Making a Public Speech

Features of your Speech

• Make sure you use persuasive language…• for example• Emotive language (use strong adjectives ‘best’, ‘most

important’, ‘stunning’ and verbs ‘will’, ‘need’, ‘must’, ‘should’, ‘could’)

• Make it personal – ‘I’/’we’ to make your speech strong and personal; use the second person ‘You’ to involve your audience.

• Forceful or memorable phrases• Clusters of three – three reasons, three benefits, three

emotive words.

Features of your Speech

• Use statistics (made up, if necessary!) use information to support your ideas. Don’t just keep saying ‘I THINK’. Explain what you believe and why.

• Humour• Come up with memorable phrases or a slogan.• Alliteration• Metaphor• Simile

Features of your Speech

• Rhetorical questions: questions that don’t actually require an answer (eg ‘Do you want all children in school to suffer? Or ‘Can you really live without this marvellous pen?’

• Make what you say sound as if it is important.• Appeal to feelings and emotions: sympathy,

empathy, guilt.

Features of your Speech

• Threaten them – tell the person what will happen if you don’t get your way.

• Strong conclusion – end your speech with a summary that will fix your ideas firmly in the audience’s mind. Remember that this will be the last thing that the examiner marks.