BEGINNERS GUIDE TO WRITING A SPEECH SCRIPT
(Based on an educational presentation conducted for Speechcraft Program by TM Kavishka Karunanayake)
If you are ever asked to deliver a speech or make a presentation you should never dismiss writing a script for it in the first place. We all know that a spontaneous, conversational delivery is what makes a speech or a presentation believable to the audience. Also, we know that, according to Professor Albert Mehrabian, only seven percent of the impact of the speech comes from the words. Yet, I reemphasize, if you are going to deliver a speech or make a presentation, do start with writing a script.
There is some debate about the pros and cons of scripting a speech, but the advantages heavily outweigh the disadvantages. The world’s most famous orators made their speeches brilliant not because they didn’t use a script, but because they learned it in advance!
Some say that it’s better to speak off the cuff because this way you’ll appear more ‘natural’. It’s true that a badly delivered presentation where someone’s reading directly from a piece of paper with their head held down is excruciating from an audience perspective. However, this is the fault of the speaker and not the script.
If you learn your script, not memorize, you have the ability to ad-lib and come across very natural without losing track of where you are during your presentation. If you know your script well you can add new elements to your presentation on the day, and then easily jump back to your presentation without stumbling.
Writing a script isn’t easy and those who say it is are lying! It takes a lifetime of learning, a creative mind and an unwavering desire to create a beautiful script.
WHY DO WE NEED A SCRIPT?
The first reason for writing the script before a speech is that you need to plan your approach. For example, say your speech topic is ‘Global warming’. You could of course come up there and start talking about how global warming is bad and everything. You might know about incorporating storytelling in your speeches. So, what if you start talking about a baby seal stuck somewhere in the arctic circle and you talk about its struggle to find food and through that you talk about the larger theme which is global warming. It’s always good to plan a sort of roundabout approach as an opening to the speech. However, you can’t do it on the spot and it’s hard to create a good approach off the cuff. You can get a look at the bigger picture and plan your approach while you are writing a script.
Next reason is to phrase your thoughts with special beauty. When you are writing, it’s easy to come up with beautiful figures of speech, some good rhetoric, metaphors and other beautiful phases. It’s hard to come up with these while you are speaking. So, writing a script will help with that.
Humans aren’t Wikipedia, humans aren’t Google! So, it’s hard to retrieve information that easily. Sometimes you may be able to bluff the audience and give some information, especially statistics, from your memory, thinking that no one will notice any errors. However, there might be someone in the audience who knows the accurate facts and you might lose credibility. Doing your research properly and writing the speech would really help to dial in all that specific information.
Lastly, it’s nice to have quotes and poems and small verses of songs in your speech. You might have heard the quote or the song a hundred times before, but what you remember might be a little different to the original. It’s super easy to research while writing your script, adding the relevant things you have to and making sure you don’t misquote people. It’s all about preparation and that’s why this is so important.
HOW CAN WE DEVELOP A GOOD SCRIPT?
Now that you know the importance of writing the script before a speech, let’s get into writing the speech itself.
Before you write the script
Like everything in life, speech writing needs preparation. There are few things you have to consider before you start writing the script.
Consider the objectives
First is the objectives, especially if your speech is part of a formal program such as Toastmasters. Very often we have had speakers saying that their project is body language and they come up on stage and talk about something like the wonder of reading books. It is pretty much wrong topic selection at that point, but you still need to consider your project objectives before you get into writing your speech.
Consider the purpose
Then we must consider the purpose of the speech. There are four general purposes for making a speech – to inform, to persuade, to inspire or to entertain. Before writing your script, you should think what your general purpose is and the way you write must reflect that. If you are writing humor, obviously you must have lots of space for humor and you need to plan accordingly like giving the audience some space to laugh, clap and to get involved in the speech. If you’re going for an informative speech you must have good facts and figure and good statistics with some compelling stories. Your speech should reflect what general purpose you’re going for.
Analyze the audience
Then you should think who you’re writing for. Writing for a board of directors is not the same as for a group of kindergarten kids. Not only the age, gender distribution, level of education and their expectations are also important aspects of the audience you need to consider. The language you use, the examples and stories, all needs to be different, catering to the specific audience you are targeting.
Pick a suitable topic
Another important consideration before writing the script obviously is picking a suitable topic. Like I said before, the topic must reflect project objectives. In addition, there are three aspects you should think of when selecting a topic. Firstly, select a topic that you are familiar with and have some knowledge about. Of course, you can find information just about any topic these days, but having a sound initial understanding helps. Secondly it should be a topic that you are passionate about. Unless you are passionate about it, you cannot deliver the speech with emotion. Thirdly, the audience should care about the topic you select. They should have enough interest to listen to your speech. The intersection of all three aspects is where you find a suitable topic for your speech.
Collect material
Finally, when all of this has been done, you can get to the stage of collecting information. There are few things to remember when collecting information. One is to note the source. It is always a good practice to mention the source of borrowed material in a speech. Another important thing to remember is the reliability of the source. Yes, it is easy to find material on the Internet, but make sure you are collecting information only from reliable sources.
While you write the script
Now that you have prepared for writing the script, let’s look at how to set about actually writing it.
Start strong
While writing you’re script the first thing is you have to think about attention. Experts are divided on this, but the general idea is that a person’s attention can last for only about 7-8 seconds, so you have essentially 8 seconds to really grab people’s attention.
A successful speech opening meet four criteria - get the attention of the audience, introduce the topic, establish rapport with the audience and take less than five to 10 percent of the entire speech time. There are of several techniques that can be used to create a strong opening. You can state the importance of your topic; make a startling statement; arouse suspense or curiosity; tell a story or anecdote; ask a rhetorical question; state a quotation or reference the occasion.
Find out the opening lines of top speeches of all time and the most popular TED talks of all time here.
Establish background, context and motives
After that you should establish backgrounds, context and motives. You can’t just dive into a speech, you should set the stage and set the scene. If you’re starting with a story, you have to set the background, the characters, what the characters want and what they do. Setting the stage properly will make it easier for the audience to follow what you are going to say in your speech.
Get to the point
Thirdly, get to the point without meandering about too much. It’s always great if you can get to the main idea of the speech as soon as possible. By now, you know what the objectives are and what the purpose of the speech is. So, let the audience know what they are. Yes, you have to set the scene first, but that should not be long winding road so that the audience will forget where they are going.
End strong
Finally, you must end strong. A Successful speech closing meet three criteria: achieve a sense of closure, make an impact and take less than five to 10 percent of the entire speech. As a good technique to end the speech you can use a quotation; tell a short story or anecdote; call for action; ask a rhetorical question; refer to the beginning of the speech or summarize your main points. When summarizing the main points, you should restate the main points without repeating them. Even though it’s a summary you don’t want to say exactly what you said before.
I recently heard a good call to action during a speech by one of my colleagues about ‘Online meetings and learning to use technology’. His ending was ‘Whenever you see some strange button click on it, then let’s figure out what it will do. Ladies and gentlemen let’s click and learn.’ That I believe was a beautiful way to end because I believe it had a simple but powerful call to action. Yes, he summarized everything, but the very last thing he said really struck a chord in the audience. And that is a great way to end.
After you write the script
Good, you have written the script. Let’s go and deliver the speech. Not so fast! Before you deliver the speech, there are few more things you should do.
Read it loud
First thing that should come after writing the script is to read it out loud, because sometimes sentences sound good coming from our head but they don’t sound good coming out loud. Reading out loud will also help you to get familiar with the content which will come in handy when you are practicing the speech.
Make sure you stick to time
Once you are reading it out loud remember to time it. Even if you have the right number of words for the time allocation (which can be calculated by multiplying the number of minutes by 150), when you are reading it out loud you may find that the speech is too short or too long.
Edit, rewrite and edit some more
And finally edit, rewrite and then do it once more. As a good quote for writers go, write without fear edit without mercy. Write whatever comes to your mind, but once you have read it out loud and checked the timing, edit it and refine it. You can always make it better. It is said that Dhanajaya Hettiarachchi’s world championship winning speech was edited and rewritten more than 400 times. It sounds crazy to us but that’s what it takes to produce a winning speech.
WHAT MAKES A GOOD SCRIPT?
There are many ways to write a speech script. If you want your script to end up as a strong and impactful speech, your script should fulfil several criteria. The script should help the audience to listen to the speech, be easy to understand and keep the keep the audience interested.
Help the audience listen
One important thing you need to keep in mind when writing a script is that it will be converted to a speech which needs to be listened by the audience. It might be a topic that the audience cares about, and it might have great content, but whether they listen to it or not is in their hands. As the writer, it is your responsibility to help the audience to listen to your speech.
Write as you speak
Don’t write like you are writing a university paper. It has to be easy flowing and easy to understand. Formalized writing style makes everyone’s sound the same when they write. Leaving less room for a person’s personality to shine through in their writing. To a reader, overly formal writing comes off as robotic. It doesn’t feel like you’re reading something a person wrote, but instead, a manufactured piece with a motive behind it, that’s hard to get through.
For starters, you must know the foundational grammar and punctuation rules before you bend or break them to sound more like yourself. Once you have the fundamentals attended to, you can think of ways to make your writing more like speaking. Few techniques you can use are – include ‘you’ and ‘I’ to personalize; ask questions within the piece; start some sentences with ‘and’, ‘but’, ‘nor’, ‘for’, ‘so’, ‘yet’, or ‘or’; add interjections like ‘ouch’, ‘phew’, and ‘duh’; and include contractions when possible.
Use short words
When you write, use short words with less syllables as much as possible. Short words are as good as ones, and short, old words like sun and grass and home are the best. A lot of short words, more than you might think, can meet your needs with a strength, grace and charm that long words don’t have. Next time you write, replace occupation with job, conceptualize with think and utilization with use!
Write snappy sentences
If you pay attention to how you talk, you’ll notice that shorter sentences sound way more natural. So, when you write, your sentences should not be too long and meandering. There should not be 15 commas in the sentence. An ideal length for a sentence would be 5-7 words. Sentences of 20-25 words should be the maximum length for it to encourage audience to listen.
Vary the sentence length
Even though short, snappy sentences will help the audience to listen, sentences of the same length become boring. Changing the length of the sentences now and then will make it easier for the audience to listen to your speech.
Make it easy to understand
Now that you have written in such a way that you got the audience to listen, the next challenge is to get them to understand your writing.
Repeat crucial points or buzz words
First thing you can do is to repeat crucial points like the phrase ‘I see something in you’ in Dhananjaya Hettiarachchi’s speech and ‘I have a dream’ in Martin Luther King’s speech. They repeated the phrase so often that by the end of the speech we knew the emotional weight those words carried and that made the speech much easier to understand.
Have strong transitions
This is of course important to make the organization of the speech clear cut. If you are writing a list, you can use firstly, then, and finally to show the transition from one point to another. If you are showing a cause and effect relationship, the transition can be indicated by phrases like ‘as a result …’ or ‘this has led to …’
Incorporate previews and summaries
Don’t just say ‘I am going to talk about …’ but give the audience a glimpse of what’s to come and what has already come. It will also be worthwhile to show where they have been, where they are now and where they are going in terms of the content, especially when there are sub-sections of the speech. If you have three sub-sections to explain, after the first sub-section you can mention, ‘That is the first out of the three topics I wanted to cover. Here is the second one.’
Maintain clarity
Long before you begin to wile the audience with wit, think about clarity. This means using clear language, so the audience understands what you mean. Be sensitive to audience's perceptions of your words, especially words having different meanings to different people.
Another way to achieve clarity is by using words that the audience is familiar with. Don't be tempted to use highly technical and sophisticated words that will confuse people. The same applies to the use of expressions that only a certain culture would understand. This works the same way with audiences of different age groups, too.
Consider this sentence. ‘The US government has failed to protect us from the scourge of so-called reality television, which exploits greed, violence and petty conflict and calls it human nature. This cannot continue’. In the final sentence what does ‘this’ mean? Is it the US Government, reality television, or greed, violence and petty conflicts or even human nature? You must be very specific and very careful when you use pronouns.
Keep the audience interested
While helping your audience to listen and understand, you also have to keep them interested in the speech till the end. As mentioned earlier, if you select a topic that audience cares about, half of the battle is won. In addition there are some techniques you can use to keep interest going right till the end.
Watch your tone
Tone in writing refers to the writer's attitude toward the reader and the subject of the message. Ultimately, the tone of a message reflects the writer and it does affect how the reader will perceive the message. So, you must watch your tone because you don’t want to come as someone who is angry, proud or inferior or superior.
You should consider several things when writing if you want to maintain an appropriate tone. The following questions will help you to determine the appropriate tone for your message - Why am I writing this document? Who am I writing to? What do I want them to understand? Some general guidelines to keep in mind when considering what kind of tone to use in your writing include being confident, being courteous and sincere, using non-discriminatory language and stressing the benefits for the reader.
Use statistics and figures sparingly
You don’t want to bombard the audience with numbers. It is far better to tell the audience the interpretation and the implication of the numbers rather than giving row numbers for the audience to derive their own conclusions.
There are two other very powerful ways to keep the interest of the audience – using descriptive language and using persuasive language, which are described in detail below.
Don’t tell me that the moon is shining; show me the glint of light in the broken glass.
~ Anton Chekov ~
Use descriptive language
You can jazz up your script by using descriptive language to bring the speech to life. This is nothing more than choosing descriptive words that generate interest and can be done by using vivid language, sensory language and rhetoric devices.
Use vivid language
First option to be descriptive is to use vivid language. After the first draft, see whether you can replace dull and boring language with more vivid language. Here are some ideas for you to try.
Use sensory language
Make your audience see what you see, hear what you hear, smell what you smell, taste what you taste and feel what you feel. In short, draw upon all five senses to create a completely immersive description. Here are some examples for using descriptive sensory language.
Add rhetorical devices
A rhetorical device is a linguistic tool that employs a particular type of sentence structure, sound, or pattern of meaning in order to evoke a particular reaction from an audience. Each rhetorical device is a distinct tool that can be used to construct an argument or make an existing argument more compelling.
You will find a comprehensive list of rhetorical devices with examples here.
Always remember it’s good to have beautiful language, but it’s better to have beautiful ideas. A beautiful idea can only be made beautiful language. So, don’t underestimate the importance of coming up with good ideas in the first place.
To be persuasive, we must be believable; to be believable, we must be credible; to be credible, we must be truthful.
~ Edward R. Murrow ~
Use persuasive language
Ancient Greeks have identified three modes of persuasion used to convince audiences – ethos, pathos and logos.
Create an ethical appeal
Ethos, or the ethical appeal, means to convince an audience of the speaker’s character or credibility. The speaker can use ethos to show to the audience that he is a credible source and is worth listening to.
Ethos can be developed by choosing language that is appropriate for the audience and topic, choosing proper level of vocabulary, making yourself sound fair and unbiased, introducing your relevant expertise and accomplishments, and by using correct grammar and pronunciation. Clarity in the writing with no errors in writing as well as subject matter will enhance ethos.
Steve Jobs' Stanford Commencement speech of 2005 is an excellent example of writing to the ethical appeal of the audience.
Create an emotional appeal
Pathos, or the emotional appeal, means to persuade an audience by appealing to their emotions. The speaker can use pathos to invoke empathy from the audience, to make the audience feel what the speaker is feeling. Speaker can use pathos to draw pity from the audience, ignite anger and even experience grief. If you judge a mood, or correctly address feelings about the subject, you can win over an audience.
Pathos can be developed by using meaningful language, emotional tine, emotion evoking examples and stories of emotional events. Storytelling is a key element of creating emotion in the audience. With a story the speaker can take the audience along with him in an emotional journey.
In 1963, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. made this famous 'I have a dream' speech, which is full of emotional appeal.
Create a logical appeal
Logos, or the logical appeal, means to convince an audience by the use of logic and reason. A successful appeal to logos requires tangible evidence, where the speaker appeals to the rationality of the audience.
Logos can be developed by using advanced, theoretical language, citing facts and statistics, using historical and literal analogies, and by constructing logical arguments.
You will be able to identify all three methods of persuasion in this TED Talk by activist Selina Juul who wants us to stop wasting food.
You don’t start out writing good stuff. You start out writing garbage thinking its good stuff and then gradually you get better at it. That’s why I say one of the most valuable traits is persistence.
~ Octavia E. Butler ~
IN CONCLUSION ...
These are only some of the ways of scriptwriting that we have shared with you. There are countless more ways to go about it. Any form of self-education will help you to get additional knowledge you need. You may also read other articles of the series, ‘Storytelling in public speaking’ and ‘Incorporating humour to your speech’ for some different perspectives of scriptwriting and speaking.
Making a speech is much more that writing the script. However, without the foundation of a well-written script, delivering a speech garnished with voice variations and body language is going to be difficult. When the script is written in such a way that it helps the audience to listen, it is easy to understand, and it keeps the audience interested, the delivery part become that much easier.
Like many skills you aspire to develop, scriptwriting needs a lot of practice. It is advisable for you to start improving this useful skill now itself without waiting till the day you of your most important speech. Practice of the right things make is perfect. Read the article again, read many more articles, watch videos and learn from whatever material you can get your hands on. Above all, apply what you learn and keep writing!
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