Once you've written your Call-to-Action and the Key Points that drive your audience to take that action, you can turn to the best part of any speech or presentation. This is the real content, what I call Leading Materials in my Speech Development System.
Leading materials include everything you can think of: statistics, reports, quotations from experts, opinion pieces, music, images, activities the audience engages in, props, movement, movies, artists and celebrities, sports figures, and stories. These categories are unlimited, as long as you open your mind to limitless possibilities.
Use leading materials to help your audience eagerly accept a key point. This is the process of persuasion. Give the audience a bit of a taste of your key point by showing them an image or quoting someone well-known. They swallow that. You add another taste in a different form, and they swallow that. After they accept the third taste, they are ready to accept your key point.
You have led them step-by-step to the immediate destination, your key point.
Here are the three important steps to researching and collecting your leading materials:
1) During your Planning stage, make notes about the kind of leading materials you would like to have before each of your key points. These are brief. You might write "story about disastrous business trip" or "video of team meeting." Don't limit your notes about potential leading materials--just make notes of all your ideas.
2) During the Research stage, gather the actual materials. These may be digital files, physical props, word games or exercises you'll include on a hand out. If you're thinking about quotations, find them and print them on paper. It's really helpful to complete the research and gathering once you start it. Your mind will be in search mode and you'll get way more collected in less time than if you stop and start many times.
3) Once you've collected all your Leading Materials, you begin to physically insert them into the physical outline or road map of your speech or presentation.
Make hard copies of digital files (images, graphics, etc) so you can add them to your handwritten notes. If you are using quotations, print them out and add them to the stack. Pile your props next to the written parts. If you have games or exercises planned, put instructions about them onto paper and add them in order to your pile.
The end result should be a physical version of your speech or presentation, that you can hold in your hand, and spread out on a long table or stick to a wall. You want to be able to see all the pieces at once, and to move them around.
What about slides? That's the topic for the next post. Please return or sign up for a feed so you don't miss it.
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