Public speaking is an important skill for every student to adapt and practice for achieving their goals and success in academic and professional life. Good public speaking qualities and effective communication techniques are must to have.
“Speech is power, speech is to persuade, to convert, to compel.” – Ralph Valdo Emerson.
Elements of public speaking
Public speaking and communication among the people are carried and completed by a series of few elements. These elements are mentioned below.
Speaker: In the public speaking or communication process, the speaker is the person who starts the conversation. The delivery of a message or information is started by the speaker. The listeners listen and analyze the information received from the speaker.
Message: the information that the speaker is delivering to the listeners or audiences is known as a message. It is the main element of public speech communication. Clear, concise, and easy to understand, messages should be delivered to the audience so that analysis becomes easy.
Channel: channel refers to the pathway or the tool with which communication and public speaking are carried. In traditional classrooms, there is face-to-face interaction whereas computers, mobile, and laptops act as channels for interacting. How to teach online effectively is achieved by these networking channels.
Listener: listener is a receiver who listens and receives information from the speaker and responds accordingly. For example in live classes of teaching, when the teacher is teaching, he or she is the speaker and students are the listeners. An attentive listener is very important for effective communication.
Feedback: the response that listeners give after receiving the information is known as feedback. In the process of public speaking, feedback plays an important role as it guides the speaker to act accordingly. Feedback can be verbal or nonverbal. These are the main five elements of public speaking.
Public speaking tips for students
To overcome your fear of speaking in front of people and to improve the quality of interacting and presenting, let us discuss a few tips that will be very helpful for students.
Be confident: confidence is very essential for effective public speaking. Errors, slip of the tongue, forgetting a few words is common but being confident is very important to overcome these small mistakes and present yourself the best way possible. The confident speakers gather a huge amount of attention from the receivers. With confidence, you can defeat your major fears and anxieties of presenting and speaking in front of an audience. Few things which you can for confident public speaking is
- Dress up comfortably and appropriately. This enhances the overall look and makes your speech more presentable for the learners. This boosts your confidence level.
- Proper preparations also boost your public speaking quality. It is a thing that you cannot master in a single day. Gradually, preparing will help the students to enhance their public speech.
Eye contact: maintaining eye contact with the listeners is very important for effective public speaking. Learning and practicing from the right age will help learners for their future well-being a lot. If students have to present a topic, whether in traditional classrooms or online live classes, maintain proper eye contact with your audience. By maintaining proper eye contact, you can catch the interest of the listeners. Also, you can check whether listeners are liking your speech or not. If they are giving a smile, this means they are liking it and are satisfied. If you find perplexing reactions, you can explain a little more to the audience.
By maintaining effective eye contact, you can improvise your speech quality a lot.
Organize your speech: organizing your content before delivering it to the audience is very essential. This means your topic should include a catchy introduction, a body, and a proper conclusion at the end. The introduction should be attractive and impressive so that you can catch the attention of your listeners. The body can include all the necessary points that you wanted to explain. A conclusion should summarize everything that you said before in the speech.
You can give real-life examples in between your speaking so that listeners can relate to it better and also respond well. Briefings can be given if you feel people have understood something. Tone, pitch, expressions, should be similar to the content you want to speak up to. Other than this try to maintain a friendly face so that listeners bond well with you.
Body language: maintaining proper body language is very important to enhance your public speaking skills. Other than your verbal speech, nonverbal components and gestures matter a lot. The main point that you have to remember is maintaining accurate postures. To present yourself, active, smart, confident and an attractive personality is very important to follow. Don’t look here and there. This can show a lack of confidence and poor speaking. Look straight at your audience. Try to maintain expressions on your face. A pale or expressionless face must be avoided. Try to smile and this will engage the listeners more with you. All these things will enhance your body language and public speaking abilities.
Parents and teachers should guide these tips to their students. Also, these techniques must be included by online teachers for how to teach online, the importance of good public speaking skills.
Conclusion
These above-mentioned tips when followed by the students will help them in the process of improvisation and betterment of their public speaking skills and qualities. Fear of speaking in front of an audience is difficult and also common for a lot of students. But following these techniques will help learners to fight and overcome their fears. Better interaction, engagement, and communication can be achieved this way.
