Reviewing Article: Characteristics of Effective Public Speakers by Peter Khoury

Aloha! Welcome back to my blog.. In this opportunity I make another resume about the article that I have read, it is more about speaking skill. I’ll cut off the small talk and let’s just get started!

As a teacher, we are included as a public speaker. The general definition about public speaker is actually how you can share an idea in front of many audiences. And there are some scientifically-proven characteristics that we shall imitate as a public speaker.

The first one is confidence, this means that confidence is one of  the important element for a public speaker. On the article, it shows that being nervous for speaking in public is normal, but however confidence is one the key to deliver our speech more smoothly. According to a study published by the University of Wolverhampton “A highly confident speaker is viewed as being more accurate, competent, credible, intelligent, knowledgeable, likeable, and believable than the less confident uncertain speaker.”

The second one is authenticity, this means that we need to be our self as we speak in front of the audience and we shouldn’t memorize the materials because it’ll be an obstacles if we forgot a line or more.

The third is passion, we need to have a passion in order to be a good speaker and able to communicate with the audience nicely. If we don’t have it then the audience can’t get our point and it would be meaningless.

The Gallup Organization recently discovered an offer insight about why passion is rare in the U.S workplaces:

• 55% of the U.S working population is not engaged at work.
• 16% of the U.S working population is actively disengaged.

We need to dig deep and find the interesting part about our material in order to discover our passion.

The fourth is to be yourself, almost the same as the authenticity. Sometimes no matter how much you rehearse your speech if you don’t act like yourself, the audience will find your speech as insincere or calculated.

Speak in your natural voice, some intonation can be taken as a fake or too perfect by the audience and it could affect how they see your whole speech in general.

Keep it short and sweet, it means that you don’t need to speak in a long duration of time, as it said in a research by Dianne Dukette and David Cornish (2009), on average, adults can only sustain attention for around 20 minutes and that their short-term response to the stimulus that attracts attention is only seconds.

The last one, don’t forget to connect with your audience. The only difference it has between speaking in front of the audience with thousands of people and speaking to one person is the quantity itself. We still have to interact with the audience to maintain their understanding.

Here are some ways to connect with the audience

• Tell stories
• Be aware of your target audience
• Know the energy in the room
• Be willing to poke fun at yourself
• Work on your non-verbal body language

So in conclusion, some of those characteristics such as confidence, authenticity, passion, being our self and etc is important to be implemented as we speak in front of the audience, or else our speech will be a failure.