhance perceptions of charisma.

Personal Appearance

Women in Business Leadership Conf.  by UCLA Anderson.  CC-BY-NC-SA .

Your appearance is often the easiest way to build (or destroy) credibility as a speaker. Your appearance will be the first and most noticeable thing your audience focuses on as you give your speech. How do you use your appearance to build credibility?

Consider how your appearance might send a negative message. Appearance is anything that can be seen by the audience. This may be dress or grooming. Messy hair and wrinkled clothes may send the message, “I don’t care.” A low-cut neckline, dirty jeans, or a graphic design t-shirt may not convey the right message for a formal or serious public speaking event.

What is considered appropriate attire has changed over history and changes based on the occasion and culture. For instance, a large number of American businesses require “business casual” as the standard dress whereas in the 50s “business” dress was more appropriate. Also, business casual on the east coast looks different than on the west coast due to weather and cultural differences.

• Dress for the occasion. Consider what dress is appropriate for the event and the culture of the audience.
• Consider the audience. You should look one step above the audience. For instance, if they are dressed casually, you should be dressed business casual.
• Consider the purpose. Is this a professional or formal event? Is this for a grade? What impression do you want to leave on your audience?
• By showing positive aspects of yourself through dress and grooming, you can inspire confidence in your abilities.

Body Language

Your overall movement is integral to successful speech delivery. Body stance, gestures, and facial expressions can be generally categorized as  body language . Body language should be relaxed and natural, and purposeful. How you use body language takes practice. Some people are naturally more expressive with body language when they speak. This can be helpful but anyone can learn how to use your body language effectively.

“Stand up tall!” I’m sure we’ve all heard this statement from a parent or a teacher at some point in our lives. The fact is, posture is actually quite important. When you stand up straight, you communicate to your audience, without saying a word, that you hold a position of power and take your position seriously. If however, you are slouching, hunched over, or leaning on something, you could be perceived as ill prepared, anxious, lacking in credibility, or not serious about your responsibilities as a speaker. While speakers often assume a more casual posture as a presentation continues (especially if it is a long one, such as a ninety-minute class lecture), it is always wise to start by standing up straight and putting your best foot forward. Remember, you only get one shot at making a first impression, and your body’s orientation is one of the first pieces of information audiences use to make that impression.

Posture can convey information about confidence and openness. Open and closed body positions communicate different messages to the audience and can be desirable or undesirable based on the type of visual delivery that is desired.

Closed:  Closed posture often gives the impression of detachment, disinterest, and hostility.

• Arms crossed on the chest or abdomen, hands clasped in front of the body, and crossed legs.
• Showing the back of hands or clenched fists can represent a closed posture.
• Hands clasped behind the back may also signal closed posture even though the front is exposed because it can give the impression of hiding something or resisting closer contact.
• A stiff and unnatural looking posture can distract the audience from your message.

Open:  Open posture communicates a friendly and positive attitude.

• The feet are spread wide and the head is straight and raised, looking at the audience.
• Showing the palms of the hands can be a signal of open posture, especially if the hand is relaxed.
• Relaxed, yet professional body and head positioning can give the perception of confidence.
• Practice open body posture in front of a mirror so you can see what the audience will see.
• If you are presenting online, use the camera to practice open body posture so you know what the audience will see.

Unless you are stuck behind a podium because of the need to use a nonmovable microphone, you should never stand in one place during a speech. However, movement during a speech should also not resemble pacing. As speakers, we must be mindful of how we go about moving while speaking.

Movement that supports your delivery:

• Upper body toward the audience – Leaning into your audience slightly helps to make a connection with them.
• Transition steps – take a few steps any time you transition from one idea to the next. By only moving at transition points, not only do you help focus your audience’s attention on the transition from one idea to the next, but you also are able to increase your nonverbal immediacy by getting closer to different segments of your audience.
• Stand still without movement – If you are listening to a question, you can stand still without movement to show your interest.
• Moving toward your visuals – you can move toward your visual (or away) to focus audience attention where you want it.

Unnecessary movement that can distract from your delivery:

• Swaying back and forth
• Pacing from one side to another
• Moving a hand repetitively without purpose.
• Have a friend observe or record yourself while you speak. Review the recording for distracting, repetitive movements.
• Remember to strive for natural movements of the body. Body movements that are planned and mechanical will call undue attention to you and distract the audience’s attention.
• If you are having difficulty focusing while speaking you might consider mind-body exercises which combine body movement with mental focus and controlled breathing.

A  gesture is a form of non-verbal communication in which visible bodily actions communicate particular messages. Effective gestures are purposeful and natural. They should add to not distract from, your vocal delivery.

Gestures that support your message:

• Emblems are gestures that have a specific agreed-on meaning. These are often used to substitute for verbal communication such as waving goodbye. You may use them while telling a story as support or trying to make a dramatic point during your speech.
• Illustrators help emphasize or explain a word. Illustrators are the most common type of gesture and are used to illustrate the verbal message they accompany. For example, you might use hand gestures to indicate the size or shape of something during your speech.
• Affect displays show feelings and emotions. Consider how you would use gestures to convey “I give up” or “we will be victorious!”
• Regulators are gestures that help coordinate the flow of conversation. If you would like your audience to answer a question you may use a head nod toward them or a hand movement indicating that you are handing over the “speaker” roll to them.

Gestures that distract from your delivery:

• Repetitive gestures: If you are using the same hand movement over and over throughout the speech, it will distract from your message.
• Contradictory : If you are using gestures that contradict your message, you may confuse your audience.
• Wild or erratic:  Wild gesturing can draw the audience attention away from your message and have them wondering what you are trying to communicate.
• Make sure that the audience can see your hands. This applies in person and online. Your audience should be able to see your gestures fully and easily.
• While practicing your speech note places you can use purposeful gestures. Are you talking about something big? How can you use nonverbal communication to accompany your description?
• Keep your hands free. This will give you more opportunities for spontaneous gesturing.

Gestures should be natural, not overdramatic nor subdued. At one extreme, arm-waving and fist-pounding will distract from your message and reduce your credibility. At the other extreme, refraining from the use of gestures is a waste of an opportunity to suggest emphasis, enthusiasm, or other personal connection with your topic.

Facial Expressions

The face as a whole indicates much about human moods. Specific emotional states, such as happiness or sadness, are expressed through a smile or a frown, respectively. There are seven universally recognized emotions shown through facial expressions:

Faces are amazing things and convey so much information. As speakers, we must be acutely aware of what our face looks like while speaking. While many of us do not look forward to seeing ourselves on videotape, often the only way you can critically evaluate what your face is doing while you are speaking is to watch a recording of your speech. If video is not available, you can practice speaking in front of a mirror.

Facial expressions that district:

• No expression : You do not want to have a completely blank face while speaking. Some people just do not show much emotion with their faces naturally, but this blankness is often increased when the speaker is nervous. Audiences will react negatively to the message of such a speaker because they will sense that something is amiss. If a speaker is talking about the joys of Disney World and his face doesn’t show any excitement, the audience is going to be turned off by the speaker and his message.
• Over animated expression : On the other extreme end is the speaker whose face looks like that of an exaggerated cartoon character. Instead, your goal is to show a variety of appropriate facial expressions while speaking.
• Contradicting expressions: Y ou should not smile throughout a speech on drug addiction, poverty, or the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. An inappropriate smile creates confusion about your meaning and may make your audience feel uncomfortable.

Use facial expressions strategically to enhance meaning. Watch the below video for more tips on using your face to enhance your delivery: 

• People smile when they are happy. Smile before you begin speaking to show the audience that you are happy to be there, and they will smile back. Smiling is contagious.
• Be aware of facial expressions that may contradict your verbal message. If you are talking about something sad, your face should reflect this!

Eye Contact

Your audience should feel that you’re speaking to them, not simply uttering main and supporting points. If you are new to public speaking, you may find it intimidating to look audience members in the eye, but if you think about speakers you have seen who did not maintain eye contact, you’ll realize why this aspect of speech delivery is important. Without eye contact, the audience begins to feel invisible and unimportant, as if the speaker is just speaking to hear her or his own voice. Eye contact lets your audience feel that your attention is on them, not solely on the cards in front of you.

Many have offered bad advice about how to engage an audience through eye contact:

• Look at the foreheads: Just for fun, walk up to a friend and begin to speak to their forehead to see how they react. Really, try it.  It just looks weird. Chances are your friend will say, “What the heck are you doing?”  That is the same thing your audience will think if you stare at their foreheads. Honestly, it is harder to focus on foreheads than it is to look in the eyes.
• Imagine your audience naked: Maybe you too have heard this advice, and it is the worst. If you are in my audience and I imagine you naked, I guarantee there will be NO EYE CONTACT. No eye contact at all! This piece of advice is designed to make you feel more at ease, but it doesn’t work. I do not know about you, but the thought of speaking to a room full of naked people does not make me feel relaxed.
• Stare at random spots in the room: You may have heard “Just look at the back wall.”  If you look over the person, you miss the person. Your audience can tell if you are looking at them or somewhere else. This strategy will cause you to lose credibility with the audience. Even in a large audience where you can’t make eye contact with everyone, you should at least find people throughout the room to look at.

Ask yourself, why is eye contact so frightening? Is it because there is a person connected to those eyes? Is it because if we look at the person, we have to acknowledge their existence? Public speaking is an interaction (remember chapter 1), not a monologue. Your audience is important and your eye contact helps to establish this importance.

• Practice making eye contact – you can use animals, pictures, and stuffed animals (it doesn’t matter) while practicing but get used to directly looking at things in your audience’s path.
• Alternate talking to the audience members to the right, left, and in front of you.
• If you struggle with eye contact, at the top of every page of your notes write–“Make eye contact.”
• Find friendly faces throughout the room where you feel comfortable speaking to the person.
• Practice with people. Sure, it is helpful to record yourself, to practice talking to a wall, and to speak to a mirror, but those are no substitutes for what happens when you speak to people. Find some friends and practice with them.
• Do not have your notes on the screen during virtual presentations. This will create challenges for you in using your notes effectively while maintaining eye contact with your audience.

Cultural Note

Eye contact can vary from culture to culture and person to person. Just because an audience member looks away from you, it may not mean they are not interested. Consider the following differences.

• In some cultures, it would be considered inappropriate to make eye contact with someone of different gender (or sex).
• When in a high-power culture (a culture where those in power are given higher status and have deferential body language), you may notice those in lower status lower their eyes or avoid eye contact with those of higher status.
• Arabs, Latin Americans, and Southern Europeans tend to make direct eye contact
• Those from Asia and parts of Africa tend to make less eye contact.
• Those on the Autism Spectrum may avoid eye contact to help them focus on the words you are saying.

Key Takeaways

Body language can make or break a speech.

• Public speaking students will want to practice and refine their nonverbal behaviors in similar ways they are refining their verbal delivery.
• Verbal and nonverbal delivery work “hand-in-hand” in an effective speech – failing to refine your non-verbals in a speech will results in an ineffective delivery.

Koch, A. (2010).  Speaking with a purpose  (8th ed.). Boston, MA: Allyn & Bacon, p. 233.

Lucas, S. E. (2009).  The art of public speaking  (9th ed.). Boston, MA: McGraw-Hill, p. 244.

Mehrabian, A. (1972).  Nonverbal communication . Chicago, IL: Aldine-Atherton.

Mitchell, O. (n.d.). Mehrabian and nonverbal communication [Web log post]. Retrieved from  http://www.speakingaboutpresenting.com/presentation-myths/mehrabian-nonverbal-communication-research

O’Hair, D., Stewart, R., & Rubenstein, H. (2001).  A speaker’s guidebook: Text and reference.  Boston, MA: Bedford/St. Martin’s.

Stossel, J. (2011, March 2). An Academy Award–winning movie, stuttering and me [Web log post]. Retrieved from  http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=42081

Stand up, Speak out  by University of Minnesota is licensed under a  Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

Public Speaking Copyright © by Dr. Layne Goodman; Amber Green, M.A.; and Various is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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9 Delivering a Speech

Introduction

9.1 Managing Public Speaking Anxiety

Sources of speaking anxiety.

Aside from the self-reported data in national surveys that rank the fear of public speaking high for Americans, decades of research conducted by communication scholars shows that communication apprehension is common among college students (Priem & Solomon, 2009). Communication apprehension (CA) is fear or anxiety experienced by a person due to real or perceived communication with another person or persons. CA is a more general term that includes multiple forms of communication, not just public speaking. Seventy percent of college students experience some CA, which means that addressing communication anxiety in a class like the one you are taking now stands to benefit the majority of students (Priem & Solomon, 2009). Think about the jitters you get before a first date, a job interview, or the first day of school. The novelty or uncertainty of some situations is a common trigger for communication anxiety, and public speaking is a situation that is novel and uncertain for many.

Public speaking anxiety is a type of CA that produces physiological, cognitive, and behavioral reactions in people when faced with a real or imagined presentation (Bodie, 2010). Physiological responses to public speaking anxiety include increased heart rate, flushing of the skin or face, and sweaty palms, among other things. These reactions are the result of natural chemical processes in the human body. The fight or flight instinct helped early humans survive threatening situations. When faced with a ferocious saber-toothed tiger, for example, the body released adrenaline, cortisol, and other hormones that increased heart rate and blood pressure to get more energy to the brain, organs, and muscles in order to respond to the threat. We can be thankful for this evolutionary advantage, but our physiology has not caught up with our new ways of life. Our body does not distinguish between the causes of stressful situations, so facing down an audience releases the same hormones as facing down a wild beast.

Cognitive reactions to public speaking anxiety often include intrusive thoughts that can increase anxiety: “People are judging me,” “I’m not going to do well,” and “I’m going to forget what to say.” These thoughts are reactions to the physiological changes in the body but also bring in the social/public aspect of public speaking in which speakers fear being negatively judged or evaluated because of their anxiety. The physiological and cognitive responses to anxiety lead to behavioral changes. All these thoughts may lead someone to stop their speech and return to their seat or leave the classroom. Anticipating these reactions can also lead to avoidance behavior where people intentionally avoid situations where they will have to speak in public.

Addressing Public Speaking Anxiety

While we cannot stop the innate physiological reactions related to anxiety from occurring, we do have some control over how we cognitively process them and the behaviors that result. Research on public speaking anxiety has focused on three key ways to address this common issue: systematic desensitization, cognitive restructuring, and skills training (Bodie,2010).

Although systematic desensitization may sound like something done to you while strapped down in the basement of a scary hospital, it actually refers to the fact that we become less anxious about something when we are exposed to it more often (Bodie, 2010). As was mentioned earlier, the novelty and uncertainty of public speaking is a source for many people’s anxiety. So becoming more familiar with public speaking by speaking more often can logically reduce the novelty and uncertainty of it.

Systematic desensitization can result from imagined or real exposure to anxiety-inducing scenarios. In some cases, an instructor leads a person through a series of relaxation techniques. Once relaxed, the person is asked to imagine a series of scenarios including speech preparation and speech delivery. This is something you could also try to do on your own before giving a speech. Imagine yourself going through the process of preparing and practicing a speech, then delivering the speech, then returning to your seat, which concludes the scenario. Aside from this imagined exposure to speaking situations, taking a communication course like this one is a great way to engage directly in systematic desensitization. Almost all students report that they have less speaking anxiety at the end of a semester than when they started, which is at least partially due to the fact they engaged with speaking more than they would have done if they were not taking the class.

Cognitive Restructuring

Cognitive restructuring entails changing the way we think about something. A first step in restructuring how we deal with public speaking anxiety is to cognitively process through our fears to realize that many of the thoughts associated with public speaking anxiety are irrational (Allen, Hunter & Donohue, 2009). For example, people report a fear of public speaking over a fear of snakes, heights, financial ruin, or even death. It’s irrational to think that the consequences of giving a speech in public are more dire than getting bit by a rattlesnake, falling off a building, or dying. People also fear being embarrassed because they mess up. Well, you cannot literally die from embarrassment, and in reality, audiences are very forgiving and overlook or do not even notice many errors that we, as speakers, may dwell on. Once we realize that the potential negative consequences of giving a speech are not as dire as we think they are, we can move on to other cognitive restructuring strategies.

Communication-orientation modification therapy (COM therapy) is a type of cognitive restructuring that encourages people to think of public speaking as a conversation rather than a performance (Motley, 2009). Many people have a performance-based view of public speaking. This can easily be seen in the language that some students use to discuss public speaking. They say that they “rehearse” their speech, deal with “stage fright,” then “perform” their speech on a “stage.” There is no stage at the front of the classroom; it is a normal floor. To get away from a performance orientation, we can reword the previous statements to say that they “practice” their speech, deal with “public speaking anxiety,” then “deliver” their speech from the front of the room. Viewing public speaking as a conversation also helps with confidence. After all, you obviously have some conversation skills, or you would not have made it to college. We engage in conversations every day. We do not have to write everything we are going to say out on a note card, we do not usually get nervous or anxious in regular conversations, and we are usually successful when we try. Even though we do not engage in public speaking as much, we speak to others in public all the time. Thinking of public speaking as a type of conversation helps you realize that you already have accumulated experiences and skills that you can draw from, so you are not starting from scratch.

Last, positive visualization is another way to engage in cognitive restructuring. Speaking anxiety often leads people to view public speaking negatively. They are more likely to judge a speech they gave negatively, even if it was good. They are also likely to set up negative self-fulfilling prophecies that will hinder their performance in future speeches. To use positive visualization, it is best to engage first in some relaxation exercises such as deep breathing or stretching, and then play through vivid images in your mind of giving a successful speech. Do this a few times before giving the actual speech. Students sometimes question the power of positive visualization, thinking that it sounds corny. Ask an Olympic diver what his or her coach says to do before jumping off the diving board and the answer will probably be “Coach says to image completing a perfect 10 dive.” Likewise a Marine sharpshooter would likely say his commanding officer says to imagine hitting the target before pulling the trigger. In both instances, positive visualization is being used in high-stakes situations. If it is good enough for Olympic athletes and snipers, it is good enough for public speakers.

Skills training is a strategy for managing public speaking anxiety that focuses on learning skills that will improve specific speaking behaviors. These skills may relate to any part of the speech-making process, including topic selection, research and organization, delivery, and self-evaluation. Skills training, like systematic desensitization, makes the public speaking process more familiar for a speaker, which lessens uncertainty. In addition, targeting specific areas and then improving on them builds more confidence, which can in turn lead to more improvement. Feedback is important to initiate and maintain this positive cycle of improvement. You can use the constructive criticism that you get from your instructor and peers in this class to target specific areas of improvement.

Self-evaluation is also an important part of skills training. Make sure to evaluate yourself within the context of your assignment or job and the expectations for the speech. Do not get sidetracked by a small delivery error if the expectations for content far outweigh the expectations for delivery. Combine your self-evaluation with the feedback from your instructor, boss, and/or peers to set specific and measurable goals and then assess whether or not you meet them in subsequent speeches. Once you achieve a goal, mark it off your list and use it as a confidence booster. If you do not achieve a goal, figure out why and adjust your strategies to try to meet it in the future.

Physical Relaxation Exercises

Suggestions for managing speaking anxiety typically address its cognitive and behavioral components, while the physical components are left unattended. While we cannot block these natural and instinctual responses, we can engage in physical relaxation exercises to counteract the general physical signs of anxiety caused by cortisol and adrenaline release, which include increased heart rate, trembling, flushing, high blood pressure, and speech disfluency.

Some breathing and stretching exercises release endorphins, which are your body’s natural antidote to stress hormones. Deep breathing is a proven way to release endorphins. It also provides a general sense of relaxation and can be done discretely, even while waiting to speak. In order to get the benefits of deep breathing, you must breathe into your diaphragm. The diaphragm is the muscle below your lungs that helps you breathe and stand up straight, which makes it a good muscle for a speaker to exercise. To start, breathe in slowly through your nose, filling the bottom parts of your lungs up with air. While doing this, your belly should pooch out. Hold the breath for three to five full seconds and then let it out slowly through your mouth. After doing this only a few times, many students report that they can actually feel a flooding of endorphins, which creates a brief “light-headed” feeling. Once you practice and are comfortable with the technique, you can do this before you start your speech, and no one sitting around you will even notice. You might also want to try this technique during other stressful situations. Deep breathing before dealing with an angry customer or loved one, or before taking a test, can help you relax and focus.

Stretching is another way to release endorphins. Very old exercise traditions like yoga, tai chi, and Pilates teach the idea that stretching is a key component of having a healthy mind and spirit. Exercise in general is a good stress reliever, but many of us do not have the time or willpower to do it. However, we can take time to do some stretching. Obviously, it would be distracting for the surrounding audience if a speaker broke into some planking or Pilates just before his or her speech. Simple and discrete stretches can help get the body’s energy moving around, which can make a speaker feel more balanced and relaxed. Our blood and our energy/ stress have a tendency to pool in our legs, especially when we are sitting.

Vocal Warm-Up Exercises

Vocal warm-up exercises are a good way to warm up your face and mouth muscles, which can help prevent some of the fluency issues that occur when speaking. Newscasters, singers, and other professional speakers use vocal warm-ups. I lead my students in vocal exercises before speeches, which also helps lighten the mood. We all stand in a circle and look at each other while we go through our warm-up list. For the first warm-up, we all make a motorboat sound, which makes everybody laugh. The full list of warm-ups follows and contains specific words and exercises designed to warm up different muscles and different aspects of your voice. After going through just a few, you should be able to feel the blood circulating in your face muscles more. It is a surprisingly good workout!

Top Ten Ways to Reduce Speaking Anxiety

Many factors contribute to speaking anxiety. There are also many ways to address it. The following is a list of the top ten ways to reduce speaking anxiety that I developed with my colleagues, which helps review what we have learned.

• Remember, you are not alone. Public speaking anxiety is common, so do not ignore it—confront it.
• Remember, you cannot literally “die of embarrassment.” Audiences are forgiving and understanding.
• Remember, it always feels worse than it looks.
• Take deep breaths. It releases endorphins, which naturally fight the adrenaline that causes anxiety.
• Look the part. Dress professionally to enhance confidence.
• Channel your nervousness into positive energy and motivation.
• Start your outline and research early. Better information = higher confidence.
• Practice and get feedback from a trusted source. (Do not just practice for your cat.)
• Visualize success through positive thinking.
• Prepare, prepare, prepare! Practice is a speaker’s best friend.

9.2 Delivery Methods and Practice Sessions

There are many decisions to make during the speech-making process. Making informed decisions about delivery can help boost your confidence and manage speaking anxiety. In this section, we will learn about the strengths and weaknesses of various delivery methods. We will also learn how to make the most of your practice sessions.

Delivery Methods

Different speaking occasions call for different delivery methods. While it may be acceptable to speak from memory in some situations, lengthy notes may be required in others. The four most common delivery methods are impromptu, manuscript, memorized, and extemporaneous.

Impromptu Delivery

When using impromptu delivery , a speaker has little to no time to prepare for a speech (LibreTexts, 2021). This means there is little time for research, audience analysis, organizing, and practice. For this reason, impromptu speaking often evokes higher degrees of speaking anxiety than other delivery types. Although impromptu speaking arouses anxiety, it is also a good way to build public speaking skills. Using some of the exercises for managing speaking anxiety discussed earlier in this chapter can help a speaker manage the challenges of impromptu speaking (LibreTexts, 2021). Only skilled public speakers with much experience are usually able to “pull off” an impromptu delivery without looking unprepared. Otherwise, a speaker who is very familiar with the subject matter can sometimes be a competent impromptu speaker, because their expertise can compensate for the lack of research and organizing time.

When Mark Twain famously said, “It usually takes me more than three weeks to prepare a good impromptu speech,” he was jokingly pointing out the difficulties of giving a good impromptu speech, essentially saying that there is no such thing as a good impromptu speech, as good speeches take time to prepare. We do not always have the luxury of preparation, though. So when speaking impromptu, be brief, stick to what you know, and avoid rambling. Quickly organize your thoughts into an introduction, body, and conclusion. Try to determine three key ideas that will serve as the basis of your main points.

When would impromptu speaking be used? Since we have already started thinking of the similarities between public speaking and conversations, we can clearly see that most of our day-to-day interactions involve impromptu speaking. When your roommate asks you what your plans for the weekend are, you do not pull a few note cards out of your back pocket to prompt your response. This type of conversational impromptu speaking is not anxiety inducing because we are talking about our lives, experiences, or something with which we are familiar. This is also usually the case when we are asked to speak publicly with little to no advance warning.

For example, if you are at a meeting for work and you are representing the public relations department, a colleague may ask you to say a few words about a recent news story involving a public relations misstep of a competing company. In this case, you are being asked to speak on the spot because of your expertise. A competent communicator should anticipate instances like this when they might be asked to speak. Of course, being caught completely off guard or being asked to comment on something unfamiliar to you creates more anxiety. In such cases, do not pretend to know something you do not, as that may come back to hurt you later. You can usually mention that you do not have the necessary background information at that time but will follow up later with your comments.

Manuscript Delivery

Speaking from a written or printed document that contains the entirety of a speech is known as manuscript delivery . Manuscript delivery can be the best choice when a speech has complicated information and/or the contents of the speech are going to be quoted or published (LibreTexts, 2021). Despite the fact that most novice speakers are not going to find themselves in that situation, many are drawn to this delivery method because of the security they feel with having everything they are going to say in front of them. Unfortunately, the security of having every word you want to say at your disposal translates to a poorly delivered and unengaging speech (LibreTexts, 2021). Even with every word written out, speakers can still have fluency hiccups and verbal fillers as they lose their place in the manuscript or trip over their words. The alternative, of course, is that a speaker reads the manuscript the whole time, effectively cutting himself or herself off from the audience. One way to make a manuscript delivery more engaging is to use a teleprompter. Almost all politicians who give televised addresses use them.

To make the delivery seem more natural, print the speech out in a larger-than-typical font, triple-space between lines so you can easily find your place, use heavier-than-normal paper so it is easy to pick up and turn the pages as needed, and use a portfolio so you can carry the manuscript securely.

Memorized Delivery

Completely memorizing a speech and delivering it without notes is known as memorized delivery (LibreTexts, 2021). Some students attempt to memorize their speech because they think it will make them feel more confident if they do not have to look at their notes; however, when their anxiety level spikes at the beginning of their speech and their mind goes blank for a minute, many admit they should have chosen a different delivery method. When using any of the other delivery methods, speakers still need to rely on their memory. An impromptu speaker must recall facts or experiences related to their topic, and speakers using a manuscript want to have some of their content memorized so they do not read their entire speech to their audience. The problem with memorized delivery overall is that it puts too much responsibility on our memory, which we all know from experience is fallible (LibreTexts, 2021).

Even with much practice, our memories can fail. If you do opt to use memorized delivery, make sure you have several “entry points” determined, so you can pick up at spots other than the very beginning of a speech if you lose your place and have to start again. Memorized delivery is very useful for speakers who are going to be moving around during a speech when carrying notes would be burdensome. I only recommend memorized delivery in cases where the speech is short (only one to two minutes), the speech is personal (like a brief toast), or the speech will be repeated numerous times (like a tour guide’s story), and even in these cases, it may be perfectly fine to have notes. Many students think that their anxiety and/or delivery challenges will vanish if they just memorize their speech only to find that they are more anxious and have more problems.

Extemporaneous Delivery

Extemporaneous delivery entails memorizing the overall structure and main points of a speech and then speaking from keyword/key-phrase notes (LibreTexts, 2021). This delivery mode brings together many of the strengths of the previous three methods. Since you only internalize and memorize the main structure of a speech, you do not have to worry as much about the content and delivery seeming stale. Extemporaneous delivery brings in some of the spontaneity of impromptu delivery but still allows a speaker to carefully plan the overall structure of a speech and incorporate supporting materials that include key facts, quotations, and paraphrased information (LibreTexts, 2021). You can also more freely adapt your speech to fit various audiences and occasions, since not every word and sentence is predetermined. This can be especially beneficial when you deliver a speech multiple times.

When preparing a speech that you will deliver extemporaneously, you will want to start practicing your speech early and then continue to practice as you revise your content. Investing quality time and effort into the speech-outlining process helps with extemporaneous delivery. As you put together your outline, you are already doing the work of internalizing the key structure of your speech. Read parts of your outline aloud as you draft them to help ensure they are written in a way that makes sense and is easy for you to deliver.

By the time you complete the formal, full-sentence outline, you should have already internalized much of the key information in your speech. Now, you can begin practicing with the full outline. As you become more comfortable with the content of your full outline, start to convert it into your speaking outline. Take out information that you know well and replace it with a keyword or key phrase that prompts your memory. You will probably want to leave key quotes, facts, and other paraphrased information, including your verbal source citation information, on your delivery outline so you make sure to include it in your speech. Once you’ve converted your full outline into your speaking outline, practice it a few more times, making sure to take some time between each practice session so you don’t inadvertently start to memorize the speech word for word. The final product should be a confident delivery of a well-organized and structured speech that is conversational and adaptable to various audiences and occasions.

Practicing Your Speech

Practicing a speech is essential, and practice sessions can be more or less useful depending on how you approach them (Dlugan, 2008). There are three primary phases to the practice process. In the first phase, you practice as you are working through your ideas and drafting your outline. In the second, you practice for someone and get feedback (Dlugan, 2008). In the third, you put the final changes on the speech.

Start practicing your speech early, as you are working through your ideas, by reading sections aloud as you draft them into your working outline. This will help ensure your speech is fluent and sounds good for the audience. Start to envision the audience while you practice and continue to think about them throughout the practicing process. This will help minimize anxiety when you actually have them sitting in front of you. Once you have completed your research and finished a draft of your outline, you will have already practiced your speech several times, as you were putting it together. Now, you can get feedback on the speech as a whole.

You begin to solicit feedback from a trusted source in the second phase of practicing your speech (Dlugan, 2008). This is the most important phase of practicing, and the one that most speakers do not complete. Beginning speakers may be nervous to practice in front of someone. That is normal. However, review the strategies for managing anxiety discussed earlier in this chapter and try to face that anxiety. After all, you will have to face a full audience when you deliver the speech, so getting used to speaking in front of someone can only help you at this point. Choose someone who will give you constructive feedback on your speech. Before you practice for them, explain the assignment or purpose of the speech. When practicing for a classroom speech, you may even want to give the person the assignment guidelines or a feedback sheet that has some key things for them to look for. Ask them for feedback on content and delivery. Almost anyone is good at evaluating delivery, but it is more difficult to evaluate content. In addition, in most cases, the content of your speech will be account for more of your grade. Also, begin to time your speech at this point, so you can determine if it meets any time limits that you have.

In addition to practicing for a trusted source for feedback, you may want to audio or video record your speech (Dlugan, 2008). This can be useful because it provides an objective record that you can then compare with the feedback you got from your friend and to your own evaluation of your speech. The most important part of this phase is incorporating the feedback you receive into your speech. If you practice for someone, get feedback, and then do not do anything with the feedback, then you have wasted your time and theirs. Use the feedback to assess whether or not you met your speaking goals. Was your thesis supported? Was your specific purpose met? Did your speech conform to any time limits that were set? Based on your answers to these questions, you may need to make some changes to your content or delivery, so do not put this part of practicing off to the last minute. Once the content has been revised as needed, draft your speaking outline and move on to the next phase of practice.

During the third and final phase of practice, you are putting the final changes on your speech. You should be familiar with the content based on your early practice sessions. You have also gotten feedback and incorporated that feedback into the speech. Your practice sessions at this point should pre-create, as much as possible, the conditions in which you will be giving your speech. You should have your speaking outline completed so you can practice with it. It is important to be familiar with the content on your note cards or speaking outline so you will not need to rely on it so much during the actual delivery. You may also want to practice in the type of clothing you will be wearing on speech day. This can be useful if you are wearing something you do not typically wear—a suit for example—so you can see how it might affect your posture, gestures, and overall comfort level.

If possible, at least one practice session in the place you will be giving the speech can be very helpful; especially if it is a room you are not familiar with. Make sure you are practicing with any visual aids or technology you will use so you can be familiar with it and it does not affect your speech fluency. (Dlugan, 2008).Continue to time each practice round. If you are too short or too long, you will need to go back and adjust your content some more. Always adjust your content to fit the time limit; do not try to adjust your delivery. Trying to speed talk or stretch things out to make a speech faster or longer is a mistake that will ultimately hurt your delivery, which will hurt your credibility. The overall purpose of this phase of practicing is to minimize surprises that might throw you off on speech day.

Vocal Delivery

Vocal delivery includes components of speech delivery that relate to your voice. These include rate, volume, pitch, articulation, pronunciation, and fluency. Our voice is important to consider when delivering our speech for two main reasons. First, vocal delivery can help us engage and interest the audience. Second, vocal delivery helps ensure we communicate our ideas clearly.

Speaking for Engagement

We have all had the displeasure of listening to an unengaging speaker. Even though the person may care about his or her topic, an unengaging delivery that does not communicate enthusiasm will translate into a lack of interest for most audience members (Davis, 2021). Although a speaker can be visually engaging by incorporating movement and gestures, a flat or monotone vocal delivery can be sedating or even annoying. Incorporating vocal variety in terms of rate, volume, and pitch is key to being a successful speaker.

Rate of speaking refers to how fast or slow you speak (Barnard, 2018). If you speak too fast, your audience will not be able to absorb the information you present. If you speak too slowly, the audience may lose interest. The key is to vary your rate of speaking in a middle range, staying away from either extreme, in order to keep your audience engaged. In general, a higher rate of speaking signals that a speaker is enthusiastic about his or her topic. Speaking slowly may lead the audience to infer that the speaker is uninterested, uninformed, or unprepared to present his or her own topic. These negative assumptions, whether they are true or not, are likely to hurt the credibility of the speaker (Barnard, 2018). The goal is to speak at a rate that will interest the audience and will effectively convey your information. Speaking at a slow rate throughout a speech would likely bore an audience, but that is not a common occurrence.

Volume refers to how loud or soft your voice is. As with speaking rate, you want to avoid the extremes of being too loud or too soft, but still vary your volume within an acceptable middle range (Packard, 2020). When speaking in a typically sized classroom or office setting that seats about twenty-five people, using a volume a few steps above a typical conversational volume is usually sufficient. When speaking in larger rooms, you will need to project your voice. You may want to look for nonverbal cues from people in the back rows or corners, like leaning forward or straining to hear, to see if you need to adjust your volume more. Obviously, in some settings, a microphone will be necessary so the entire audience can hear you. Like rate, audiences use volume to make a variety of judgments about a speaker. Sometimes, softer speakers are judged as meek (Packard, 2020). This may lead to lowered expectations for the speech or less perceived credibility. Loud speakers may be seen as overbearing or annoying, which can lead audience members to disengage from the speaker and message. Be aware of the volume of your voice and, when in doubt, increase your volume a notch, since beginning speakers are more likely to have an issue of speaking too softly rather than too loudly.

Pitch refers to how high or low a speaker’s voice is. As with other vocal qualities, there are natural variations among people’s vocal pitch. Unlike rate and volume, we have less control over pitch. For example, males generally have lower pitched voices than females. Despite these limitations, each person still has the capability to change their pitch across a range large enough to engage an audience. Changing pitch is a good way to communicate enthusiasm and indicate emphasis or closure (Scotti, 2015). In general, our pitch goes up when we are discussing something exciting. Our pitch goes down slightly when we emphasize a serious or important point. Lowering pitch is also an effective way to signal transitions between sections of your speech or the end of your speech, which cues your audience to applaud and avoids an awkward ending.

Of the vocal components of delivery discussed so far, pitch seems to give beginning speakers the most difficulty. It is as if giving a speech temporarily numbs their ability to vary their pitch. Record yourself practicing your speech to help determine if the amount of pitch variety and enthusiasm you think you convey while speaking actually comes through. Speakers often assume that their pitch is more varied and their delivery more enthusiastic than the audience actually perceives it to be (Scotti, 2015). Many students note this on the self-evaluations they write after viewing their recorded speech.

Vocal Variety

Overall, the lesson to take away from this section on vocal delivery is that variety is key. Vocal variety includes changes in your rate, volume, and pitch that can make you look more prepared, seem more credible, and be able to engage your audience better (Moore, 2015). Employing vocal variety is not something that takes natural ability or advanced skills training. It is something that beginning speakers can start working on immediately and everyone can accomplish. The key is to become aware of how you use your voice when you speak, and the best way to do this is to record yourself (Moore, 2015). We all use vocal variety naturally without thinking about it during our regular conversations, and many of us think that this tendency will translate over to our speaking voices. This is definitely not the case for most beginning speakers. Unlike in your regular conversations, it will take some awareness and practice to use vocal variety in speeches. I encourage students to make this a delivery priority early on. Since it is something anyone can do, improving in this area will add to your speaking confidence, which usually translates into better speeches and better grades further on.

Speaking for Clarity

In order to be an effective speaker, your audience should be able to understand your message and digest the information you present (Rampton, 2021). Audience members will make assumptions about our competence and credibility based on how we speak. As with other aspects of speech delivery, many people are not aware that they have habits of speech that interfere with their message clarity. Since most of our conversations are informal and take place with people we know, many people do not make a concerted effort to articulate every word clearly and pronounce every word correctly (Rampton, 2021). Most of the people we talk to either do not notice our errors or do not correct us if they do notice. Since public speaking is generally more formal than our conversations, we should be more concerned with the clarity of our speech.

Articulation

Articulation refers to the clarity of sounds and words we produce. If someone is articulate, they speak words clearly, and speakers should strive to speak clearly. Poor articulation results when speakers do not speak clearly (Ward, 2020). For example, a person may say dinnt instead of didn’t , gonna instead of going to , wanna instead of want to , or hunnerd instead of hundred . Unawareness and laziness are two common challenges to articulation. As with other aspects of our voice, many people are unaware that they regularly have errors in articulation. Recording yourself speak and then becoming a higher self-monitor are effective ways to improve your articulation. Laziness, on the other hand, requires a little more motivation to address. Some people just get in the habit of not articulating their words well. Both mumbling and slurring are examples of poor articulation. In informal settings, this type of speaking may be acceptable, but in formal settings, it will be evaluated negatively. It will hurt a speaker’s credibility. Perhaps the promise of being judged more favorably is enough to motivate a mumbler to speak more clearly.

When combined with a low volume, poor articulation becomes an even greater problem. Doing vocal warm-ups like the ones listed in Section 10.1 “Managing Public Speaking Anxiety” or tongue twisters can help prime your mouth, lips, and tongue to articulate words more clearly. When you notice that you have trouble articulating a particular word, you can either choose a different word to include in your speech or you can repeat it a few times in a row in the days leading up to your speech to get used to saying it.

Pronunciation

Unlike articulation, which focuses on the clarity of words, pronunciation refers to speaking words correctly, including the proper sounds of the letters and the proper emphasis (Shtern, 2017). Mispronouncing words can damage a speaker’s credibility, especially when the correct pronunciation of a word is commonly known. We all commonly run into words that we are unfamiliar with and therefore may not know how to pronounce. Here are three suggestions when faced with this problem. First, look the word up in an online dictionary. Many dictionaries have a speaker icon with their definitions, and when you click on it, you can hear the correct pronunciation of a word. Some words have more than one pronunciation—for example, Caribbean —so choosing either of the accepted pronunciations is fine. Just remember to use consistently that pronunciation to avoid confusing your audience. If a word does not include an audio pronunciation, you can usually find the phonetic spelling of a word, which is the word spelled out the way it sounds.

Second, there will occasionally be words that you cannot locate in a dictionary. These are typically proper nouns or foreign words. In this case, use the “phone-a-friend” strategy. Call up the people you know who have large vocabularies or are generally smart when it comes to words, and ask them if they know how to pronounce it. If they do, and you find them credible, you are probably safe to take their suggestion.

Third, “fake it ‘til you make it” should only be used as a last resort. If you cannot find the word in a dictionary and your smart friends do not know how to pronounce it, it is likely that your audience will also be unfamiliar with the word. In that case, using your knowledge of how things are typically pronounced, decide on a pronunciation that makes sense and confidently use it during your speech. Most people will not question it. In the event that someone does correct you on your pronunciation, thank him or her for correcting you and adjust your pronunciation.

Fluency refers to the flow of your speaking. To speak with fluency means that your speech flows well and that there are not many interruptions to that flow. Two main disfluencies or problems affect the flow of a speech. Fluency hiccups are unintended pauses in a speech that usually result from forgetting what you were saying, being distracted, or losing your place in your speaking notes. Fluency hiccups are not the same as intended pauses, which are useful for adding emphasis or transitioning between parts of a speech. While speakers should try to minimize fluency hiccups, even experienced speakers need to take an unintended pause sometimes to get their bearings or to recover from an unexpected distraction. Fluency hiccups become a problem when they happen regularly enough to detract from the speaker’s message.

Verbal fillers are words that speakers use to fill in a gap between what they were saying and what they are saying next (Hennessy, 2019). Common verbal fillers include um , uh , ah , er , you know , and like . The best way to minimize verbal fillers is to become a higher self-monitor and realize that you use them. Many students are surprised when they watch the video of their first speech and realize they said “um” thirty times in three minutes. Gaining that awareness is the first step in eliminating verbal fillers, and students make noticeable progress with this between their first and second speeches (Hennessy, 2019). If you do lose your train of thought, having a brief fluency hiccup is better than injecting a verbal filler, because the audience may not even notice the pause or may think it was intentional.

9.3 Physical Delivery

Physical delivery.

Many speakers are more nervous about physical delivery than vocal delivery. Putting our bodies on the line in front of an audience often makes us feel more vulnerable than putting our voice out there. Yet most audiences are not as fixated on our physical delivery as we think they are. Knowing this can help relieve some anxiety, but it does not give us a free pass when it comes to physical delivery. We should still practice for physical delivery that enhances our verbal message. Physical delivery of a speech involves nonverbal communication through the face and eyes, gestures, and body movements.

Physical Delivery and the Face

We tend to look at a person’s face when we are listening to them (Hoffler, 2016). Again, this often makes people feel uncomfortable and contributes to their overall speaking anxiety. Many speakers do not like the feeling of having “all eyes” on them, even though having a room full of people avoiding making eye contact with you would be much more awkward. Remember, it is a good thing for audience members to look at you, because it means they are paying attention and interested. Audiences look toward the face of the speaker for cues about the tone and content of the speech.

Facial Expressions

Facial expressions can help bring a speech to life when used by a speaker to communicate emotions and demonstrate enthusiasm for the speech (Hoffler, 2016). As with vocal variety, we tend to use facial expressions naturally and without conscious effort when engaging in day-to-day conversations. Yet many speakers’ expressive faces turn “deadpan” when they stand in front of an audience. Some people naturally have more expressive faces than others do have—think about the actor Jim Carey’s ability to contort his face as an example. However, we can also consciously control and improve on our facial expressions to be speakers that are more effective. As with other components of speech delivery, becoming a higher self-monitor and increasing your awareness of your typical delivery habits can help you understand, control, and improve your delivery. Although you should not only practice your speech in front of a mirror, doing so can help you get an idea of how expressive or unexpressive your face is while delivering your speech.

Facial expressions help set the emotional tone for a speech, and it is important that your facial expressions stay consistent with your message (Hoffler, 2016). In order to set a positive tone before you start speaking, briefly look at the audience and smile. A smile is a simple but powerful facial expression that can communicate friendliness, openness, and confidence. Facial expressions communicate a range of emotions and are associated with various moods or personality traits.

For example, combinations of facial expressions can communicate that a speaker is tired, excited, angry, confused, frustrated, sad, confident, smug, shy, or bored, among other things. Even if you are not bored, for example, a slack face with little animation may lead an audience to think that you are bored with your own speech, which is not likely to motivate them to be interested. So make sure your facial expressions are communicating an emotion, mood, or personality trait that you think your audience will view favorably. Also, make sure your facial expressions match with the content of your speech. When delivering something lighthearted or humorous, a smile, bright eyes, and slightly raised eyebrows will nonverbally enhance your verbal message. When delivering something serious or somber, a furrowed brow, a tighter mouth, and even a slight head nod can enhance that message. If your facial expressions and speech content are not consistent, your audience could become confused by the conflicting messages, which could lead them to question your honesty and credibility.

Eye Contact

Eye contact is an important element of nonverbal communication in all communication settings. Eye contact can also be used to establish credibility and hold your audience’s attention (Barnard, 2017). We often interpret a lack of eye contact to mean that someone is not credible or not competent, and as a public speaker, you do not want your audience thinking either of those things. Eye contact holds attention because an audience member who knows the speaker is making regular eye contact will want to reciprocate that eye contact to show that they are paying attention. This will also help your audience remember the content of your speech better, because acting as if we are paying attention actually leads us to pay attention and better retain information.

Norms for eye contact vary among cultures (Barnard, 2017). Therefore, it may be difficult for speakers from countries that have higher power distances or are more collectivistic to get used to the idea of making direct and sustained eye contact during a speech. In these cases, it is important for the speaker to challenge himself or herself to integrate some of the host culture’s expectations and for the audience to be accommodating and understanding of the cultural differences.

Physical Delivery and the Body

Have you ever gotten dizzy as an audience member because the speaker paced back and forth? Anxiety can lead us to do some strange things with our bodies, like pacing, that we do not normally do, so it is important to consider the important role that your body plays during your speech. We call extra movements caused by anxiety nonverbal adaptors . Most of them manifest as distracting movements or gestures. These nonverbal adaptors, like tapping a foot, wringing hands, playing with a paper clip, twirling hair, jingling change in a pocket, scratching, and many more, can definitely detract from a speaker’s message and credibility. Conversely, a confident posture and purposeful gestures and movement can enhance both.

Posture is the position we assume with our bodies, either intentionally or out of habit. Although people, especially young women, used to be trained in posture, often by having them walk around with books stacked on their heads, you should use a posture that is appropriate for the occasion while still positioning yourself in a way that feels natural. In a formal speaking situation, it is important to have an erect posture that communicates professionalism and credibility (Clayton, 2018). However, a military posture of standing at attention may feel and look unnatural in a typical school or business speech. In informal settings, it may be appropriate to lean on a table or lectern, or even sit among your audience members (Clayton, 2018). Head position is also part of posture. In most speaking situations, it is best to keep your head up, facing your audience. A droopy head does not communicate confidence. Consider the occasion important, as an inappropriate posture can hurt your credibility.

Gestures include arm and hand movements. We all go through a process of internalizing our native culture from childhood. An obvious part of this process is becoming fluent in a language. Perhaps less obvious is the fact that we also become fluent in nonverbal communication, gestures in particular. We all use hand gestures while we speak, but we didn’t ever take a class in matching verbal communication with the appropriate gestures; we just internalized these norms over time based on observation and put them into practice. By this point in your life, you have a whole vocabulary of hand movements and gestures that spontaneously come out while you are speaking. Some of these gestures are emphatic and some are descriptive (Koch, 2007).

Emphatic gestures are the most common hand gestures we use, and they function to emphasize our verbal communication and often relate to the emotions we verbally communicate (Toastmasters International, 2011). Pointing with one finger or all the fingers straight out is an emphatic gesture. We can even bounce that gesture up and down to provide more emphasis. Moving the hand in a circular motion in front of our chest with the fingers spread apart is a common emphatic gesture that shows excitement and often accompanies an increased rate of verbal speaking. We make this gesture more emphatic by using both hands. Descriptive gestures function to illustrate or refer to objects rather than emotions (Toastmasters International, 2011). We use descriptive gestures to indicate the number of something by counting with our fingers or the size, shape, or speed of something. Our hands and arms are often the most reliable and easy-to-use visual aids a speaker can have.

While the best beginning strategy is to gesture naturally, you also want to remain a high self-monitor and take note of your typical patterns of gesturing. If you notice that you naturally gravitate toward one particular gesture, make an effort to vary your gestures more. You also want your gestures to be purposeful, not limp or lifeless.

Sometimes movement of the whole body, instead of just gesturing with hands, is appropriate in a speech. When students are given the freedom to move around, it often ends up becoming floating or pacing, which are both movements that comfort a speaker by expending nervous energy but only serve to distract the audience (Toastmasters International, 2011). Floating refers to speakers who wander aimlessly around, and pacing refers to speakers who walk back and forth in the same path. To prevent floating or pacing, make sure that your movements are purposeful. Many speakers employ the triangle method of body movement where they start in the middle, take a couple steps forward and to the right, then take a couple steps to the left, then return to the center. Obviously, you do not need to do this multiple times in a five- to ten-minute speech, as doing so, just like floating or pacing, tends to make an audience dizzy.

To make your movements appear more natural, time them to coincide with a key point you want to emphasize or a transition between key points. Minimize other movements from the waist down when you are not purposefully moving for emphasis. Speakers sometimes tap or shuffle their feet, rock, or shift their weight back and forth from one leg to the other. Keeping both feet flat on the floor, and still, will help avoid these distracting movements (Toastmasters International, 2011).

Credibility and Physical Delivery

Audience members primarily take in information through visual and auditory channels. Just as the information you present verbally in your speech can add to or subtract from your credibility, nonverbal communication that accompanies your verbal messages affects your credibility.

Professional Dress and Appearance

No matter what professional field you go into, you will need to consider the importance of personal appearance (Caffrey, 2020). Although it may seem petty or shallow to put so much emphasis on dress and appearance, impressions matter, and people make judgments about our personality, competence, and credibility based on how we look. In some cases, you may work somewhere with a clearly laid out policy for personal dress and appearance. In many cases, the suggestion is to follow guidelines for “business casual.”

Despite the increasing popularity of this notion over the past twenty years, people’s understanding of what business casual means is not consistent (Caffrey, 2020). The formal dress codes of the mid-1900s, which required employees to wear suits and dresses, gave way to the trend of business casual dress, which seeks to allow employees to work comfortably while still appearing professional. While most people still dress more formally for job interviews or high-stakes presentations, the day-to-day dress of working professionals varies.

Visual Aids and Delivery

Visual aids play an important role in conveying supporting material to your audience. They also tie to delivery, since using visual aids during a speech usually requires some physical movements. It is important not to let your use of visual aids detract from your credibility (Beqiri, 2018). Many good speeches are derailed by posters that fall over, videos with no sound, and uncooperative PowerPoint presentations.

Figure 9.1: Systematic desensitization can include giving more public speeches, taking communication courses, or imagining public speaking scenarios. William Moreland. 2019. Unsplash license . https://unsplash.com/photos/GkWP64truqg

Figure 9.2: Vocal warm-up exercises. Andrea Piacquadio. 2020. Pexels license . https://www.pexels.com/photo/man-in-red-polo-shirt-3779453/

Figure 9.3: Primary phases to the practice process. Kindred Grey. 2022. CC BY 4.0 .

Figure 9.4: Three facets of speaking for clarity. Kindred Grey. 2022. CC BY 4.0 .

Figure 9.5: Facial expressions set the tone for a speech, and should be consistent with your message. Afif Kusuma. 2021. Unsplash license . https://unsplash.com/photos/F3dFVKj6q8I

Figure 9.6: To make your movements appear natural, time them to coincide with a key point. Product School. 2019. Unsplash license . https://unsplash.com/photos/S3hhrqLrgYM

Section 9.1

Allen, M., Hunter, J. E., & Donohue, W. A. (1989). Meta-analysis of self-report data on the effectiveness of public speaking anxiety treatment techniques. Communication Education, 38 (1), 54–76. https://doi.org/10.1080/03634528909378740

Bodie, G. D. (2010). A racing heart, rattling knees, and ruminative thoughts: Defining, explaining, and treating public speaking anxiety. Communication Education, 59 (1), 70–105. https://doi.org/10.1080/03634520903443849

Motley, M. T. (2009). COM therapy. In J. A. Daly, J. C. McCroskey, J. Ayres, T. Hopf, and D. M. Ayers Sonandré (Eds.), Avoiding communication: Shyness, reticence, and communication apprehension (pp. 379-400) (3rd ed.). Hampton Press.

Priem, J. S., & Haunani Solomon, D. (2009). Comforting apprehensive communicators: The effects of reappraisal and distraction on cortisol levels among students in a public speaking class. Communication Quarterly, 57 (3), 259-281.

Section 9.2

Barnard, D. (2018, January 20). Average speaking rate and words per minute . https://virtualspeech.com/blog/average-speaking-rate-words-per-minute

Davis, B. (2021, June 1). Why is audience engagement important? https://www.mvorganizing.org/why-is-audience-engagement-important/

Hennessy, C. (2019, March 27). Verbal filler: How to slow the flow . https://www.throughlinegroup.com/2019/03/27/verbal-filler-how-to-slow-the-flow/

LibreTexts. (2021, February 20). Methods of speech delivery . https://socialsci.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Communication/Public_Speaking/Exploring_Public_Speaking_(Barton_and_Tucker)/11%3A_Delivery/11.02%3A_Methods_of_Speech_Delivery

Moore, K. (2015, January 13). Public speaking tips: Use vocal variety like a pro! https://coachkiomi.com/best-public-speaking-tips-use-vocal-variety/

Packard, D. (2020, July 13). Speaking up: How to increase the volume of your voice . https://packardcommunications.com/speaking-up-how-to-increase-the-volume-of-your-voice/

Rampton, J. (2021, July 27). Learning to speak with clarity . https://www.calendar.com/blog/learning-to-speak-with-clarity/

Scotti, S. (2015, December 1). Vocal delivery: Take command of your voice . https://professionallyspeaking.net/vocal-delivery-take-command-of-your-voice-part-one/

Shtern, A. (2017, April 17). The importance of good pronunciation . https://shaneschools.com/en/the-importance-of-good-pronunciation/

Section 9.3

Barnard, D. (2017, October 24). The importance of eye contact during a presentation . https://virtualspeech.com/blog/importance-of-eye-contact-during-a-presentation

Beqiri, G. (2018, June 21). Using visual aids during a presentation or training session . https://virtualspeech.com/blog/visual-aids-presentation

Caffrey, A. (2020, February 25). The importance of personal appearance . http://www.publicspeakingexpert.co.uk/importanceofpersonalappearance.html

Clayton, D. (2018, October 31). The importance of good posture in public speaking . https://simplyamazingtraining.co.uk/blog/good-posture-public-speaking

Hoffler, A. (2016, June 7). Why facial expressions are important in public speaking . https://www.millswyck.com/2016/06/07/the-importance-of-facial-expression/

Koch, A. (2007). Speaking with a purpose (7th ed.). Pearson, 2007.

Toastmasters International. (2011). Gestures: Your body speaks . https://web.mst.edu/~toast/docs/Gestures.pdf

Fear or anxiety experience by a person due to real or perceived communication with another person or persons. This is a fear or anxiety that involves several types of communication not limited to public speaking.

Type of communication apprehension that produces physiological, cognitive, and behavioral reactions in people when faced with a real or imagined presentation

A type of cognitive restructuring that encourages people to think of public speaking as conversation rather than a performance

When a speaker has little or no time to prepare a speech

Speaking from a well written or printed document that contains the entirety of a speech

Completely memorizing a speech and delivering it without notes

Memorizing the overall structure and main points of a speech and then speaking from keyword/key-phrase notes

Refers to how fast or slow you speak

Refers to how loud or soft you speak

Refers to how high or low a speaker’s voice is

Changes in your rate, volume, and pitch that make you sound more prepared and credible

Refers to the clarity of sounds and words you pronounce

Whether you say the words correctly

Refers to the flow of your speaking

Unintended pauses in a speech that usually result from forgetting what you were saying, being distracted, or losing your place in speaking

The umms, uhhs, and other linguistic pauses of conversation

The feelings expressed on a person’s face

The act of looking directly into one another’s eyes

Extra movements caused by anxiety (i.e., tapping your foot, wringing your hands, playing with a paperclip, twirling hair, or scratching)

The position in which someone holds their body when standing or sitting

A movement of part of the body, especially a hand or the head, to express an idea or meaning

Communication in the Real World Copyright © by Faculty members in the School of Communication Studies, James Madison University is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Oral Presentations

Effective delivery: vocal & non-verbal.

Effective delivery has two aspects:  vocal delivery and non-verbal communication.

Vocal Delivery

You may have a well-developed presentation, one that you’re excited about, one that distills your main ideas into memorable slides, one that meets your audience’s needs while presenting your informed viewpoint, one that will advance knowledge or process within or outside of your organization.  Yet if you do not deliver that presentation well, it will not have the effects you intend.  As legendary advertising creative director William Bernbach noted, “It’s not just what you say that stirs people. It’s the way that you say it.”

Vocal presentation matters in any type of presentation: in-person, online, real-time, asynchronous.  Vocal variety affects how you are heard. Here are a few tips for effective verbal presentation from presentation skills training consultant Gavin Meikle, who identifies key elements, common errors, and good practices to develop greater vocal impact [1] .

• Volume – Develop your range and vary your volume. To help put this in perspective, consider the saying, “A good speech needs light and shade.”
• Pitch – Research suggests a general preference for lower vocal pitch, with participants ascribing more positive personality traits to lower pitched voices. That’s not to say that you should artificially lower your voice, but simply try to be conscious if your voice tends to rise when you speak, and try to modulate it.
• Resonance – Resonance refers to the fullness of the sound.  For example, when you’re nervous, your voice may tend to become “tighter.” Try deep breathing to re-establish vocal resonance before a presentation.
• Pace – Be aware of and manage your speaking speed. It’s been found that people who moderate their pace when speaking to groups are thought to have greater credibility, and authority.
• Pause – Consider well-placed pauses to emphasize information, and/or to give your audience a brief chance to absorb key information.
• Ending a spoken sentence with a rising tone indicates a question or suggestion.
• Ending a spoken sentence with a descending tone is generally interpreted as an order.
• A flat intonation is used to indicate a statement.

View the following video, which expands on these vocal presentation tips.

Non-Verbal Communication

Non-verbal differs from verbal communication in a few ways.

• Verbal communication uses one channel (words); non-verbal communication uses multiple channels (gestures, pauses/silence, environment, posture/stance, appearance).
• Verbal communication is usually linear (sentences, discussions, and articles start, develop, and end); non-verbal communication is continuous (in constant motion and relative to context).
• Verbal communication is conscious (you consider and choose your words); non-verbal communication can be both conscious and unconscious (you usually don’t make a conscious decision to smile or laugh, but you may make a conscious decision to dress a certain way).

Non-verbal communication – the information and cues you emit through your gestures, appearance, stance, and more – is just as important to consider as verbal communication when you present to an audience. When we first see each other, before anyone says a word, we are already sizing each other up. Within the first few seconds we have made judgments about each other based on what we wear, our physical characteristics, even our posture. Are these judgments accurate? That is hard to know without context, but we can say that nonverbal communication certainly affects first impressions, for better or worse. When a presenter and audience first meet, nonverbal communication in terms of space, dress, and even personal characteristics can contribute to assumed expectations. The expectations might not be accurate or even fair, but it is important to recognize that they will be present. There is truth in the saying, “You never get a second chance to make a first impression.” Since beginnings are fragile times, your attention to aspects you can control, both verbal and nonverbal, will help contribute to the first step of forming a relationship with your audience. Your eye contact with audience members, use of space, and degree of formality will continue to contribute to that relationship.

Non-verbal communication also factors into online, real-time and asynchronous presentations with pauses, silence, and/or background noise; the image you project with your identifying photograph; and your gestures, posture, appearance, and environment visible via the video option in conferencing tools.

The following videos illustrate important aspects of non-verbal communication for presentations.

One Big Presentation Tip

Practice.  It really does help you become aware of how you come across to others in terms of look and language.

The following video discusses the importance of practicing and reviews oral presentation concepts, within the context of doing a presentation for a job interview (although the tips work for any oral presentation context).

[1] Meikle, Gavin. “ Six Elements of Vocal Variety and How to Master Them. ”  Inter-Activ . 18 Jun 2017. Web. 25 Jun 2018.

• some original content and content adapted from Business Communication Skills for Managers, Introduction to Communication, and Business Communication for Success; attributions below. Authored by : Susan Oaks. Project : Communications for Professionals. License : CC BY-NC: Attribution-NonCommercial
• Delivery Techniques. Authored by : Nina Burokas. Provided by : Lumen Learning. Located at : https://courses.lumenlearning.com/wmopen-businesscommunicationmgrs/chapter/delivery-techniques/ . Project : Business Communication Skills for Managers. License : CC BY: Attribution
• video Vocal Delivery. Provided by : COMMpadres Media. Located at : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ha-KUArLWc . License : Other . License Terms : YouTube video
• Differences Between Verbal and Non-Verbal Communication. Authored by : Scott T. Paynton and Linda K. Hahn. Provided by : Humboldt State Universtiy. Located at : https://courses.lumenlearning.com/introductiontocommunication/chapter/differences-between-verbal-and-nonverbal-communication/ . Project : Introduction to Communication. License : CC BY-NC-SA: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike
• 11.1 Principles of Nonverbal Communication. Located at : https://open.lib.umn.edu/businesscommunication/chapter/11-1-principles-of-nonverbal-communication/ . Project : Business Communication for Success. License : CC BY-NC-SA: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike
• video Body Language for Presentations. Authored by : Alex Lyon. Provided by : Communication Coach. Located at : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TmbQFWBvTtY . License : Other . License Terms : YouTube video
• video Gestures - The Business Presentation Revolution . Authored by : Michael Rickwood and Rose Bloomfield. Provided by : Ideas on Stage. Located at : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-P9C8xl4RPU . License : Other . License Terms : YouTube video
• image man holding microphone and speaking in a business environment. Authored by : PhotoMIX-Company. Provided by : Pixabay. Located at : https://pixabay.com/photos/the-conference-lecture-lecture-hall-3248255/ . License : CC0: No Rights Reserved
• video How to Make an Interview Presentation. Provided by : Monster UK & Ireland. Located at : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VCr7ZXNKz6A . License : Other . License Terms : YouTube video

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Speak Like a Pro: The Ultimate Guide to Flawless Speech Delivery Techniques Revealed!

Eloquence Everly

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Implementing  effective speech delivery  techniques is essential to captivate and engage your audience. By following these techniques, you can improve your public speaking skills and deliver persuasive and engaging presentations.

Key Takeaways:

• Thoroughly prepare and practice your speech before delivering it.
• Create a distraction-free  presentation environment  with proper lighting and visibility.
• Pay attention to your  personal appearance  and maintain good  body language  during the speech.
• Focus on  vocal delivery  strategies such as clear  enunciation , appropriate  loudness and speed , and  variations in speed and force .
• Utilize effective  body language  by maintaining  eye contact , using  gestures and movement  naturally, and avoiding distracting mannerisms.

Preparation for Speech Delivery

Before delivering a speech, thorough preparation is essential. By taking the time to prepare, you can ensure a smooth and confident delivery that captivates your audience . Here are some key aspects to consider:

• Create a Well-Organized Set of Notes: To guide you during your presentation, create a clear and concise set of notes. This will help you stay on track and ensure you cover all your key points. Structure your notes in a logical manner, using headings and bullet points for easy reference.
• Engage in Ample Practice: Practice makes perfect, so dedicate time to rehearse your speech. Familiarize yourself with the content, flow, and timing of your presentation. Practice in front of a mirror, friends, or colleagues to receive feedback and make necessary improvements.
• Prepare the  Presentation Environment : The environment in which you deliver your speech can greatly impact its effectiveness. Consider factors such as lighting, visibility, and distractions. Ensure that the room is well-lit and that your audience can see and hear you clearly. Eliminate any distractions or potential interruptions.
• Test and Have a Backup Plan for  Audiovisual Equipment : If you will be using  audiovisual equipment , such as a microphone or projector, it is crucial to test them beforehand. Check for any technical issues and have a backup plan in case of equipment failure. This will help you avoid any disruptions and allow for a seamless delivery.

By adequately preparing your speech, notes, and the  presentation environment , you can set yourself up for success and deliver a confident and impactful presentation to your audience.

Personal Appearance and Body Language

When delivering a speech, your  personal appearance  and  body language  significantly impact the impression you make on your audience. Here are some key tips to ensure you project confidence and professionalism:

Dress Appropriately

Choose attire that is suitable for the occasion and reflects your respect for the audience and the topic. Ensure your outfit is clean, well-fitted, and comfortable. Avoid wearing hats or caps that can obstruct your face and hinder your nonverbal communication.

Maintain Good Posture

Stand or sit up straight, with your shoulders back and chin parallel to the ground. This posture exudes confidence and engages your audience . Remember to distribute your weight evenly and avoid excessive shifting or fidgeting.

Eye Contact

Maintaining  eye contact  is crucial for establishing connection and credibility with your audience. Look directly at individuals while speaking, making an effort to engage different parts of the room. Avoid constantly referring to notes or reading from a script, as this can diminish the impact of your message.

Avoid Distracting Mannerisms

Be mindful of your body language throughout your speech. Minimize excessive hand movements, pacing, or other distracting mannerisms that can detract from your message. Focus on conveying confidence and clarity through calm and composed  gestures .

By paying attention to your  personal appearance  and body language, you can enhance your speech delivery and effectively engage your audience .

Vocal Delivery Strategies

Your  vocal delivery  plays a crucial role in how your speech is received by the audience. By implementing effective vocal techniques, you can enhance the impact of your message and maintain audience attention. Let’s explore some strategies to improve your  vocal delivery :

Enunciation and Clarity

Clear  enunciation  is vital for effective communication. Ensure that you pronounce your words distinctly and avoid mumbling or garbling. By articulating each word clearly, you enhance the audience’s understanding and engagement with your speech.

Appropriate Loudness and Speed

Adjusting your volume and speed based on the audience, venue, and topic is crucial for effective vocal delivery. Speak loudly enough to be heard, but avoid being overly loud or shouting. Similarly, vary your speed to maintain audience interest and emphasize key points, but avoid speaking too quickly or too slowly.

Variations in Speed, Inflections, and Force

Utilizing variations in speed, inflections, and force adds depth and meaning to your speech. By emphasizing certain words or phrases, you can convey the significance and emotion behind them. Adjusting the pace of your speech can create anticipation or highlight important information. Use this technique strategically to enhance your message and keep your audience engaged.

Minimize Filler Words

Filler words such as “um,” “uh,” and “like” can detract from the impact and clarity of your delivery. Minimize their use to ensure a smooth and impactful presentation. Pausing briefly instead of using filler words can also add emphasis and facilitate better understanding.

“Clear and confident vocal delivery is essential for engaging your audience. Enunciate your words with clarity, speak at an appropriate  loudness and speed , utilize  variations in speed and force , and minimize the use of filler words. These strategies will help you captivate your audience and effectively convey your message.”

Now that you have learned about effective vocal delivery strategies, let’s move on to exploring the importance of body language in speech delivery.

Effective Use of Body Language

When delivering a speech, your body language can greatly impact how your message is received by the audience. By mastering the art of body language , you can effectively communicate your ideas and captivate your listeners.

Maintaining Eye Contact

One of the most important aspects of body language is maintaining eye contact with your audience. This establishes a connection between you and your listeners, making them feel engaged and involved in your speech. Avoid excessively reading from notes, as this can hinder eye contact and create a barrier between you and your audience. Instead, glance at your notes discreetly when necessary and focus on making eye contact with individuals throughout the room.

Using Gestures and Movement

“Gestures, in my opinion, are the most powerful tool we have in becoming an effective communicator.” – Andrea Foy

Gestures and movement  can add depth and emphasis to your speech. Use them naturally to illustrate concepts, reinforce transitions between ideas, and highlight key points. However, it’s important to be mindful of using  gestures  in a controlled and purposeful manner. Avoid excessive or distracting movements that can draw attention away from your message. Instead, use  gestures and movement  to enhance your delivery and engage your audience.

Show Enthusiasm and Commitment

When delivering a speech, it’s vital to demonstrate interest and passion in your topic. Show enthusiasm through your body language, such as by smiling, using facial expressions that reflect your emotions, and maintaining an open and confident posture. This not only captures the audience’s attention but also conveys your commitment to the subject matter, making your speech more compelling and memorable.

Avoiding Distracting Mannerisms

While  gestures  and  movement  are important, it’s crucial to avoid distracting or aimless mannerisms that can detract from your message. Be aware of any nervous habits, such as fidgeting, excessive hand movements, or aimless shifting of weight. These mannerisms can undermine your credibility and divert the audience’s attention from your speech. Practice self-awareness and aim for body language that is purposeful, controlled, and complementary to your message.

Improving Verbal Delivery

When delivering a speech, your verbal delivery plays a crucial role in engaging your audience. To ensure your message reaches every corner of the room, focus on the following aspects:

• Projection :  Speak with enough volume to reach people in the back of the room. This will ensure clear communication and prevent your words from getting lost in the space.
• Comfortable Rate :  Speak at a pace that allows your audience to comprehend and absorb your message. Pausing occasionally not only helps you catch your breath but also gives the listeners time to process the information.
• Clear Articulation :  Enunciate your words clearly to facilitate understanding. Avoid mumbling or rushing through your sentences, as this can make it difficult for your audience to follow along.
• Vocal Habits :  Pay attention to any vocal habits that may distract your listeners. Eliminate vocalized pauses like “um” or “uh” and work on maintaining a steady volume throughout your speech. Avoid speaking more softly at the end of sentences, as it can diminish the impact of your message.

Sample Table: Comparing Verbal Delivery Techniques

By focusing on  projection ,  comfortable rate ,  clear articulation , and eliminating distracting  vocal habits , you can deliver a speech that captivates your audience and ensures effective communication.

Enhancing Nonverbal Delivery

Nonverbal delivery plays a crucial role in enhancing your overall speech delivery and making a lasting impact on your audience. By utilizing effective eye contact,  movement , gestures, and an  unobtrusive use of notes , you can captivate and engage your listeners. These nonverbal elements add depth and authenticity to your speech, helping to convey your message effectively.

Eye Contact:  Making eye contact with individuals in your audience establishes a connection and shows that you are genuinely interested in their presence. Avoid excessive reading from notes, as it can break the eye contact and lessen your impact. Instead, actively engage with your audience, scanning the room and making meaningful eye contact with different individuals throughout your speech.

Movement:  Movement on stage or in front of your audience can help you control nervousness and create visual interest. Utilize the space around you, taking purposeful steps and making slight changes in position to capture the attention of your listeners. Movement should be natural and deliberate, enhancing your message rather than distracting from it.

Gestures:  Gestures and arm movements can add emphasis and clarify your spoken words. Use them to reinforce key points, illustrate concepts, and enhance the overall impact of your speech. Effective gestures appear natural and are synchronized with the rhythm and flow of your speech, engaging your audience on a visual level and reinforcing the meaning of your words.

Unobtrusive Use of Notes:  While it is common to use notes during a speech to stay on track and remember important points, it is essential to use them unobtrusively. Ensure that your notes are legible and well-organized, allowing you to find the information you need without causing distractions. Place your notes discreetly or use a small podium or lectern to hold them, allowing for seamless transitions and maintaining the focus on your delivery.

Avoid any distracting mannerisms or gestures that detract from your communication. Practice incorporating these nonverbal elements into your delivery to create a powerful and engaging speech that leaves a lasting impression on your audience.

Managing Nervousness and Overcoming Challenges

Nervousness is a common experience when delivering a speech. However, it’s important to remember that you are not alone in feeling this way. Chances are, many members of your audience are also experiencing nerves. The good news is that most signs of nervousness are invisible to the audience, so you can stay calm and composed even if you’re feeling a bit jittery.

Embrace nervousness  as it can actually be a valuable tool in enhancing your speech delivery. It can make you more alert, animated, and enthusiastic about your topic. Instead of trying to suppress it, harness that nervous energy and channel it into your presentation. When you embrace your nerves, you can turn them into a positive force that adds authenticity and passion to your speech.

Handling mistakes  is another important aspect of  managing nervousness . It’s natural to feel flustered if you make a mistake or lose your place during your speech. However, it’s crucial to remember that these slip-ups happen to everyone at some point. Instead of panicking, take a moment to collect yourself, take a deep breath, and calmly continue from where you left off. Most importantly, don’t dwell on the mistake or draw attention to it. Keep your focus on delivering your message effectively.

By embracing and  managing nervousness , you can transform it from a potential obstacle into a catalyst for a powerful and engaging presentation. Embrace the nerves, handle mistakes gracefully, and let your genuine enthusiasm shine through.

Mastering  effective speech delivery  techniques is essential for becoming a confident and persuasive speaker. By implementing these techniques, such as thorough preparation, proper personal appearance, and effective vocal and nonverbal delivery strategies, you can captivate your audience and deliver impactful presentations.

Preparing well before your speech, organizing your notes, and creating a suitable environment are all crucial steps in ensuring an effective delivery. Your personal appearance and body language contribute greatly to the overall impression you make on your audience. Maintaining eye contact, using gestures and movement, and speaking with clear articulation and appropriate  variations in speed and force  all enhance your communication.

While it is natural to feel nervous before delivering a speech, embracing this nervousness can actually help enhance your delivery. Remember, you are not alone in experiencing nerves, and most signs of nervousness are invisible to the audience. Embrace the energy that nerves bring and use it to your advantage, channeling it into a more animated and enthusiastic performance.

By following these  effective speech delivery  techniques, you can confidently communicate your ideas and engage your audience in a persuasive and impactful manner. Remember to always strive for clear and effective communication, and never hesitate to seek further opportunities for growth and improvement in your public speaking skills .

What are some effective speech delivery techniques?

Implementing effective  speech delivery techniques  involves thorough preparation, proper personal appearance, vocal and nonverbal delivery strategies, and  managing nervousness .

How important is speech preparation for effective delivery?

Speech preparation  is crucial for effective delivery. Creating well-organized notes, practicing, and preparing the presentation environment and  audiovisual equipment  are essential steps.

How does personal appearance and body language impact speech delivery?

Personal appearance, such as appropriate dressing and tidy hair, and positive body language help to engage the audience. Standing or sitting up straight, making eye contact, and avoiding distracting mannerisms are key aspects.

What are some vocal delivery strategies for effective speech delivery?

Enunciating clearly, speaking with appropriate loudness and speed, using variations in speed and inflections, and minimizing filler words are important strategies for vocal delivery.

How can body language enhance speech delivery?

Maintaining eye contact, using gestures and movement naturally, and displaying enthusiasm through body language can enhance the impact of your speech.

What are some tips for improving verbal delivery in a speech?

Projecting your voice, speaking at a comfortable rate, articulating words clearly, and eliminating vocal habits are key tips to improve verbal delivery.

How can nonverbal delivery support speech delivery?

Making eye contact with the audience, using movement and gestures, and using notes unobtrusively can make your speech more engaging and effective.

How can one manage nervousness during speech delivery?

Managing nervousness  can be achieved by realizing that it’s common, remaining calm and composed, using nervous energy to enhance your delivery, and embracing mistakes as learning opportunities.

What are the key takeaways for effective speech delivery?

By implementing effective  speech delivery techniques , one can become a confident and persuasive speaker. Thorough preparation, proper personal appearance, vocal and nonverbal delivery strategies, and managing nervousness are key components.

Written By Eloquence Everly

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Learning Objective

• Demonstrate three ways to improve nonverbal communication.

Nonverbal communication is an important aspect of business communication, from the context of an interpersonal interaction to a public presentation. It is a dynamic, complex, and challenging aspect of communication. We are never done learning and adapting to our environment and context, and improving our understanding of nonverbal communication comes with the territory.

When your audience first sees you, they begin to make judgments and predictions about you and your potential, just as an employer might do when you arrive for a job interview. If you are well dressed and every crease is ironed, your audience may notice your attention to detail. Wearing jeans with holes, a torn T-shirt, and a baseball cap would send a different message. Neither style of dress is “good” or “bad, but simply appropriate or inappropriate depending on the environment and context. Your skills as an effective business communicator will be called upon when you contemplate your appearance. As a speaker, your goal is to create common ground and reduce the distance between the audience and yourself. You want your appearance to help establish and reinforce your credibility.

In order to be a successful business communicator, you will need to continually learn about nonverbal communication and its impact on your interactions. Below are three ways to examine nonverbal communication.

Watch Reactions

Market research is fundamental to success in business and industry. So, too, you will need to do a bit of field research to observe how, when, and why people communicate the way they do. If you want to be able to communicate effectively with customers, you will need to anticipate not only their needs, but also how they communicate. They are far more likely to communicate with someone whom they perceive as being like them, than with a perceived stranger. From dress to mannerisms and speech patterns, you can learn from your audience how to be a more effective business communicator.

Enroll an Observer

Most communication in business and industry involves groups and teams, even if the interpersonal context is a common element. Enroll a coworker or colleague in your effort to learn more about your audience, or even yourself. They can observe your presentation and note areas you may not have noticed that could benefit from revision. Perhaps the gestures you make while speaking tend to distract rather than enhance your presentations. You can also record a video of your performance and play it for them, and yourself, to get a sense of how your nonverbal communication complements or detracts from the delivery of your message.

Focus on a Specific Type of Nonverbal Communication

What is the norm for eye contact where you work? Does this change or differ based on gender, age, ethnicity, cultural background, context, environment? Observation will help you learn more about how people communicate; looking for trends across a specific type of nonverbal communication can be an effective strategy. Focus on one behavior you exhibit on your videotape, like pacing, body movements across the stage, hand gestures as you are making a point, or eye contact with the audience.

Key Takeaway

To use nonverbal communication to enhance your message, watch reactions and consider enrolling an observer to help you become aware of your nonverbal habits and how your audience receives nonverbal messages.

• Watch a television program without the sound. Can you understand the program? Write a description of the program and include what you found easy to understand, and what presented a challenge, and present it to the class.
• Observe communication in your environment. Focus on specific actions like face touching, blink rate, or head nodding and write a brief description of what you observe. Share with classmates.
• In a group, play charades. Pull words from a hat or envelope and act out the words without verbal communication.
• Interview someone from a different culture than your own and ask them to share a specific cultural difference in nonverbal communication—for example, a nonverbal gesture that is not used in polite company. Write a brief description and present it to the class.
• What do you think are the assumptions (explicit or underlying) about nonverbal communication in this chapter? Discuss your thoughts with a classmate.

Business Communication for Success: Public Speaking Edition Copyright © 2015 by University of Minnesota is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

10 Tips for Improving Your Public Speaking Skills

Few are immune to the fear of public speaking. Marjorie North offers 10 tips for speakers to calm the nerves and deliverable memorable orations.

Marjorie North

Snakes? Fine. Flying? No problem. Public speaking? Yikes! Just thinking about public speaking — routinely described as one of the greatest (and most common) fears — can make your palms sweat. But there are many ways to tackle this anxiety and learn to deliver a memorable speech.

In part one of this series,  Mastering the Basics of Communication , I shared strategies to improve how you communicate. In part two, How to Communicate More Effectively in the Workplace , I examined how to apply these techniques as you interact with colleagues and supervisors in the workplace. For the third and final part of this series, I’m providing you with public speaking tips that will help reduce your anxiety, dispel myths, and improve your performance.

Here Are My 10 Tips for Public Speaking:

1. nervousness is normal. practice and prepare.

All people feel some physiological reactions like pounding hearts and trembling hands. Do not associate these feelings with the sense that you will perform poorly or make a fool of yourself. Some nerves are good. The adrenaline rush that makes you sweat also makes you more alert and ready to give your best performance.

The best way to overcome anxiety is to prepare, prepare, and prepare some more. Take the time to go over your notes several times. Once you have become comfortable with the material, practice — a lot. Videotape yourself, or get a friend to critique your performance.

Communication Strategies: Presenting with Impact

Search all Communication programs.

2. Know Your Audience. Your Speech Is About Them, Not You.

Before you begin to craft your message, consider who the message is intended for. Learn as much about your listeners as you can. This will help you determine your choice of words, level of information, organization pattern, and motivational statement.

3. Organize Your Material in the Most Effective Manner to Attain Your Purpose.

Create the framework for your speech. Write down the topic, general purpose, specific purpose, central idea, and main points. Make sure to grab the audience’s attention in the first 30 seconds.

4. Watch for Feedback and Adapt to It.

Keep the focus on the audience. Gauge their reactions, adjust your message, and stay flexible. Delivering a canned speech will guarantee that you lose the attention of or confuse even the most devoted listeners.

5. Let Your Personality Come Through.

Be yourself, don’t become a talking head — in any type of communication. You will establish better credibility if your personality shines through, and your audience will trust what you have to say if they can see you as a real person.

6. Use Humor, Tell Stories, and Use Effective Language.

Inject a funny anecdote in your presentation, and you will certainly grab your audience’s attention. Audiences generally like a personal touch in a speech. A story can provide that.

7. Don’t Read Unless You Have to. Work from an Outline.

Reading from a script or slide fractures the interpersonal connection. By maintaining eye contact with the audience, you keep the focus on yourself and your message. A brief outline can serve to jog your memory and keep you on task.

8. Use Your Voice and Hands Effectively. Omit Nervous Gestures.

Nonverbal communication carries most of the message. Good delivery does not call attention to itself, but instead conveys the speaker’s ideas clearly and without distraction.

9. Grab Attention at the Beginning, and Close with a Dynamic End.

Do you enjoy hearing a speech start with “Today I’m going to talk to you about X”? Most people don’t. Instead, use a startling statistic, an interesting anecdote, or concise quotation. Conclude your speech with a summary and a strong statement that your audience is sure to remember.

10. Use Audiovisual Aids Wisely.

Too many can break the direct connection to the audience, so use them sparingly. They should enhance or clarify your content, or capture and maintain your audience’s attention.

Practice Does Not Make Perfect

Good communication is never perfect, and nobody expects you to be perfect. However, putting in the requisite time to prepare will help you deliver a better speech. You may not be able to shake your nerves entirely, but you can learn to minimize them.

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About the Author

North is a consultant for political candidates, physicians, and lawyers, and runs a private practice specializing in public speaking, and executive communication skills. Previously, she was the clinical director in the department of speech and language pathology and audiology at Northeastern University.

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Learning Objectives

• Describe the importance of nonverbal delivery in public speaking
• Identify common non-verbal pitfalls
• Utilize specific techniques to enhance non-verbal delivery

Have you played charades? Many of you have likely “acted out” a person, place, or a thing for an audience, using only your body and no words. Charades, like many games, demonstrates the heightened or exaggerated use of nonverbals – through acting out, the game highlights how powerful nonverbal communication can be for communicating with an audience.

When speaking, similar to charades, your job is to create a captivating experience for your audience that leads them to new information or to consider a new argument. Nonverbals provide an important facet of that experience by accentuating your content and contributing to the aesthetic experience.

The nonverbal part of your speech is a presentation of yourself as well as your message. Like we discussed previously, public speaking is embodied, and your nonverbals are a key part of living and communicating in and through your body. Through the use of eye contact, vocals, body posture, gestures, and facial expression, you enhance your message and invite your audience to give their serious attention to it—and to you. Your credibility, your sincerity, and your knowledge of your speech become apparent through your nonverbal behaviors.

In this chapter, we explore various nonverbal components that influence your message to create an aesthetic experience for your audience. Rather than a checklist of skillsets, we invite you to read these as a series of inter-related behaviors and practices, beginning with eye contact.

Eye Contact

Imagine bringing in 2 qualified applicants for a job opening that you were responsible to fill. The interview is intimate, and each applicant sits directly across from you and 3 other colleagues who are assisting.

While answering questions, applicant 1 never breaks eye contact with you. It’s likely that, as the interview progresses, you begin to feel uncomfortable, even threatened, and begin shifting your own eyes around the room awkwardly. When the applicant leaves, you finally take a deep breath but realize that you can’t remember anything the applicant said.

The second applicant enters and, unlike the first, looks down at their notes, and they never make direct eye contact. As you try to focus on their answers, they seem so uncomfortable that you aren’t able to concentrate on the exchange.

Both approaches are common mistakes when integrating eye contact into a speech. We have likely all seen speakers who read their presentations from notes and never look up. It’s also common for a speaker to zoom in on one audience member (like the teacher!) and never break their gaze.

Eye contact creates an intimate and interpersonal experience for individual audience members and it assists in maintaining rapport. Part of creating a meaningful aesthetic experience is through eye contact, and the general rule of thumb is that 80% of your total speech time should be spent making eye contact with your audience (Lucas, 2015, p. 250). When you’re able to connect by using eye contact, you create a more intimate, trusting, and transparent experience.

It’s important to note that you want to establish genuine eye contact with your audience and not “fake” eye contact. There have been a lot of techniques generated for “faking” eye contact, and none of them look natural. For example, these aren’t great:

• Three points on the back wall – You may have heard that instead of making eye contact, you can just pick three points on the back wall and look at each point. What ends up happening, though, is you look like you are staring off into space and your audience will spend the majority of your speech trying to figure out what you are looking at. This technique may work better for a larger audience, but in a more intimate space (like the classroom), the audience is close enough to be suspicious. Put simply: we can tell you aren’t looking at us.
• The swimming method – This happens when someone is reading their speech and looks up quickly and briefly, not unlike a swimmer who pops their head out of the water for a breath before going back under. Eye contact is more than just physically moving your head; it is about looking at your audience and establishing a connection.

Instead, work to maintain approximately 3 seconds of eye contact with audience members throughout the room. You are, after all, speaking to them, so use your eyes to make contact. This may also reduce some anxiety because you can envision yourself speaking directly to one person at a time, rather than a room full of strangers.

Remember: you have done the work. You are prepared. You have something to say. People want to listen.

When you (and your body) move, you communicate. You may, for example, have a friend who, when telling exciting stories, frantically gestures and paces the room—their movement is part of how they communicate their story. They likely do this unconsciously, and that’s often how much of our informal movement occurs.

Many of us, like your friend, have certain elements of movement that we comfortably integrate into our daily interactions. It’s important to know your go-to movements to ask: how can I utilize these (or put them in check) to enhance the audience’s experience? In this section, we will introduce how and why movement should be purposefully integrated into your public speech. We’ll focus on your hands, your feet, and how to move around the space.

Gestures and Hands

Everyone who gives a speech in public gets scared or nervous. Even professionals who do this for a living feel that way, but they have learned how to combat those nerves through experience and practice. When we get scared or nervous, our bodies emit adrenaline into our systems so we can deal with whatever problem is causing us to feel that way. In a speech, you are asked to speak for a specific duration of time, so that burst of adrenaline is going to try to work its way out of your body and manifest itself somehow. One of the main ways is through your hands.

Three common reactions to this adrenaline rush are:

• Jazz hands! It may sound funny, but nervous speakers can unknowingly incorporate “jazz hands”—shaking your hands at your sides with fingers opened wide— at various points in their speech. While certainly an extreme example, this and behaviors like it can easily become distracting.
• Stiff as a board . At the other end of the scale, people who don’t know what to do with their hands or use them “too little” sometimes hold their arms stiffly at their sides, behind their backs, or in their pockets, all of which can also look unnatural and distracting.
• Hold on for dear life! Finally, some speakers might grip their notes or a podium tightly with their hands. This might also result in tapping on a podium, table, or another object nearby.

It’s important to remember that just because you aren’t sure what your hands are doing does not mean they aren’t doing something . Fidgeting, jazz hands, gripping the podium, or hands in pockets are all common and result in speakers asking, “Did I really do that? I don’t even remember!”

Like we mentioned in this section’s introduction, the key to knowing what to do with your hands is to know your own embodied movement and to trust or adjust your natural style as needed.

Are you someone who uses gestures when speaking? If so, great! Use your natural gestures to create purposeful aesthetic emphasis for your audience. If you were standing around talking to your friends and wanted to list three reasons why you should all take a road trip this weekend, you would probably hold up your fingers as you counted off the reasons (“First, we hardly ever get this opportunity. Second, we can…”). Try to pay attention to what you do with your hands in regular conversations and incorporate that into your delivery. Be conscious, though, of being over the top and gesturing at every other word. Remember that gestures highlight and punctuate information for the audience, so too many gestures (like jazz hands) can be distracting.

Similarly, are you someone who generally rests your arms at your sides? That’s OK, too! Work to keep a natural (and not stiff) look, but challenge yourself to integrate a few additional gestures throughout the speech.

Feet and Posture

Just like your hands, nervous energy might try to work its way out of your body through your feet. Common difficulties include:

• The side-to-side. You may feel awkward standing without a podium and try to shift your weight back and forth. On the “too much” end, this is most common when people start “dancing” or stepping side to side.
• The twisty-leg. Another variation is twisting feet around each other or the lower leg.
• Stiff-as-a-board. On the other end are speakers who put their feet together, lock their knees, and never move from that position. Locked knees can restrict oxygen to your brain, so there are many reasons to avoid this difficulty.

These options look unnatural, and therefore will prove to be distracting to your audience.

The default position for your feet, then, is to have them shoulder-width apart, with your knees slightly bent. Since public speaking often results in some degree of physical exertion, you need to treat speaking as physical activity. Public speaking is too often viewed as merely the transmission of information or a message rather than a full-body experience. Being in-tune and attuned to your body will allow you to speak in a way that’s both comfortable for you and the audience.

In addition to keeping your feet shoulder-width apart, you’ll also want to focus on your posture. As an audience member, you may have witnessed speakers with slumped shoulders or leaning into the podium (if there is one) with their entire bodies.

Difficulty with good posture is not just a public speaking problem. Think about how often you sit down in a coffee shop, pull out your laptop, and, after some time, you realize that you are leaning over and your lower back is wincing in pain. You likely pull your shoulders back and straighten your spine in response. If you don’t focus on this posture (and practice reminding yourself to “sit up straight”), your body may slump back into old habits. So, you guessed it: focusing on good posture is just that – something that you must focus on, over time, so that it becomes habitual.

Focusing on good posture and solid grounding will, in addition to increasing your confidence, assist you in maintaining your eye contact and focusing on projecting your voice throughout the space.

Moving in the Space

We know that likely you’re wondering, “Should I do any other movement around the room?”

Unfortunately, there isn’t an easy answer. Movement depends on two overarching considerations: 1) What’s the space? And, 2) What’s the message?

First, movement is always informed by the space in which you’ll speak. We’ll cover this more in tips on rehearsal (see Chapter 16), but we’ll highlight a few important details here. Consider the two following examples:

• You’ll be giving a presentation at a university where a podium is set up with a stable microphone.
• You’re speaking at a local TedTalk event with an open stage.

Both scenarios provide constraints and opportunities for movement.

In the university space, the microphone may constrain your movement if you determine that vocal projection is insufficient to guarantee a level of speaking that can be heard throughout the space.

In other words, you need to stay planted behind the microphone to guarantee sound. Partially constraining, this does allow a stable location to place your notes, a microphone to assist in projecting, and allows you to focus on other verbal and nonverbal techniques.

In the TedTalk example, you are not constrained by a stable microphone and you have a stage for bodily movement. The open stage means that the entire space becomes part of the aesthetic experience for the audience. However, if you are less comfortable with movement, the open space may feel intimidating because audiences may assume that you’ll use the entire space.

In addition to the space, your message and content assist in deciding how or why you might move around the space. It’s necessary to ask, “how does movement support, enhance or detract from the message?” and “how might movement support, enhance, or detract from the aesthetic experience for the audience?”

Remember that most public speeches are ephemeral, where the audience is attempting to comprehend your message in one shot or run through. Given these circumstances, it can be tricky for an audience to track the argument progression, especially since you may be dealing with an audience of varying levels of experience with your topic. Similar to the space, thinking through where your movement can assist in translating your information is paramount.

Once you have knowledge of the speaking space and completed speech content, you can start using movement to add dimension to the aesthetic experience for your audience.

One benefit of movement is that it allows you to engage with different sections of the audience. If you are not constrained to one spot (in the case of a podium or a seat, for example), then you can use movement to engage with the audience by adjusting your spatial dynamic. You can literally move your body to different sides of the stage and audience. This allows for each side of a room to be pulled into the content because you close the physical distance and create clear pathways for eye contact.

Without these changes, sections of the audience may feel lost or forgotten. Consider your role as a student. Have you experienced a professor or teacher who stays solitary and does not move to different sides of the room? It can be difficult to stay motivated to listen or take notes if a speaker is dominating one area of the space.

Changing the spatial dynamics goes beyond moving from side to side. You can also move forward and backward (or what theater practitioners might call down or upstage). This allows you to move closer to the audience or back away—depending on what experience you’re trying to create.

In addition to engaging with the audience, movement often signals a transition between ideas or an attempt to visually enunciate an important component of your information. You may want to signal a change in time or mark progression. If you’re walking your audience through information chronologically, movement can mark that temporal progression where your body becomes the visual marker of time passing.

You may also want to signal a transition between main ideas, and movement can assist with that, too! Moving as main point transitions embodies the connections between your ideas while letting the audience know that “we are going to progress in the argument.” If integrating movement as a transition feels odd, choppy, or awkward, those feelings help signal that the organization of your main points may need some re-working.

Thus, using purposeful movement can enhance your aesthetics, but purposeful is the keyword here. While movement can enhance, it can also distract and constrain. Keep these common pitfalls in mind:

• The pace-master. We all know this distracting pitfall where (likely due to nervousness), a speaker paces back and forth without any clear reason for the movement. “What in the world are they doing?” you might wonder as an audience member. Unfortunately, if you’re internally asking that question, you’re likely not focusing on the speaker’s content. While it’s OK to “walk and talk” so to speak, avoid constant walking and talking. As a speaker, maintain a solid footing when you aren’t moving.
• Obstructing the view: It’s likely that, at some point, you’ll use objects or other presentation enhancements like a PowerPoint or a video during your speech. Make sure you aren’t moving directly in front of the audience’s line of sight. Even if you aren’t referencing something, it can be awkward to walk in front of a projection light.
• The robot : As a dance, the robot can be great, but in public speaking, it’s usually not as effective. We commonly experience students who use “the triangle” method, where each main point in the speech is mapped onto an invisible triangle. This can be done well and is a great way to start incorporating intentional movement, but it can also at times lead to movement looking unnatural. Work to strike a balance between pre-planned and robotic.

When you speak, moving in the space can be beneficial. As you plan your purposeful movement, be aware of the message you’re providing and the space in which you’re speaking.

Facial Expressions

Picture being out to dinner with a friend and, as you finish telling a story about a joke you played on your partner, you look up to a grimacing face.

“What?” you ask. But their face says it all.

“Oh, nothing,” they reply. Realizing that their face has “spilled the beans” so to speak, they might correct their expression by shrugging and biting their lip – a move that may insinuate nervousness or anxiety. You perceive that they didn’t find your story as humorous as you’d hoped.

Facial expressions communicate to others (and audiences) in ways that are congruent or incongruent with your message. In the example above, your friend’s feedback of “oh, nothing” was incongruent with their facial expressions. Their verbal words didn’t trump their facial expressions, however, and their nonverbal feedback was part of the communication.

Facial expressions are generally categorized as one of the following: happy, sad, angry, fearful, surprised, and disgusted. Your facial expressions matter; your audience will be looking at your face to guide them through the speech, so they’re an integral part of communicating meaning and demonstrating to your audience a felt sense.

In fact, if your facial expressions seem incongruent or contradictory from the tone of the argument, an audience may go so far as to feel distrust toward you as a speaker. Children might, for example, say, “I’m fine” or “It doesn’t hurt” after falling and scraping their knee, but their face often communicates a level of discomfort. In this case, their facial expression is incongruent with their verbal message. If you’re frowning while presenting information that the audience perceives to be positive, they may feel uneasy or unsure how to process that information. So, congruency can increase your ethos.

Instead, work to create congruence between your message and expressions. In class discussions on pathos, we often joke about the ASPCA commercials with the Sarah McLachlan song “In the Arms of an Angel” playing in the background. The music is meant to, of course, communicate feelings of sadness around animal cruelty, and rightfully so. In a speech, similar to using music, your facial expressions can assist in setting the aesthetic tone; they are part of developing pathos.

Given the amount of information that we all encounter daily, including information about global injustices, it’s often insufficient to merely state the problem and how to solve it. Audience members need buy-in from you as the speaker. Using facial expressions to communicate emotions, for example, can demonstrate your commitment and overall feelings around an issue.

To be clear: facial expressions, like other forms of nonverbal communication, can greatly impact an audience member’s perception of the speaker, but not all audiences may interpret your expressions the same. Re-visit Chapter 4 on audiences.

What you wear, similar to other aesthetic components, can either enhance or detract from the audience’s experience. Like facial expressions, you want your attire to be congruent with the message that you’re delivering. In an early chapter, we noted that aesthetics are often dictated by certain contextual norms. Context is relevant here, too, as the purpose and audience will inform appropriate attire.

We recommend considering two questions when selecting your attire:

First, “what attire matches the occasion?” Is this a casual occasion? Does it warrant a more professional or business-casual approach? If you’re speaking at an organization’s rally, for example, you may decide to wear attire with the organization’s logo and jeans. Other occasions, like a classroom or city council meeting, may require a higher level of professional attire.

Second, “have I selected any attire that could be distracting while I’m speaking?” Certain kinds of jewelry, for example, might make additional noise or move around your arm, and audiences can focus too much on the jewelry. In addition to noise-makers, some attire can have prints that might distract, including letters, wording, or pictures.

Your attire can influence how the audience perceives you as a speaker (ahem: your credibility) which, as we’ve discussed, is key to influencing listeners. Before we conclude this chapter, we return to credibility and reflexivity.

Aesthetics and Credibility

As a speaker, it’s important to remember that the audience remains a central component of public speaking and is central to consider when making aesthetic choices.

Yes, this means that you should think about your audience when you are a speaker. These aesthetic choices will influence your audience and assist them in determining if you are credible and, frankly, if they want to listen to your message.

For example, an audience may view vocalized pauses as evidence that a speaker lacks confidence around their topic or does not know the material as well. Similarly, you may consider your attire before presenting, assuming that your audience will respect and view you professionally if you select business casual clothing.

Aesthetic choices are also important when you are in the audience, and it is imperative to be critical and reflect (or practice reflexivity) on how you are filtering a speaker’s information through their aesthetics. The filter that informs our willingness to view a speaker as credible is often based on a mythical norm , or what Audre Lorde (1984) defines generally as young, white, thin, middle-class men. This classification certainly does not fit all speakers, and if you are part of this classification, that’s OK! The mythical norm warns us to be conscious of holding these categories as “the best” or preferred, especially around what counts as credibility. In other words, are these categories unconsciously facilitating a more positive aesthetic experience?

For example, you may decide to wear business casual clothing to increase the likelihood that your audience views you as credible, but as an audience member, be careful assuming that someone is not credible because of their attire. Business attire can be a privilege that everyone cannot afford.

Eye contact can also be investigated. We’ve alluded that eye contact increases trust amongst your audience, and it often does; however, the connection between eye contact and higher levels of credibility is specific to the U.S. cultural context. Culture thus defines how we interpret and understand certain aesthetic choices, including eye contact. Remember that culture is always a core component of communication. As an audience member, be careful of presumptively judging a speaker based on your own cultural expectations, identities, or positions.

Your nonverbal delivery assists in setting an aesthetic tone for the audience by providing embodied insight into how the audience should think, act, or feel. The space – or literal context in which you’ll speak – also contributes nonverbally to the message. We’ll discuss space in more detail in a later chapter on rehearsal.

a filter that informs our willingness to view a speaker as credible that is often based on dominant cultural norms and/or identities

Speaking Confidently Copyright © 2021 by Meggie Mapes is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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14.4 Practicing for Successful Speech Delivery

Learning objectives.

• Explain why having a strong conversational quality is important for effective public speaking.
• Explain the importance of eye contact in public speaking.
• Define vocalics and differentiate among the different factors of vocalics.
• Explain effective physical manipulation during a speech.
• Understand how to practice effectively for good speech delivery.

Christian Pierret – Speech – CC BY 2.0.

There is no foolproof recipe for good delivery. Each of us is unique, and we each embody different experiences and interests. This means each person has an approach, or a style, that is effective for her or him. This further means that anxiety can accompany even the most carefully researched and interesting message. Even when we know our messages are strong and well-articulated on paper, it is difficult to know for sure that our presentation will also be good.

We are still obligated to do our best out of respect for the audience and their needs. Fortunately, there are some tools that can be helpful to you even the very first time you present a speech. You will continue developing your skills each time you put them to use and can experiment to find out which combination of delivery elements is most effective for you.

What Is Good Delivery?

The more you care about your topic, the greater your motivation to present it well. Good delivery is a process of presenting a clear, coherent message in an interesting way. Communication scholar Stephen E. Lucas tells us:

Good delivery…conveys the speaker’s ideas clearly, interestingly, and without distracting the audience. Most audiences prefer delivery that combines a certain degree of formality with the best attributes of good conversation—directness, spontaneity, animation, vocal and facial expressiveness, and a lively sense of communication (Lucas, 2009).

Many writers on the nonverbal aspects of delivery have cited the findings of psychologist Albert Mehrabian, asserting that the bulk of an audience’s understanding of your message is based on nonverbal communication. Specifically, Mehrabian is often credited with finding that when audiences decoded a speaker’s meaning, the speaker’s face conveyed 55 percent of the information, the vocalics conveyed 38 percent, and the words conveyed just 7 percent (Mehrabian, 1972). Although numerous scholars, including Mehrabian himself, have stated that his findings are often misinterpreted (Mitchell), scholars and speech instructors do agree that nonverbal communication and speech delivery are extremely important to effective public speaking.

In this section of the chapter, we will explain six elements of good delivery: conversational style, conversational quality, eye contact, vocalics, physical manipulation, and variety. And since delivery is only as good as the practice that goes into it, we conclude with some tips for effective use of your practice time.

Conversational Style

Conversational style is a speaker’s ability to sound expressive and to be perceived by the audience as natural. It’s a style that approaches the way you normally express yourself in a much smaller group than your classroom audience. This means that you want to avoid having your presentation come across as didactic or overly exaggerated. You might not feel natural while you’re using a conversational style, but for the sake of audience preference and receptiveness, you should do your best to appear natural. It might be helpful to remember that the two most important elements of the speech are the message and the audience. You are the conduit with the important role of putting the two together in an effective way. Your audience should be thinking about the message, not the delivery.

Stephen E. Lucas defines conversational quality as the idea that “no matter how many times a speech has been rehearsed, it still sounds spontaneous” [emphasis in original] (Lucas, 2009). No one wants to hear a speech that is so well rehearsed that it sounds fake or robotic. One of the hardest parts of public speaking is rehearsing to the point where it can appear to your audience that the thoughts are magically coming to you while you’re speaking, but in reality you’ve spent a great deal of time thinking through each idea. When you can sound conversational, people pay attention.

Eye Contact

Eye contact is a speaker’s ability to have visual contact with everyone in the audience. Your audience should feel that you’re speaking to them, not simply uttering main and supporting points. If you are new to public speaking, you may find it intimidating to look audience members in the eye, but if you think about speakers you have seen who did not maintain eye contact, you’ll realize why this aspect of speech delivery is important. Without eye contact, the audience begins to feel invisible and unimportant, as if the speaker is just speaking to hear her or his own voice. Eye contact lets your audience feel that your attention is on them, not solely on the cards in front of you.

Sustained eye contact with your audience is one of the most important tools toward effective delivery. O’Hair, Stewart, and Rubenstein note that eye contact is mandatory for speakers to establish a good relationship with an audience (O’Hair, Stewart, & Rubenstein, 2001). Whether a speaker is speaking before a group of five or five hundred, the appearance of eye contact is an important way to bring an audience into your speech.

Eye contact can be a powerful tool. It is not simply a sign of sincerity, a sign of being well prepared and knowledgeable, or a sign of confidence; it also has the power to convey meanings. Arthur Koch tells us that all facial expressions “can communicate a wide range of emotions, including sadness, compassion, concern, anger, annoyance, fear, joy, and happiness” (Koch, 2010).

If you find the gaze of your audience too intimidating, you might feel tempted to resort to “faking” eye contact with them by looking at the wall just above their heads or by sweeping your gaze around the room instead of making actual eye contact with individuals in your audience until it becomes easier to provide real contact. The problem with fake eye contact is that it tends to look mechanical. Another problem with fake attention is that you lose the opportunity to assess the audience’s understanding of your message. Still, fake eye contact is somewhat better than gripping your cards and staring at them and only occasionally glancing quickly and shallowly at the audience.

This is not to say that you may never look at your notecards. On the contrary, one of the skills in extemporaneous speaking is the ability to alternate one’s gaze between the audience and one’s notes. Rehearsing your presentation in front of a few friends should help you develop the ability to maintain eye contact with your audience while referring to your notes. When you are giving a speech that is well prepared and well rehearsed, you will only need to look at your notes occasionally. This is an ability that will develop even further with practice. Your public speaking course is your best chance to get that practice.

Effective Use of Vocalics

Vocalics , also known as paralanguage, is the subfield of nonverbal communication that examines how we use our voices to communicate orally. This means that you speak loudly enough for all audience members (even those in the back of the room) to hear you clearly, and that you enunciate clearly enough to be understood by all audience members (even those who may have a hearing impairment or who may be English-language learners). If you tend to be soft-spoken, you will need to practice using a louder volume level that may feel unnatural to you at first. For all speakers, good vocalic technique is best achieved by facing the audience with your chin up and your eyes away from your notecards and by setting your voice at a moderate speed. Effective use of vocalics also means that you make use of appropriate pitch, pauses, vocal variety, and correct pronunciation.

If you are an English-language learner and feel apprehensive about giving a speech in English, there are two things to remember: first, you can meet with a reference librarian to learn the correct pronunciations of any English words you are unsure of; and second, the fact that you have an accent means you speak more languages than most Americans, which is an accomplishment to be proud of.

If you are one of the many people with a stutter or other speech challenge, you undoubtedly already know that there are numerous techniques for reducing stuttering and improving speech fluency and that there is no one agreed-upon “cure.” The Academy Award–winning movie The King’s Speech did much to increase public awareness of what a person with a stutter goes through when it comes to public speaking. It also prompted some well-known individuals who stutter, such as television news reporter John Stossel, to go public about their stuttering (Stossel, 2011). If you have decided to study public speaking in spite of a speech challenge, we commend you for your efforts and encourage you to work with your speech instructor to make whatever adaptations work best for you.

Volume refers to the loudness or softness of a speaker’s voice. As mentioned, public speakers need to speak loudly enough to be heard by everyone in the audience. In addition, volume is often needed to overcome ambient noise, such as the hum of an air conditioner or the dull roar of traffic passing by. In addition, you can use volume strategically to emphasize the most important points in your speech. Select these points carefully; if you emphasize everything, nothing will seem important. You also want to be sure to adjust your volume to the physical setting of the presentation. If you are in a large auditorium and your audience is several yards away, you will need to speak louder. If you are in a smaller space, with the audience a few feet away, you want to avoid overwhelming your audience with shouting or speaking too loudly.

Rate is the speed at which a person speaks. To keep your speech delivery interesting, your rate should vary. If you are speaking extemporaneously, your rate will naturally fluctuate. If you’re reading, your delivery is less likely to vary. Because rate is an important tool in enhancing the meanings in your speech, you do not want to give a monotone drone or a rapid “machine-gun” style delivery. Your rate should be appropriate for your topic and your points. A rapid, lively rate can communicate such meanings as enthusiasm, urgency, or humor. A slower, moderated rate can convey respect, seriousness, or careful reasoning. By varying rapid and slower rates within a single speech, you can emphasize your main points and keep your audience interested.

Pitch refers to the highness or lowness of a speaker’s voice. Some speakers have deep voices and others have high voices. As with one’s singing voice range, the pitch of one’s speaking voice is determined to a large extent by physiology (specifically, the length of one’s vocal folds, or cords, and the size of one’s vocal tract). We all have a normal speaking pitch where our voice is naturally settled, the pitch where we are most comfortable speaking, and most teachers advise speaking at the pitch that feels natural to you.

While our voices may be generally comfortable at a specific pitch level, we all have the ability to modulate, or move, our pitch up or down. In fact, we do this all the time. When we change the pitch of our voices, we are using inflections . Just as you can use volume strategically, you can also use pitch inflections to make your delivery more interesting and emphatic. If you ordinarily speak with a soprano voice, you may want to drop your voice to a slightly lower range to call attention to a particular point. How we use inflections can even change the entire meaning of what we are saying. For example, try saying the sentence “I love public speaking” with a higher pitch on one of the words—first raise the pitch on “I,” then say it again with the pitch raised on “love,” and so on. “ I love public speaking” conveys a different meaning from “I love public speaking,” doesn’t it?

There are some speakers who don’t change their pitch at all while speaking, which is called monotone . While very few people are completely monotone, some speakers slip into monotone patterns because of nerves. One way to ascertain whether you sound monotone is to record your voice and see how you sound. If you notice that your voice doesn’t fluctuate very much, you will need to be intentional in altering your pitch to ensure that the emphasis of your speech isn’t completely lost on your audience.

Finally, resist the habit of pitching your voice “up” at the ends of sentences. It makes them sound like questions instead of statements. This habit can be disorienting and distracting, interfering with the audience’s ability to focus entirely on the message. The speaker sounds uncertain or sounds as though he or she is seeking the understanding or approval of the listener. It hurts the speaker’s credibility and it needs to be avoided.

The effective use of pitch is one of the keys to an interesting delivery that will hold your audience’s attention.

Pauses are brief breaks in a speaker’s delivery that can show emphasis and enhance the clarity of a message. In terms of timing, the effective use of pauses is one of the most important skills to develop. Some speakers become uncomfortable very quickly with the “dead air” that the pause causes. And if the speaker is uncomfortable, the discomfort can transmit itself to the audience. That doesn’t mean you should avoid using pauses; your ability to use them confidently will increase with practice. Some of the best comedians use the well-timed pause to powerful and hilarious effect. Although your speech will not be a comedy routine, pauses are still useful for emphasis, especially when combined with a lowered pitch and rate to emphasize the important point you do not want your audience to miss.

Vocal Variety

Vocal variety has to do with changes in the vocalics we have just discussed: volume, pitch, rate, and pauses. No one wants to hear the same volume, pitch, rate, or use of pauses over and over again in a speech. Your audience should never be able to detect that you’re about to slow down or your voice is going to get deeper because you’re making an important point. When you think about how you sound in a normal conversation, your use of volume, pitch, rate, and pauses are all done spontaneously. If you try to overrehearse your vocalics, your speech will end up sounding artificial. Vocal variety should flow naturally from your wish to speak with expression. In that way, it will animate your speech and invite your listeners to understand your topic the way you do.

Pronunciation

The last major category related to vocalics is pronunciation , or the conventional patterns of speech used to form a word. Word pronunciation is important for two reasons: first, mispronouncing a word your audience is familiar with will harm your credibility as a speaker; and second, mispronouncing a word they are unfamiliar with can confuse and even misinform them. If there is any possibility at all that you don’t know the correct pronunciation of a word, find out. Many online dictionaries, such as the Wiktionary ( http://wiktionary.org ), provide free sound files illustrating the pronunciation of words.

Many have commented on the mispronunciation of words such as “nuclear” and “cavalry” by highly educated public speakers, including US presidents. There have been classroom examples as well. For instance, a student giving a speech on the Greek philosopher Socrates mispronounced his name at least eight times during her speech. This mispronunciation created a situation of great awkwardness and anxiety for the audience. Everyone felt embarrassed and the teacher, opting not to humiliate the student in front of the class, could not say anything out loud, instead providing a private written comment at the end of class.

One important aspect of pronunciation is articulation , or the ability to clearly pronounce each of a succession of syllables used to make up a word. Some people have difficulty articulating because of physiological problems that can be treated by trained speech therapists, but other people have articulation problems because they come from a cultural milieu where a dialect other than standard American English is the norm. Speech therapists, who generally guide their clients toward standard American English, use the acronym SODA when helping people learn how to more effectively articulate: substitutions , omissions , distortions , and additions .

• Substitutions occur when a speaker replaces one consonant or vowel with another consonant ( water becomes wudda ; ask becomes ax ; mouth becomes mouf ).
• Omissions occur when a speaker drops a consonant or vowel within a word ( Internet becomes Innet ; mesmerized becomes memerized ; probably becomes prolly ).
• Distortions occur when a speaker articulates a word with nasal or slurring sounds ( pencil sounds like mencil ; precipitation sounds like persination ; second sounds like slecond ).
• Additions occur when a speaker adds consonants or vowels to words that are not there ( anyway becomes anyways ; athletic becomes athaletic ; black becomes buhlack ; interpret becomes interpretate ).

Another aspect of pronunciation in public speaking is avoiding the use of verbal surrogates or “filler” words used as placeholders for actual words (like er , um , uh , etc.). You might be able to get away with saying “um” as many as two or three times in your speech before it becomes distracting, but the same cannot be said of “like.” We know of a student who trained herself to avoid saying “like.” As soon as the first speech was assigned, she began wearing a rubber band on her left wrist. Each time she caught herself saying “like,” she snapped herself with the rubber band. It hurt. Very quickly, she found that she could stop inflicting the snap on herself, and she had successfully confronted an unprofessional verbal habit.

Effective Physical Manipulation

In addition to using our voices effectively, a key to effective public speaking is physical manipulation , or the use of the body to emphasize meanings or convey meanings during a speech. While we will not attempt to give an entire discourse on nonverbal communication, we will discuss a few basic aspects of physical manipulation: posture, body movement, facial expressions, and dress. These aspects add up to the overall physical dimension of your speech, which we call self-presentation.

“Stand up tall!” I’m sure we’ve all heard this statement from a parent or a teacher at some point in our lives. The fact is, posture is actually quite important. When you stand up straight, you communicate to your audience, without saying a word, that you hold a position of power and take your position seriously. If however, you are slouching, hunched over, or leaning on something, you could be perceived as ill prepared, anxious, lacking in credibility, or not serious about your responsibilities as a speaker. While speakers often assume more casual posture as a presentation continues (especially if it is a long one, such as a ninety-minute class lecture), it is always wise to start by standing up straight and putting your best foot forward. Remember, you only get one shot at making a first impression, and your body’s orientation is one of the first pieces of information audiences use to make that impression.

Body Movement

Unless you are stuck behind a podium because of the need to use a nonmovable microphone, you should never stand in one place during a speech. However, movement during a speech should also not resemble pacing. One of our authors once saw a speaker who would walk around a small table where her speaking notes were located. She would walk around the table once, toss her chalk twice, and then repeat the process. Instead of listening to what the speaker was saying, everyone became transfixed by her walk-and-chalk-toss pattern. As speakers, we must be mindful of how we go about moving while speaking. One common method for easily integrating some movement into your speech is to take a few steps any time you transition from one idea to the next. By only moving at transition points, not only do you help focus your audience’s attention on the transition from one idea to the next, but you also are able to increase your nonverbal immediacy by getting closer to different segments of your audience.

Body movement also includes gestures. These should be neither overdramatic nor subdued. At one extreme, arm-waving and fist-pounding will distract from your message and reduce your credibility. At the other extreme, refraining from the use of gestures is the waste of an opportunity to suggest emphasis, enthusiasm, or other personal connection with your topic.

There are many ways to use gestures. The most obvious are hand gestures, which should be used in moderation at carefully selected times in the speech. If you overuse gestures, they lose meaning. Many late-night comedy parodies of political leaders include patterned, overused gestures or other delivery habits associated with a particular speaker. However, the well-placed use of simple, natural gestures to indicate emphasis, direction, size is usually effective. Normally, a gesture with one hand is enough. Rather than trying to have a gesture for every sentence, use just a few well-planned gestures. It is often more effective to make a gesture and hold it for a few moments than to begin waving your hands and arms around in a series of gestures.

Finally, just as you should avoid pacing, you will also want to avoid other distracting movements when you are speaking. Many speakers have unconscious mannerisms such as twirling their hair, putting their hands in and out of their pockets, jingling their keys, licking their lips, or clicking a pen while speaking. As with other aspects of speech delivery, practicing in front of others will help you become conscious of such distractions and plan ways to avoid doing them.

Facial Expressions

Faces are amazing things and convey so much information. As speakers, we must be acutely aware of what our face looks like while speaking. While many of us do not look forward to seeing ourselves on videotape, often the only way you can critically evaluate what your face is doing while you are speaking is to watch a recording of your speech. If video is not available, you can practice speaking in front of a mirror.

There are two extremes you want to avoid: no facial expression and overanimated facial expressions. First, you do not want to have a completely blank face while speaking. Some people just do not show much emotion with their faces naturally, but this blankness is often increased when the speaker is nervous. Audiences will react negatively to the message of such a speaker because they will sense that something is amiss. If a speaker is talking about the joys of Disney World and his face doesn’t show any excitement, the audience is going to be turned off to the speaker and his message. On the other extreme end is the speaker whose face looks like that of an exaggerated cartoon character. Instead, your goal is to show a variety of appropriate facial expressions while speaking.

Like vocalics and gestures, facial expression can be used strategically to enhance meaning. A smile or pleasant facial expression is generally appropriate at the beginning of a speech to indicate your wish for a good transaction with your audience. However, you should not smile throughout a speech on drug addiction, poverty, or the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. An inappropriate smile creates confusion about your meaning and may make your audience feel uncomfortable. On the other hand, a serious scowl might look hostile or threatening to audience members and become a distraction from the message. If you keep the meaning of your speech foremost in your mind, you will more readily find the balance in facial expression.

Another common problem some new speakers have is showing only one expression. One of our coauthors competed in speech in college. After one of his speeches (about how people die on amusement park rides), one of his judges pulled him aside and informed him that his speech was “creepy.” Apparently, while speaking about death, our coauthor smiled the entire time. The incongruity between the speech on death and dying and the coauthor’s smile just left the judge a little creeped out. If you are excited in a part of your speech, you should show excitement on your face. On the other hand, if you are at a serious part of your speech, your facial expressions should be serious.

While there are no clear-cut guidelines for how you should dress for every speech you’ll give, dress is still a very important part of how others will perceive you (again, it’s all about the first impression). If you want to be taken seriously, you must present yourself seriously. While we do not advocate dressing up in a suit every time you give a speech, there are definitely times when wearing a suit is appropriate.

One general rule you can use for determining dress is the “step-above rule,” which states that you should dress one step above your audience. If your audience is going to be dressed casually in shorts and jeans, then wear nice casual clothing such as a pair of neatly pressed slacks and a collared shirt or blouse. If, however, your audience is going to be wearing “business casual” attire, then you should probably wear a sport coat, a dress, or a suit. The goal of the step-above rule is to establish yourself as someone to be taken seriously. On the other hand, if you dress two steps above your audience, you may put too much distance between yourself and your audience, coming across as overly formal or even arrogant.

Another general rule for dressing is to avoid distractions in your appearance. Overly tight or revealing garments, over-the-top hairstyles or makeup, jangling jewelry, or a display of tattoos and piercings can serve to draw your audience’s attention away from your speech. Remembering that your message is the most important aspect of your speech, keep that message in mind when you choose your clothing and accessories.

Self-Presentation

When you present your speech, you are also presenting yourself. Self-presentation, sometimes also referred to as poise or stage presence, is determined by how you look, how you stand, how you walk to the lectern, and how you use your voice and gestures. Your self-presentation can either enhance your message or detract from it. Worse, a poor self-presentation can turn a good, well-prepared speech into a forgettable waste of time. You want your self-presentation to support your credibility and improve the likelihood that the audience will listen with interest.

Your personal appearance should reflect the careful preparation of your speech. Your personal appearance is the first thing your audience will see, and from it, they will make inferences about the speech you’re about to present.

One of the biggest mistakes novice public speakers make is to use the same gesture over and over again during a speech. While you don’t want your gestures to look fake, you should be careful to include a variety of different nonverbal components while speaking. You should make sure that your face, body, and words are all working in conjunction with each other to support your message.

Practice Effectively

You might get away with presenting a hastily practiced speech, but the speech will not be as good as it could be. In order to develop your best speech delivery, you need to practice—and use your practice time effectively. Practicing does not mean reading over your notes, mentally running through your speech, or even speaking your speech aloud over and over. Instead, you need to practice with the goal of identifying the weaknesses in your delivery, improving upon them, and building good speech delivery habits.

When you practice your speech, place both your feet in full, firm contact with the floor to keep your body from swaying side to side. Some new public speakers find that they don’t know what to do with their hands during the speech. Your practice sessions should help you get comfortable. When you’re not gesturing, you can rest your free hand lightly on a lectern or simply allow it to hang at your side. Since this is not a familiar posture for most people, it might feel awkward, but in your practice sessions, you can begin getting used to it.

Seek Input from Others

Because we can’t see ourselves as others see us, one of the best ways to improve your delivery is to seek constructive criticism from others. This, of course, is an aspect of your public speaking course, as you will receive evaluations from your instructor and possibly from your fellow students. However, by practicing in front of others before it is time to present your speech, you can anticipate and correct problems so that you can receive a better evaluation when you give the speech “for real.”

Ask your practice observers to be honest about the aspects of your delivery that could be better. Sometimes students create study groups just for this purpose. When you create a study group of classroom peers, everyone has an understanding of the entire creative process, and their feedback will thus be more useful to you than the feedback you might get from someone who has never taken the course or given a speech.

If your practice observers seem reluctant to offer useful criticisms, ask questions. How was your eye contact? Could they hear you? Was your voice well modulated? Did you mispronounce any words? How was your posture? Were your gestures effective? Did you have any mannerisms that you should learn to avoid? Because peers are sometimes reluctant to say things that could sound critical, direct questions are often a useful way to help them speak up.

If you learn from these practice sessions that your voice tends to drop at the ends of sentences, make a conscious effort to support your voice as you conclude each main point. If you learn that you have a habit of clicking a pen, make sure you don’t have a pen with you when you speak or that you keep it in your pocket. If your practice observers mention that you tend to hide your hands in the sleeves of your shirt or jacket, next time wear short sleeves or roll your sleeves up before beginning your speech. If you learn through practice that you tend to sway or rock while you speak, you can consciously practice and build the habit of not swaying.

When it is your turn to give feedback to others in your group, assume that they are as interested in doing well as you are. Give feedback in the spirit of helping their speeches be as good as possible.

Use Audio and/or Video to Record Yourself

Technology has made it easier than ever to record yourself and others using the proliferation of electronic devices people are likely to own. Video, of course, allows you the advantage of being able to see yourself as others see you, while audio allows you to concentrate on the audible aspects of your delivery. As we mentioned earlier in the chapter, if neither video nor audio is available, you can always observe yourself by practicing your delivery in front of a mirror.

After you have recorded yourself, it may seem obvious that you should watch and listen to the recording. This can be intimidating, as you may fear that your performance anxiety will be so obvious that everyone will notice it in the recording. But students are often pleasantly surprised when they watch and listen to their recordings, as even students with very high anxiety may find out that they “come across” in a speech much better than they expected.

A recording can also be a very effective diagnostic device. Sometimes students believe they are making strong contact with their audiences, but their cards contain so many notes that they succumb to the temptation of reading. By finding out from the video that you misjudged your eye contact, you can be motivated to rewrite your notecards in a way that doesn’t provide the opportunity to do so much reading.

It is most likely that in viewing your recording, you will benefit from discovering your strengths and finding weak areas you can strengthen.

Good Delivery Is a Habit

Luckily, public speaking is an activity that, when done conscientiously, strengthens with practice. As you become aware of the areas where your delivery has room for improvement, you will begin developing a keen sense of what “works” and what audiences respond to.

It is advisable to practice out loud in front of other people several times, spreading your rehearsals out over several days. To do this kind of practice, of course, you need to have your speech be finalized well ahead of the date when you are going to give it. During these practice sessions, you can time your speech to make sure it lasts the appropriate length of time. A friend of ours was the second student on the program in an event where each student’s presentation was to last thirty to forty-five minutes. After the first student had been speaking for seventy-five minutes, the professor in charge asked, “Can we speed this up?” The student said yes, and proceeded to continue speaking for another seventy-five minutes before finally concluding his portion of the program. Although we might fault the professor for not “pulling the plug,” clearly the student had not timed his speech in advance.

Your practice sessions will also enable you to make adjustments to your notecards to make them more effective in supporting your contact with your audience. This kind of practice is not just a strategy for beginners; it is practiced by many highly placed public figures with extensive experience in public speaking.

Your public speaking course is one of the best opportunities you will have to manage your performance anxiety, build your confidence in speaking extemporaneously, develop your vocal skills, and become adept at self-presentation. The habits you can develop through targeted practice are to build continuously on your strengths and to challenge yourself to find new areas for improving your delivery. By taking advantage of these opportunities, you will gain the ability to present a speech effectively whenever you may be called upon to speak publicly.

Key Takeaways

• Conversational style is a speaker’s ability to sound expressive while being perceived by the audience as natural. Conversational quality is a speaker’s ability to prepare a speech and rehearse a speech but still sound spontaneous when delivering it.
• Eye contact helps capture and maintain an audience’s interest while contributing to the speaker’s credibility.
• Vocalics are the nonverbal components of the verbal message. There are six important vocalic components for a speaker to be aware of: volume (loudness or softness), pitch (highness or lowness), rate (fastness or slowness), pauses (use of breaks to add emphasis), vocal variety (use of a range of vocalic strategies), and pronunciation (using conventional patterns of speech formation).
• Physical manipulation is the use of one’s body to add meaning and emphasis to a speech. As such, excessive or nonexistent physical manipulation can detract from a speaker’s speech.
• Good delivery is a habit that is built through effective practice.
• Find a speech online and examine the speaker’s overall presentation. How good was the speaker’s delivery? Make a list of the aspects of delivery in this chapter and evaluate the speaker according to the list. In what areas might the speaker improve?
• Record a practice session of your speech. Write a self-critique, answering the following questions: What surprised you the most? What is an area of strength upon which you can build? What is one area for improvement?

Koch, A. (2010). Speaking with a purpose (8th ed.). Boston, MA: Allyn & Bacon, p. 233.

Lucas, S. E. (2009). The art of public speaking (9th ed.). Boston, MA: McGraw-Hill, p. 244.

Mehrabian, A. (1972). Nonverbal communication . Chicago, IL: Aldine-Atherton.

Mitchell, O. (n.d.). Mehrabian and nonverbal communication [Web log post]. Retrieved from http://www.speakingaboutpresenting.com/presentation-myths/mehrabian-nonverbal-communication-research

O’Hair, D., Stewart, R., & Rubenstein, H. (2001). A speaker’s guidebook: Text and reference. Boston, MA: Bedford/St. Martin’s.

Stossel, J. (2011, March 2). An Academy Award–winning movie, stuttering and me [Web log post]. Retrieved from http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=42081

Stand up, Speak out Copyright © 2016 by University of Minnesota is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Types of Nonverbal Communication

Often you don't need words at all

 Tim Robberts / Getty Images

Why Nonverbal Communication Is Important

• How to Improve

Nonverbal communication means conveying information without using words. This might involve using certain facial expressions or hand gestures to make a specific point, or it could involve the use (or non-use) of eye contact, physical proximity, and other nonverbal cues to get a message across.

A substantial portion of our communication is nonverbal. In fact, some researchers suggest that the percentage of nonverbal communication is four times that of verbal communication, with 80% of what we communicate involving our actions and gestures versus only 20% being conveyed with the use of words.

Every day, we respond to thousands of nonverbal cues and behaviors, including postures, facial expressions, eye gaze, gestures, and tone of voice. From our handshakes to our hairstyles, our nonverbal communication reveals who we are and impacts how we relate to other people.

9 Types of Nonverbal Communication

Scientific research on nonverbal communication and behavior began with the 1872 publication of Charles Darwin's The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals . Since that time, a wealth of research has been devoted to the types, effects, and expressions of unspoken communication and behavior .

Nonverbal Communication Types

While these signals can be so subtle that we are not consciously aware of them, research has identified nine types of nonverbal communication. These nonverbal communication types are:

• Facial expressions
• Paralinguistics (such as loudness or tone of voice)
• Body language
• Proxemics or personal space
• Eye gaze, haptics (touch)
• Artifacts (objects and images)

Facial Expressions

Facial expressions are responsible for a huge proportion of nonverbal communication. Consider how much information can be conveyed with a smile or a frown. The look on a person's face is often the first thing we see, even before we hear what they have to say.

While nonverbal communication and behavior can vary dramatically between cultures, the facial expressions for happiness, sadness, anger, and fear are similar throughout the world.

Deliberate movements and signals are an important way to communicate meaning without words. Common gestures include waving, pointing, and giving a "thumbs up" sign. Other gestures are arbitrary and related to culture.

For example, in the U.S., putting the index and middle finger in the shape of a "V" with your palm facing out is often considered to be a sign of peace or victory. Yet, in Britain, Australia, and other parts of the world, this gesture can be considered an insult.

Nonverbal communication via gestures is so powerful and influential that some judges place limits on which ones are allowed in the courtroom, where they can sway juror opinions. An attorney might glance at their watch to suggest that the opposing lawyer's argument is tedious, for instance. Or they may roll their eyes during a witness's testimony in an attempt to undermine that person's credibility.

Paralinguistics

Paralinguistics refers to vocal communication that is separate from actual language. This form of nonverbal communication includes factors such as tone of voice, loudness, inflection, and pitch.

For example, consider the powerful effect that tone of voice can have on the meaning of a sentence. When said in a strong tone of voice, listeners might interpret a statement as approval and enthusiasm. The same words said in a hesitant tone can convey disapproval and a lack of interest.

Body Language and Posture

Posture and movement can also provide a great deal of information. Research on body language has grown significantly since the 1970s, with popular media focusing on the over-interpretation of defensive postures such as arm-crossing and leg-crossing, especially after the publication of Julius Fast's book Body Language .

While these nonverbal communications can indicate feelings and attitudes , body language is often subtle and less definitive than previously believed.

People often refer to their need for "personal space." This is known as proxemics and is another important type of nonverbal communication.

The amount of distance we need and the amount of space we perceive as belonging to us are influenced by several factors. Among them are social norms , cultural expectations, situational factors, personality characteristics, and level of familiarity.

The amount of personal space needed when having a casual conversation with another person can vary between 18 inches and four feet. The personal distance needed when speaking to a crowd of people is usually around 10 to 12 feet.

The eyes play a role in nonverbal communication, with such things as looking, staring, and blinking being important cues. For example, when you encounter people or things that you like, your rate of blinking increases and your pupils dilate.

People's eyes can indicate a range of emotions , including hostility, interest, and attraction. People also often utilize eye gaze cues to gauge a person's honesty. Normal, steady eye contact is often taken as a sign that a person is telling the truth and is trustworthy. Shifty eyes and an inability to maintain eye contact, on the other hand, is frequently seen as an indicator that someone is lying or being deceptive.

However, some research suggests that eye gaze does not accurately predict lying behavior.

Communicating through touch is another important nonverbal communication behavior. Touch can be used to communicate affection, familiarity, sympathy, and other emotions .

In her book Interpersonal Communication: Everyday Encounters , author Julia Wood writes that touch is also often used to communicate both status and power. High-status individuals tend to invade other people's personal space with greater frequency and intensity than lower-status individuals.

Sex differences also play a role in how people utilize touch to communicate meaning. Women tend to use touch to convey care, concern, and nurturance. Men, on the other hand, are more likely to use touch to assert power or control over others.

There has been a substantial amount of research on the importance of touch in infancy and early childhood. Harry Harlow's classic monkey study , for example, demonstrated how being deprived of touch impedes development. In the experiments, baby monkeys raised by wire mothers experienced permanent deficits in behavior and social interaction.

Our choice of clothing, hairstyle, and other appearance factors are also considered a means of nonverbal communication. Research on color psychology has demonstrated that different colors can evoke different moods. Appearance can also alter physiological reactions, judgments, and interpretations.

Just think of all the subtle judgments you quickly make about someone based on their appearance. These first impressions are important, which is why experts suggest that job seekers dress appropriately for interviews with potential employers.

Researchers have found that appearance can even play a role in how much people earn. Attractive people tend to earn more and receive other fringe benefits, including higher-quality jobs.

Culture is an important influence on how appearances are judged. While thinness tends to be valued in Western cultures, some African cultures relate full-figured bodies to better health, wealth, and social status.

Objects and images are also tools that can be used to communicate nonverbally. On an online forum, for example, you might select an avatar to represent your identity and to communicate information about who you are and the things you like.

People often spend a great deal of time developing a particular image and surrounding themselves with objects designed to convey information about the things that are important to them. Uniforms, for example, can be used to transmit a tremendous amount of information about a person.

A soldier will don fatigues, a police officer will wear a specific uniform, and a doctor will wear a white lab coat. At a mere glance, these outfits tell others what that person does for a living. That makes them a powerful form of nonverbal communication.

Nonverbal Communication Examples

Think of all the ways you communicate nonverbally in your own life. You can find examples of nonverbal communication at home, at work, and in other situations.

Nonverbal Communication at Home

Consider all the ways that tone of voice might change the meaning of a sentence when talking with a family member. One example is when you ask your partner how they are doing and they respond with, "I'm fine." How they say these words reveals a tremendous amount about how they are truly feeling.

A bright, happy tone of voice would suggest that they are doing quite well. A cold tone of voice might suggest that they are not fine but don't wish to discuss it. A somber, downcast tone might indicate that they are the opposite of fine but may want to talk about why.

Other examples of nonverbal communication at home include:

• Going to your partner swiftly when they call for you (as opposed to taking your time or not responding at all)
• Greeting your child with a smile when they walk into the room to show that you're happy to see them
• Leaning in when your loved one speaks to show that you are listening and that you are interested in what they're saying
• Shoving your fist into the air when you're upset that something isn't working

Nonverbal Communication in the Workplace

You can also find nonverbal communication in the workplace. Examples of this include:

• Looking co-workers in the eye when speaking with them to be fully engaged in the interaction
• Throwing your hands in the air when you are frustrated with a project
• Using excitement in your voice when leading work meetings to project your passion for a specific topic
• Walking down the hall with your head held high to convey confidence in your abilities

Nonverbal Communication in Other Situations

Here are a few additional examples of nonverbal communication that say a lot without you having to say anything at all:

• Greeting an old friend at a restaurant with a hug, handshake, or fist bump
• Placing your hand on someone's arm when they are talking to you at a party to convey friendliness or concern
• Rolling your eyes at someone who is chatting excessively with a store clerk as a line begins to form
• Scowling at someone who has cut you off in traffic, or "flipping them the bird"

Nonverbal communication serves an important role in conveying meaning. Some benefits it provides include:

• Strengthening relationships : Nonverbal communication fosters closeness and intimacy in interpersonal relationships.
• Substituting for spoken words : Signaling information that a person might not be able to say aloud. This can be helpful in situations where a person might not be heard (such as a noisy workplace) or in therapy situations where a mental health professional can look at nonverbal behaviors to learn more about how a client might be feeling.
• Reinforcing meaning : Matching nonverbal communication to spoken words can help add clarity and reinforce important points.
• Regulating conversation : Nonverbal signals can also help regulate the flow of conversation and indicate both the start and end of a message or topic.

Nonverbal communication is important because it can provide valuable information, reinforce the meaning of spoken words, help convey trust, and add clarity to your message.

How to Improve Your Nonverbal Communication Skills

If you want to develop more confident body language or improve your ability to read other people's nonverbal communication behaviors, these tips can help:

• Pay attention to your own behaviors : Notice the gestures you use when you're happy versus when you're upset. Think about how you change the tone of your voice depending on the emotions you are feeling. Being aware of your own nonverbal communication tendencies is the first step to changing the ones you want to change. It can also give you insight into how you're feeling if you're having trouble putting it into words.
• Become a student of others : It can also be helpful to consider how others around you communicate nonverbally. What do their facial expressions say? What type of gestures do they use? Becoming familiar with their nonverbal communication patterns helps you recognize when they might be feeling a certain way quicker because you're actively watching for these cues. It can also help you recognize nonverbal behaviors you may want to adopt yourself (such as standing tall when talking to others to display self-confidence ).
• Look for incongruent nonverbal cues : Do you say that you're fine, then slam cupboard doors to show that you're upset? This can give those around you mixed messages. Or maybe when someone is speaking with you, they are saying yes while shaking their head no. This is another example of incongruent behavior. Both can be signs of feeling a certain way but not yet being ready to admit or discuss it.
• Think before you act : If your middle finger seems to automatically fly up when a car cuts you off—even if your young child is in the back seat, causing you to regret it as soon as it happens—you can work to stop this reaction. Train yourself to stop and think before you act. This can help you eliminate or replace nonverbal behaviors that you've been wanting to change.
• Ask before you assume : Certain types of nonverbal communication can mean different things in different cultures. They can also vary based on someone's personality . Before assuming that a person's body language or tone means something definitively, ask. "I notice that you won't look me in the eye when we speak. Are you upset with me?" Give them the opportunity to explain how they are feeling so you know for sure.

A Word From Verywell

Nonverbal communication plays an important role in how we convey meaning and information to others, as well as how we interpret the actions of those around us.

The important thing to remember when looking at nonverbal behaviors is to consider the actions in groups. Consider what a person says verbally, combined with their expressions, appearance, and tone of voice and it can tell you a great deal about what that person is really trying to say.

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By Kendra Cherry, MSEd Kendra Cherry, MS, is a psychosocial rehabilitation specialist, psychology educator, and author of the "Everything Psychology Book."