Public Speaking Tip: Types of Speeches

There are many different types of speeches and depending on the audience and/or topic, a good public speaker will be able to tailor his/her speech in the right format, delivery and style accordingly in order to have the most impact.

Here are the most common types of speeches and our take on how/when to use them.

1. The Narrative

The narrative speech is most suitable for when you are telling a story.  This is the easiest speech but yet so many people fall flat when attempting it.  Everyone thinks that telling a story is a piece of cake, but it is an art that takes some finesse.

The most important ingredient in a narrative speech is being as descriptive as possible but keeping your language plain and easy to understand.  Remember, this is your story and you want your audience to be interested in it.  The only way they can follow the story is through your words.  You need to be able to paint a visual picture so that they can see in their imagination how things unfold.

Most of all, avoid using over-bombastic words.  You may think that you are impressing your audience with your awesome vocabulary, but in reality, people just find you hard to understand.

You also need to keep the timeline of the story correct.  If you keep jumping between different parts of the story, your audience will be confused and ultimately will not be able to understand your speech message at the end.

2. The Informative Speech

The purpose of this speech is to educate your audience.  A proper structure for this type speech involves:

- An opening introduction to your topic
- Main points about your topics together with supporting information (3 points recommended)
- Conclusion

The informative speech doesn't have to be dry.  Even the most boring topic can be entertaining with some simple anecdotes that your audience can relate to.

The key to a successful informative speech is to tailor your topic to something that the audience is interested in.  You don't talk about the relevance of mathematical theorems in rocket science to a room full of high school students unless they are a specialized group of students who are interested in this topic.

3. The Persuasive Speech

The persuasive speech aims to convince the audience of something or get them to do something.  Note that this is NOT necessarily a sales pitch.

It may be tempting to load your speech with lots of statistics, facts and figures.  While this can be useful, it is not advisable if you cannot use them to get the full impact.  If you want to use facts and figures, make them visual rather than auditory.  This will help your audience remember them.

Again, as a general guideline, you may want to keep to the format of the informative speech.

At the end of your speech, give your audience a take home message or something that they can do immediately to drive home your point.

At the end of the day, how you format your speech depends on a variety of things such your own personal style and what you're comfortable doing.  It takes time to develop your own personal style so experiment a bit on the various types of speeches.

The Toastmasters Competent Communicator Manual has 10 speech exercises, each with a different objective, for speakers to complete.  At the end of these 10 exercises we are confident you will be able to find your own style and the type of speech that you are most comfortable with.

If you would like the opportunity to hone your public speaking skills as well as learn leadership skills, join us for our bi-monthly meetings on every 1st and 3rd Wednesdays of the month.  Our meetings start at 8pm.  For further information please contact us at gurneyhydrotoastmastersclub@gmail.com or refer to our Next Meeting page for information on our next meeting.