Delivery

You’ve done the research. You’ve written the information down into an outline and transferred all of that onto a 3×5 cue card using keywords. Now, it’s finally time to practice. By now, you should recognize that a presentation, like all communication, is more than just transferring information from one person to another. It’s all about how you communicate that information. Ultimately, your delivery is going to be a big part of that. More specifically, your visual delivery and verbal delivery will have a significant impact on how your message is received and the overall experience of your audience. Rather than a checklist of skillsets, we invite you to read these as a series of interrelated behaviors and practices.

Visual Delivery

Have you played charades? Many of you have likely “acted out” a person, place, or thing for an audience, using only your body and no words. Charades, like many games, demonstrate the heightened or exaggerated use of nonverbal communication through acting out, which highlights how powerful this communication method can be. Similar to charades, your job when speaking is to create a captivating experience for your audience that leads them to new information or to consider a new argument. Nonverbals are essential to that experience, accentuating your content and contributing to an aesthetic experience.

As discussed earlier, public speaking is embodied, and your nonverbal cues are key to living and communicating through your body. Here are the nonverbals that we will discuss in this section:

• eye contact
• facial expressions
• attire
• gestures and hands
• feet and posture
• movement

All of the above enhance your message and invite your audience to give it serious attention, and you. Your credibility, your sincerity, and your knowledge of your speech become apparent through your nonverbal behaviors.

Eye Contact

Imagine bringing in two qualified applicants for a job opening you were responsible for filling. Each applicant will sit directly across from you and three other assisting colleagues. While answering questions, Applicant 1 never breaks eye contact with you. It’s likely that, as the interview progresses, you begin to feel uncomfortable, even threatened, and begin shifting your own eyes around the room awkwardly. When the applicant leaves, you finally take a deep breath but realize you can’t remember a single thing the applicant said. Applicant 2 enters and, unlike the first, looks down at their notes, never making direct eye contact. As you try to focus on their answers, they seem so uncomfortable that you can’t concentrate on the exchange.

Both approaches are common mistakes when integrating eye contact into a speech. We have likely all seen speakers who read their presentations from notes and never look up. It’s common for a speaker to zoom in on one audience member and never break their gaze. The general rule is that 80% of your speech time should be spent making eye contact with your audience. When you’re able to connect by using eye contact, you create a more intimate, trusting, and transparent experience.

It’s important to note that you want to establish genuine eye contact with your audience and not “fake” eye contact. Many techniques have been developed for “faking” eye contact, but none appear natural. For example, these approaches aren’t great:

• Three points on the back wall – One technique suggests that you can pick three points on the back wall and examine each one. What ends up happening is that you look like you are staring off into space, and your audience will spend most of your speech trying to figure out what you are looking at. This technique may work better for a larger audience, but the audience is close enough to be suspicious in a more intimate space (such as the classroom). Put simply, we can tell you aren’t looking at us.
• The swimming method – This occurs when someone is reading their speech and looks up quickly and briefly, much like a swimmer who pops their head out of the water for a breath before going back under. Eye contact is more than just physically moving your head; it’s about looking at your audience and establishing a genuine connection.

Instead, work to maintain approximately three seconds of eye contact with audience members throughout the room. You are, after all, speaking to them, so use your eyes to make contact. This approach may also reduce anxiety because you can envision talking directly to one person at a time rather than a room full of strangers. Eye contact is as important in virtual presentations as in delivering to an in-person audience. To balance eye contact in this setting, draw a smiley face on a sticky note. Then, place that note next to your camera. This approach reminds you to look into the camera to build nonverbal immediacy with your audience. The face reminds you to speak to the camera as though you are talking to a live audience, and panning across the room to speak to each individual.

Facial Expressions

Picture being out to dinner with a friend and, as you finish telling a story about a joke you played on your partner, you look up to a grimacing face.

“What?” you ask.

“Oh, nothing,” they reply. But their face says it all.

Realizing that their face has “spilled the beans,” so to speak, your friend might correct their expression by shrugging and biting their lip—a move that may insinuate nervousness or anxiety. You perceive that they didn’t find your story as humorous as you’d hoped. Facial expressions communicate to others (and audiences) consistent or inconsistent meanings with your message. In the example above, your friend’s “Oh, nothing” feedback was inconsistent with their facial expressions. However, their words didn’t trump their facial expressions, and their nonverbal feedback was part of the communication. Your facial expressions will matter in the context of your speech. Your audience will be looking at your face to guide them through the speech, so these expressions are crucial for conveying meaning to them.

If your facial expressions seem inconsistent with or contradictory to the tone of the argument, an audience may go so far as to feel distrust toward you as a speaker. Children might, for example, say, “I’m fine” or “It doesn’t hurt” after falling and scraping their knees, but their facial expressions often communicate discomfort. In this case, their facial expression is inconsistent with their verbal message. If you’re frowning while presenting information that the audience perceives as positive, they may feel uneasy or unsure how to process it. So, consistency can increase your ethos. Similarly, your facial expressions, like the soundtrack of a movie or commercial, can help set the aesthetic tone; they are part of developing pathos. Given the vast amount of information we encounter daily, including information about global injustices, it’s often insufficient to state the problem and its solution. Audience members need your buy-in as the speaker. For example, using facial expressions to communicate emotions can demonstrate your commitment to and feelings about an issue. To be explicit, facial expressions, like other forms of nonverbal communication, can significantly impact an audience member’s perception of the speaker. Still, not all audiences may interpret your expressions in the same way.

Attire

What you wear can either enhance or detract from the audience’s experience. Like facial expressions, your attire should be consistent with the message you’re delivering. Context is important here, as the purpose and audience will be informed about appropriate clothing. We recommend considering two questions when selecting your attire: First, what attire matches the occasion? Is this a casual occasion? Does it warrant a more professional or business-casual approach? For example, if you’re speaking at an organization’s rally, you may wear attire with the organization’s logo and jeans. On other occasions, such as a classroom or city council meeting, a higher level of professional attire may be required. Second, ask yourself, “Have I selected any attire that could be distracting while I’m speaking?” Certain kinds of jewelry, for example, may make additional noise or move around on your arm, and audiences may focus too much on the jewelry. In addition to noise-makers, some attire can feature prints that may distract, including letters, wording, or images. Your attire can influence how the audience perceives you as a speaker—that is, your credibility, which, as we’ve discussed, is key to influencing listeners.

Movement

When you (and your body) move, you communicate. You may, for example, have a friend who frantically gestures and paces the room when telling exciting stories—their movement is part of how they communicate their story. They likely do this unconsciously, and that’s often how much of our informal movement occurs. Many of us, like your friend, have some aspects of movement that we comfortably integrate into our daily interactions. To determine how to incorporate movements most effectively into your speech, ask yourself, “How can I utilize these movements (or put them in check) to enhance the audience’s experience?” This section will introduce how and why movement should be purposefully integrated into your speech. We’ll focus on your hands and feet and consider how to move around the space. Not sure what nonverbals you commonly use when communicating? Ask a friend! Your friends are observant, and they can likely tell you if you over-gesture, look down, stay poised, etc. Use this inventory to determine areas of focus for your speeches.

Gestures and Hands

Everyone who gives a speech in public gets scared or nervous. Even professionals who do this for a living feel that way, but they have learned how to combat those nerves through experience and practice. When we feel scared or nervous, our bodies release adrenaline into our system, allowing us to deal with the problem that is causing us to feel that way. In a speech, that burst of adrenaline will try to work out of your body and somehow manifest itself. One of the main ways is through your hands.

Three common reactions to this adrenaline rush are:

• Jazz hands! It may sound funny, but nervous speakers can unknowingly incorporate “jazz hands”—shaking their hands at their sides with fingers opened wide—at various points in their speech. While certainly an extreme example, behaviors like this can easily become distracting.
• Stiff as a board. At the other end of the scale, people who don’t know what to do with their hands or use them “too little” sometimes hold their arms stiffly at their sides, behind their backs, or in their pockets, which can look unnatural and distracting.
• Hold on for dear life! Finally, some speakers might grip their notes or a lectern tightly with their hands. This tendency might also result in tapping on a lectern, table, or nearby object.

Remember that just because you aren’t sure what your hands are doing does not mean they aren’t doing something. Fidgeting, making jazz hands, gripping the podium, or keeping hands in pockets are common, resulting in speakers asking, “Did I do that? I don’t even remember!” Are you someone who uses gestures when speaking? If so, great! Use your natural gestures to create purposeful aesthetic emphasis for your audience. If you were standing around talking to your friends and wanted to list three reasons why you should all take a road trip this weekend, you would probably hold up your fingers as you counted off the reasons (“First, we hardly ever get this opportunity. Second, we can…”). Pay attention to how you use your hands in regular conversations and incorporate that into your delivery. Be mindful of not being over the top and gesturing at every other word. Remember that gestures highlight and punctuate information for the audience, so using too many gestures (like jazz hands) can be distracting. Similarly, are you someone who generally rests your arms at your sides? That’s OK, too! Work to keep a natural (and not stiff) look, but challenge yourself to integrate a few additional gestures throughout the speech.

Feet and Posture

Just as it does through your hands, nervous energy may try to work its way out of your body through your feet. Common difficulties include:

• The side-to-side. You may feel awkward standing without a lectern and try to shift your weight back and forth. On the “too much” end, this is most common when people start “dancing” or stepping side to side.
• The twisty-leg. Another variation is to twist the feet around each other or the lower leg.
• Stiff-as-a-board. At the other end are speakers who put their feet together, lock their knees, and remain in that position. Locked knees can restrict oxygen to the brain, so there are many reasons to avoid this difficulty.

These options look unnatural and, therefore, will distract your audience. The default position for your feet is to have them shoulder-width apart, with your knees slightly bent. Since public speaking often results in some degree of physical exertion, you must treat speaking as a physical activity. Public speaking is, after all, a full-body experience. Being in tune and attuned to your body will enable you to communicate in a way that’s comfortable for you and your audience. In addition to keeping your feet shoulder-width apart, focus on maintaining good posture. Good posture will eventually become habitual if you focus on it over time.

Moving in the Space

We know you’re likely wondering, “Should I do any other movement around the room?”

Unfortunately, there isn’t an easy answer. Movement depends on two overarching considerations:

1) What’s the space?

2) What’s the message?

First, movement is always informed by the space in which you speak. Consider the two following examples:

• You’ll present at a university where a podium is set up with a stable microphone.
• You’re speaking at a local TED Talk event with an open stage.

Both scenarios provide constraints and opportunities for movement.

In the TED Talk example, you are not constrained by a stable microphone and have a stage for bodily movement. The open stage means the entire space becomes part of the audience’s aesthetic experience. However, if you are less comfortable with movement, the open space may feel intimidating because audiences may assume you’ll use the entire space. Once you understand the speaking space and the speech content, you can use movement to enhance your audience’s aesthetic experience.

One benefit of movement is that it allows you to engage with different sections of the audience. If you are not confined to a single spot (such as a podium or a seat), you can use movement to engage with the audience by adjusting your spatial dynamic. You can move your body to different sides of the stage and the audience. Such use of space enables each side of a room to be pulled into the content because you close the physical distance and create clear pathways for eye contact.

Without these changes, sections of the audience may feel lost or forgotten. Consider your role as a student. Have you ever had a professor or teacher who stays in one place and does not move to different parts of the room? Keeping motivated to listen or take notes can be challenging if a speaker dominates one area of the space. Changing the spatial dynamics goes beyond moving from side to side. You can also move forward and backward. This allows you to move closer to the audience or back away, depending on what experience you’re trying to create.

In addition to engaging with the audience, movement often signals a transition between ideas or an attempt to convey a critical component of your information visually. You may want to signal a change in time or mark progression. If you’re walking your audience through information chronologically, movement can mark that temporal progression where your body becomes the visual marker of time passing. When you speak, moving in the space can be beneficial. As you plan your purposeful movement, be aware of the message you’re providing and the space in which you’re speaking.

Verbal Delivery

Humans are communicators. We rely on communication processes to make sense of our world and on others’ communicating with us to create shared meaning. Through symbols, we use and adapt language with one another and our communities.

The same is true for speeches, but what symbols you select and how you portray them—what we’ll call verbal delivery— are dependent on your audience and how they experience or comprehend what you say. For example, consider your favorite podcaster or a podcast series you enjoy. We love crime podcasts! Despite relying solely on verbal delivery, the presenters’ voices paint a vivid picture as they walk us through stories of crime, murder, and betrayal. So, how do they do it? What keeps millions of people listening to podcasts and returning to their favorite verbal-only speakers? Is it how they say it? Is it the language they choose? All of these are essential parts of effective verbal delivery.

Below, we begin discussing verbal delivery, looking at the following topics:

1. projection
2. vocal enunciation
3. rate
4. vocal pauses

Projection

“Louder!”

You may have experienced a situation where an audience notified a speaker that they couldn’t be heard. “Louder!” Here, the audience is letting the speaker know to increase the volume or the relative softness or loudness of one’s voice. In this example, the speaker needed to fully project their vocals to fit the speaking-event space by increasing their volume. In a more formal setting, however, an audience may be reluctant to give such candid feedback, so it is your job to prepare. Projection is a strategy to fill the space vocally; thus, the space dictates which vocal elements need to be adapted because every person in the room should comfortably experience your vocal range. If you speak too softly (with insufficient volume or without projecting), your audience will struggle to hear and understand, and may give up trying to listen. If you speak with too much volume, your audience may feel that you are yelling at them, or at least feel uncomfortable with you shouting. The volume you use should be appropriate for the size of the audience and the room.

Vocal Enunciation

Vocal enunciation is often reduced to pronouncing words correctly, but enunciation also describes the expression of words and language. Have you ever spoken to a friend who replied, “Stop that! You’re mumbling.” If so, they’re telling you they can’t understand your message. You may have pronounced the words correctly but had poorly enunciated them, leading to reduced comprehension. One technique to increase enunciation occurs during speech rehearsal, known as the “dash” strategy: e-nun-ci-ate e-ve–ry syll–a–bal in your pre-sen-ta-tion.  The dashes signify distinct enunciation to create emphasis and expression. However, don’t go overboard! The dash strategy is an exaggerated exercise, but can lead to a choppy vocal delivery. Instead, use the dash strategy to identify areas where complicated and longer words require more punctuated emphasis, and through rehearsal, naturally integrate those areas of emphasis into your presentational persona.

Rate

The rate is how quickly or slowly you say the words of your speech. A slower rate may suggest that you do not fully understand the speech. “Where is this going?” they may wonder. It might also be slightly dull if the audience is processing information faster than it’s being presented. By contrast, speaking too fast can overly tax an audience’s ability to keep up with and digest your words. It sometimes helps to imagine that your speech is a jog you and your friends (the audience) are taking together. You (as the speaker) are setting the pace based on how quickly you speak. If you start sprinting, it may be too difficult for your audience to keep up, and they may give up halfway through. Most people who babble know they babble, and if that applies to you, just be sure to practice slowing down and writing yourself delivery cues in your notes to maintain a more comfortable rate.

You will want to maintain a deliberate rate at the beginning of your speech, as your audience will become accustomed to your voice. We have all called a business where the person answering the phone mumbles the company’s name, and we aren’t sure if we called the correct number. Since the introduction is designed to get the audience’s attention and arouse interest in your speech, you will want to focus on a clear vocal rate here. You might also consider varying the rate depending on the type of information being communicated. While you’ll want to be careful not to go too slow consistently, slowing your rate for difficult supporting material may be helpful. Similarly, quickening your rate in specific segments can communicate urgency. Although the experience might seem awkward, watching yourself speak via recording (or webcam) is a great way to gauge your natural rate and pace.

Vocal Pauses

The common misconception for public speaking students is that pausing during your speech is terrible, but vocal pauses can increase both the tone and comprehension of your argument. This is especially true if you are making a critical point or want a statement to have a powerful impact: you will want to give the audience a moment to digest what you have said. You may also provide new or technical information to an audience needing additional time to absorb your words.

For example, consider the following statement:

Following a statement like this, you want to give your audience a brief moment to consider what you are saying fully. Use audience nonverbal cues and feedback (and provide them as an audience member) to determine whether additional pauses may be necessary for comprehension. Audiences are generally reactive and will use facial expressions and body language to communicate whether they are listening, confused, angry, or supportive. Of course, there is such a thing as pausing too much, both in frequency and length. Someone who pauses too often may appear unprepared. Someone who pauses too long (more than a few seconds) risks the audience feeling uncomfortable or, even worse, becoming distracted or letting their attention wander. Pauses should be controlled to maintain the audience’s attention and create additional areas of emphasis.