How to Design Your Speech for Maximum Impact

While public speaking comes easily for some people, it can be downright daunting for others. Not only are you presenting information, but you are presenting it to a group of people with all eyes on you! That can be a tough pill to swallow.

For those who get nervous about public speaking (and even for those who don’t), the focus can sometimes be too much on the actual speaking part of public speaking and not the speech itself. However, one of the most significant components of a successful public speaker is having a well-designed speech! So, how can you design a speech that leaves a lasting impact?

Wait … design a speech?

Yes. Design a speech. Or speech design. It may be a less daunting way to think about coming up with a speech than “speech writing.” It can also be a valid way to approach a speech. For our purposes, we are going to go backward.

The Backward Speech Design Method: Lessons From Education and Theatre

As an educator and theatre practitioner, I find the idea of backward design relatively familiar. Educators Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe wrote a book, Understanding by Design, outlining the concept of Backward Course Design, wherein an instructor designs a course by looking at the end: what do you want students to learn from this course? By understanding the end goal, instructors can build their courses backward so that all activities actively support that goal. While it may sound obvious to choose a goal, most people who create courses start out knowing that they will teach a subject and start at the beginning without thinking about how it will affect the end. By working backward, an instructor can ensure that those first things taught in class actively inform what that end learning goal is. The Ohio State University has a great overview of Backward Course Design here. 

On the theatrical end, in Backwards and Forwards: A Technical Manual for Reading Plays, author David Ball argues that to truly understand sequences of events and why things happen the way they do, readers must analyze the play from beginning to end and from end to beginning. By analyzing backward, you can better understand what triggers events and better understand the play’s structure.

But how does this relate to public speaking?

Teachers, theater artists, and public speakers share at least one common goal: communicating with an audience. While the purpose of communication and the projected outcomes may be different among the three, we are all communicating with an audience.

As a speaker, you may be trying to do one or more of many things:

• Convince someone to buy something.

• Inform someone of something new or innovative in your field.

• Advocate for a person, group or idea.

• Entertain a group with a story.

• Advise on a topic of expertise … the list can go on and on.

Like an academic course, you can employ backward design in your speeches; you simply need to think about it in terms of audience rather than students. What do you want your audience to learn or take away from this speech? How do you want them to feel immediately after hearing your speech and an hour after it? A day after? A week after? What is the impact you want to have on your audience?

Craft a Speech with Emotional Impact

By defining what you want your audience to learn, understand, feel, or do after your speech, you can begin to design your speech backward and forward.

This process could start with an outline. For instance, you could work with a nonprofit and give a fundraising talk at an event. You’ve thought about what you want your audience to do and feel at the end: you want them to give money to your organization, but you also want them to feel hopeful at the end of your speech, carrying that sense of hope forward with them so that they may be more inclined to donate again in the future. How do you get them there?

By mapping their emotional journey from back to front, you can truly embrace the power of storytelling in your speech. How do we get people to hope? Here is a potential map:

Take your audience on an emotional journey.

6. Hope

5. Calm after the storm

4. Sadness

3. Love or caring

2. Engagement

1. Interest

Going forward, you must first get your audience interested in your topic and then truly engaged. This could be done by describing what your organization does or how it works in your community. Then, they need to feel emotions. If we want to end at hope, we will need to take them some places, so maybe you tell a story that gets them loving or caring about the subject, and then something happens to that subject. The audience feels sadness that the subject has had a setback. Your organization comes in and assists, and the audience feels the calm after the storm. You reiterate what your organization does and how it helps, share words from the people you have helped, show the audience where they are now, and provide hope that you can yield those same results with others. And they are so impressed at what you have done that they are opening their wallets and practically throwing money at you!

Wrapping Up: Reframe Your Approach to Public Speaking

In the end, backward speech design can help (re)frame the purpose of your speech. Instead of thinking, “I need to present my research for 20 minutes at this conference,” you think, “What do I want my audience to learn from this research? How do I want them to use the information I presented, and is there something I want them to do once the presentation is over?” By reframing your purpose in this way, you allow yourself to design your speech for maximum impact.

Now, get to designing. I believe in you!