![]() Without eye contact, the audience begins to feel invisible and unimportant, as if the speaker is just speaking to hear her or his own voice. If you are new to public speaking, you may find it intimidating to look audience members in the eye, but if you think about speakers you have seen who did not maintain eye contact, you’ll realize why this aspect of speech delivery is important. Your audience should feel that you’re speaking to them, not simply uttering main and supporting points. When you can sound conversational, people pay attention.Įye contact is a speaker’s ability to have visual contact with everyone in the audience. One of the hardest parts of public speaking is rehearsing to the point where it can appear to your audience that the thoughts are magically coming to you while you’re speaking, but in reality you’ve spent a great deal of time thinking through each idea. No one wants to hear a speech that is so well rehearsed that it sounds fake or robotic. ![]() Lucas defines conversational quality as the idea that “no matter how many times a speech has been rehearsed, it still sounds spontaneous” (Lucas, 2009). Your audience should be thinking about the message, not the delivery. You are the conduit with the important role of putting the two together in an effective way. It might be helpful to remember that the two most important elements of the speech are the message and the audience. You might not feel natural while you’re using a conversational style, but for the sake of audience preference and receptiveness, you should do your best to appear natural. This means that you want to avoid having your presentation come across as didactic or overly exaggerated. It’s a style that approaches the way you normally express yourself in a much smaller group than your classroom audience. And since delivery is only as good as the practice that goes into it, we conclude with some tips for effective use of your practice time.Ĭonversational style is a speaker’s ability to sound expressive and to be perceived by the audience as natural. ![]() In this section of the chapter, we will explain six elements of good delivery: conversational style, conversational quality, eye contact, vocalics, physical manipulation, and variety. ![]() Although numerous scholars, including Mehrabian himself, have stated that his findings are often misinterpreted (Mitchell), scholars and speech instructors do agree that nonverbal communication and speech delivery are extremely important to effective public speaking. Specifically, Mehrabian is often credited with finding that when audiences decoded a speaker’s meaning, the speaker’s face conveyed 55 percent of the information, the vocalics conveyed 38 percent, and the words conveyed just 7 percent (Mehrabian, 1972). Many writers on the nonverbal aspects of delivery have cited the findings of psychologist Albert Mehrabian, asserting that the bulk of an audience’s understanding of your message is based on nonverbal communication. Most audiences prefer delivery that combines a certain degree of formality with the best attributes of good conversation-directness, spontaneity, animation, vocal and facial expressiveness, and a lively sense of communication (Lucas, 2009). Good delivery…conveys the speaker’s ideas clearly, interestingly, and without distracting the audience. Good delivery is a process of presenting a clear, coherent message in an interesting way. The more you care about your topic, the greater your motivation to present it well.
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