How to prepare to give a speech

Hello. Welcome back to engVid with me, Benjamin. Today's lesson is for my more advanced students,

because we're going to be looking at a speech by a former American president. We're going

to get to understand what the speech is about, but my primary focus in today's lesson is

to show you how to approach preparing a speech. So, useful if you have to give presentations

and you find that, you know, it's just difficult and... So, really what I'm showing you is

a very sort of step-by-step process of really understanding the text so that you can communicate

it clearly to an audience. It's going to be quite slow and time consuming, but if you

want to be great in your communications with a prepared speech, then that's what it takes.

So, always useful to know a little bit of context. You know, if you're preparing a speech,

you need to know the situation surrounding the information that you are given. Just as

if we are getting to understand a text, we want to know, well, what is around it. Well,

this is a speech that was made in 1963 by J.F. Kennedy when he came to visit the people

of West Berlin. At that time, Berlin was divided by a wall. In basic terms, you had the communists

in the east with Russian influence and the capitalist west with American and European

influence. So, J.F. Kennedy was coming to speak to the West Berliners to show his support

of them and to criticize the division of this city and the wall that was causing that division.

So, what we're going to do first is read through it, and as there are difficult words, I will

explain them, okay? So, it's in the first person, "I". "I know of no town, no city that

has been besieged." So, think of a castle and the people are attacking it and not allowing

the people out of the castle, okay? So, he doesn't know of any place that has been besieged

for 18 years that still lives with the vitality, that means energy and the force, strength

and the hope and the determination of the city of West Berlin.

"While the wall", so that's the wall between east and west Berlin, "is the most obvious

and vivid", that means sort of full of color, like you can actually sort of see it, "demonstration

of the failures of the communist system for all the world to see, we the American people

take no satisfaction in it, for it is an offence not only against history", an offence is where

you do something bad, "it's an offence not only against history, but an offence against

humanity." So, he's talking about the wall being, it upsets the whole world. What does

it do, this wall? It separates families, divides husbands and wives and brothers and sisters

and dividing people who wish to be joined together, okay? Right. Why have I put all

those funny colors all over the speech? Because I want you to get to know this speech in a

very detailed and close manner. Now, by... So, the color code is as follows. Underlined

in blue, we have people, names, and pronouns. People, names, and pronouns. Underlined in

red, I've put nouns, places, and objects, okay? This isn't a lesson about parts of speech,

okay? It's a lesson in how to bring a speech alive. Verbs underlined in green, adjectives

and adverbs underlined in black. I haven't underlined everything, I can see offence doesn't

have anything under it. As I said, I'm focusing on kind of getting the key meaning out. But

if you can do this color coding, you'll start to look at the text in a way that will make

you understand things that you didn't understand before, because you're really looking closely

at those sentences. But I have done this color coding because what we're going to do is I'm

going to read through, and to start with, I'm just going to say the things underlined

in blue. And I want to try and build a picture in my mind of the things being described.

What kind of feelings are attached to these words? "I", "West Berlin", "The Communist

System", "We", "It", talking about the wall, "It". So, that sound, "It", it's quite a sort

of short, sharp, there's quite a lot of sort of criticism, I feel, that is contained in

that word, "It", a very basic pronoun. Short vowel sound. Okay. After this, we have the

nouns, places, and objects. Town, city, years. Yeah, this has been going on for years. Vitality,

this is the people of West Berlin. What do they have? They've got force, hope, determination,

city, and then wall, yeah? Wall. Yeah, the voice sort of drops down, wall. It's quite

a sort of bleak sound, wall. Demonstration, failures, no satisfaction, offense. Yeah,

these are strong, you know, they've got a lot of thoughts and feelings attached to these

words. Humanity, families, husbands, brothers, sisters, people. The sense I'm getting is

that we've got this massive injustice. We've got all these people, all this life, but something

is getting in the way. Look at what he lists. Families, husbands, brothers, wives, sisters,

and then the sort of negative words attached to the wall. Failures, offense. So, there

are two different ideas, yeah? The terribleness of the wall and the strength of the West Berlin

people that need to be communicated in the speech. And then verbs, let's see what we

get from the verbs. No, besieged, yeah, that's quite a sort of violent word, isn't it? Lives.

See, take, separating, dividing. So, these are, again, negatives. Separating, dividing.

Wish, joined. Yeah, they're looking for something positive. Adjectives and adverbs. These are

quite difficult to see. They're sort of, I've got the little black dots. Eighteen. Eighteen

years we've had this wall. Eighteen, it's a long time. Still. Vivid. Together, yeah?

He's ending on a positive note. Together.

Okay, so I've kind of done my analysis. I'm starting to get an idea of where JFK is, what

he feels about this stuff. So, now I need to actually say it out, really going slowly

and really kind of feeling the sounds of the consonants and the vowels as they come, okay?

This might appear funny, okay, because I'm going to go slowly, yeah? But if you take

your time, then you get a fuller understanding. I know of no town, no city that has been besieged

for 18 years that still lives with the vitality and the force and the hope and the determination

of the city of West Berlin.

Okay, so let's just look at this section here. I need to try and find what the right pace

is with this speech. I don't want to go too fast, but I don't want to go too slow, because

I've got to connect with an audience, yeah? So, they need to understand this speech. If

I go too fast, they're not going to understand. If I go too slowly, they're going to get bored.

So, the punctuation can serve as a guide as to where to breathe. Look, I've got a list

here, no town, no city, but really I need to get all the way through to the end of this

thought, which is here. That's a long sentence. I know of no town, no city that has been besieged

for 18 years that still lives with the... So, if you don't have a full stop and you've

got a really long sentence, then your breaths, you're just going to be, like, topping up

for a little bit more breath. You're not going to get to go... Yeah? You're just going to

be, like, getting a little bit more so that you can get through to the end of the line.

But at this stage, it's better that we go slow than fast. "I know of no town", so I'm

starting to imagine, because I'm practicing this, that there's going to be an audience

listening to me. Okay? So, the more I get used to looking out, the more confident I'm

going to be when it comes to actually making the speech. "I know of no town, no city that

has been besieged for 18 years that still lives with the vitality and the force and

the hope and the determination of the city of West Berlin." Right. I didn't feel I quite

got that, because he's giving compliments to the people. Yep. He's talking to the people

of West Berlin, so I feel that next time I do that, I want to put in a little bit more

flattery. Yep. He's saying, "Hey, guys, you're doing a great job. The world cares about you."

So, how do we go about preparing a speech? Well, we go through our careful analysis,

we look. What kind of... Look at where the people, the names, and the pronouns, what

choice of words are being used, because that shows how someone is feeling about something.

But if you're doing quite a, you know, non-emotional speech at work, it's still good to do this

process because it will help you to see, well, what points are you making in this speech?

So, we go through our analysis. You practice saying the speech. Practice with the breaths.

Where can you breathe in the piece? Have you got long sentences like this? How are you

going to get through to the end of the sentence? And then when we're actually delivering it,

we need to think about our breaths, we need to think about the audience, we need to connect

with the text, with the real meaning of the text.

So, I'm going to leave it there with this video, but literally about now I'm about to

make two more videos about preparing and delivering speeches. So, if you're one of my subscriber,

you'll get those videos when they come onto this channel. Thanks for watching. I'll see

you in the next video.