This chapter is about speaking skills and voice skills. If you are not used to speaking in public, you will find it useful first to assess your current speaking skills and make any improvements necessary to turn yourself into a competent public speaker. You may then wish to go on to consider the main features of a good public speaking voice and undertake a range of exercises that will enhance your voice and transform you into a polished public speaker.

Whichever programme or programmes you follow, remember that your voice is the main means of communicating with your audience and your aim must always be to speak fluently, intelligibly, animatedly and with confidence in order to convey genuine:

• joy and ease
• sincerity
• enthusiasm.

Your joy and ease will make your audience feel comfortable. Your sincerity will convince them you mean every word you say. And your enthusiasm will be infectious.

So how well do you speak? Do you speak loudly enough? Do you vary your pitch and tone? Do you pronounce each word correctly and distinctly? You probably don’t know because you never listen to yourself. To be an effective communicator, you must listen to your own voice and practise different ways of getting your message across. For this reason you will need to get hold of a video camera or audio cassette player before you proceed.

If you decide to work on your speaking skills only, it is still well worth reading this entire chapter once because an awareness and understanding of voice features will be useful in itself, if it encourages a greater variety in speech.

ASSESSING YOUR CURRENT SKILLS

Every speaker needs those basic abilities which hold and retain an audience’s attention. The key to avoiding tedium is variety: pace, style, pitch, tone. Try to inject a sparkle into your speech. Emphasise your main points. Convey the true meaning of your words. Express your deepest feelings.

This useful tip comes from actor David Suchet:

Imagine that your audience is blind. They cannot see you. Because you will have to get into their ears, the energy in your voice will change and grow immediately. It will happen subconsciously. It will make you speak very differently.

The best way to find out how well you speak is to record yourself and then assess your performance against the guidelines which follow. Obviously it is sensible to choose a speech similar to the actual one you will be making on the big day. So take a look at the model speeches in Chapter 8. If you will be proposing a toast to the happy couple, you should choose model speech 1; if you are the bridegroom, choose model speech 22; and if you are the best man, choose model speech 41.

Read your speech through a number of times until you are familiar with it. Pretend this is your actual speech and then record yourself presenting it.

Now play the tape back and assess yourself against these guidelines:

• speed
• pausing
• articulation
• enunciation
• pronunciation
• modulation
• pitch
• repetition
• projection.

Don’t worry about complicated words like ‘articulation’, ‘enunciation’ and ‘modulation’. As we shall now see, the words may be difficult but the concepts are quite straightforward.