quality of speech

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14.4 Practicing for Successful Speech Delivery

Learning objectives.

• Explain why having a strong conversational quality is important for effective public speaking.
• Explain the importance of eye contact in public speaking.
• Define vocalics and differentiate among the different factors of vocalics.
• Explain effective physical manipulation during a speech.
• Understand how to practice effectively for good speech delivery.

Christian Pierret – Speech – CC BY 2.0.

There is no foolproof recipe for good delivery. Each of us is unique, and we each embody different experiences and interests. This means each person has an approach, or a style, that is effective for her or him. This further means that anxiety can accompany even the most carefully researched and interesting message. Even when we know our messages are strong and well-articulated on paper, it is difficult to know for sure that our presentation will also be good.

We are still obligated to do our best out of respect for the audience and their needs. Fortunately, there are some tools that can be helpful to you even the very first time you present a speech. You will continue developing your skills each time you put them to use and can experiment to find out which combination of delivery elements is most effective for you.

What Is Good Delivery?

The more you care about your topic, the greater your motivation to present it well. Good delivery is a process of presenting a clear, coherent message in an interesting way. Communication scholar Stephen E. Lucas tells us:

Good delivery…conveys the speaker’s ideas clearly, interestingly, and without distracting the audience. 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).

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. 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). 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.

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. 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.

Conversational Style

Conversational style is a speaker’s ability to sound expressive and to be perceived by the audience as natural. It’s a style that approaches the way you normally express yourself in a much smaller group than your classroom audience. This means that you want to avoid having your presentation come across as didactic or overly exaggerated. 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. It might be helpful to remember that the two most important elements of the speech are the message and the audience. You are the conduit with the important role of putting the two together in an effective way. Your audience should be thinking about the message, not the delivery.

Stephen E. Lucas defines conversational quality as the idea that “no matter how many times a speech has been rehearsed, it still sounds spontaneous” [emphasis in original] (Lucas, 2009). No one wants to hear a speech that is so well rehearsed that it sounds fake or robotic. 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. When you can sound conversational, people pay attention.

Eye Contact

Eye contact is a speaker’s ability to have visual contact with everyone in the audience. Your audience should feel that you’re speaking to them, not simply uttering main and supporting points. 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. 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. Eye contact lets your audience feel that your attention is on them, not solely on the cards in front of you.

Sustained eye contact with your audience is one of the most important tools toward effective delivery. O’Hair, Stewart, and Rubenstein note that eye contact is mandatory for speakers to establish a good relationship with an audience (O’Hair, Stewart, & Rubenstein, 2001). Whether a speaker is speaking before a group of five or five hundred, the appearance of eye contact is an important way to bring an audience into your speech.

Eye contact can be a powerful tool. It is not simply a sign of sincerity, a sign of being well prepared and knowledgeable, or a sign of confidence; it also has the power to convey meanings. Arthur Koch tells us that all facial expressions “can communicate a wide range of emotions, including sadness, compassion, concern, anger, annoyance, fear, joy, and happiness” (Koch, 2010).

If you find the gaze of your audience too intimidating, you might feel tempted to resort to “faking” eye contact with them by looking at the wall just above their heads or by sweeping your gaze around the room instead of making actual eye contact with individuals in your audience until it becomes easier to provide real contact. The problem with fake eye contact is that it tends to look mechanical. Another problem with fake attention is that you lose the opportunity to assess the audience’s understanding of your message. Still, fake eye contact is somewhat better than gripping your cards and staring at them and only occasionally glancing quickly and shallowly at the audience.

This is not to say that you may never look at your notecards. On the contrary, one of the skills in extemporaneous speaking is the ability to alternate one’s gaze between the audience and one’s notes. Rehearsing your presentation in front of a few friends should help you develop the ability to maintain eye contact with your audience while referring to your notes. When you are giving a speech that is well prepared and well rehearsed, you will only need to look at your notes occasionally. This is an ability that will develop even further with practice. Your public speaking course is your best chance to get that practice.

Effective Use of Vocalics

Vocalics , also known as paralanguage, is the subfield of nonverbal communication that examines how we use our voices to communicate orally. This means that you speak loudly enough for all audience members (even those in the back of the room) to hear you clearly, and that you enunciate clearly enough to be understood by all audience members (even those who may have a hearing impairment or who may be English-language learners). If you tend to be soft-spoken, you will need to practice using a louder volume level that may feel unnatural to you at first. For all speakers, good vocalic technique is best achieved by facing the audience with your chin up and your eyes away from your notecards and by setting your voice at a moderate speed. Effective use of vocalics also means that you make use of appropriate pitch, pauses, vocal variety, and correct pronunciation.

If you are an English-language learner and feel apprehensive about giving a speech in English, there are two things to remember: first, you can meet with a reference librarian to learn the correct pronunciations of any English words you are unsure of; and second, the fact that you have an accent means you speak more languages than most Americans, which is an accomplishment to be proud of.

If you are one of the many people with a stutter or other speech challenge, you undoubtedly already know that there are numerous techniques for reducing stuttering and improving speech fluency and that there is no one agreed-upon “cure.” The Academy Award–winning movie The King’s Speech did much to increase public awareness of what a person with a stutter goes through when it comes to public speaking. It also prompted some well-known individuals who stutter, such as television news reporter John Stossel, to go public about their stuttering (Stossel, 2011). If you have decided to study public speaking in spite of a speech challenge, we commend you for your efforts and encourage you to work with your speech instructor to make whatever adaptations work best for you.

Volume refers to the loudness or softness of a speaker’s voice. As mentioned, public speakers need to speak loudly enough to be heard by everyone in the audience. In addition, volume is often needed to overcome ambient noise, such as the hum of an air conditioner or the dull roar of traffic passing by. In addition, you can use volume strategically to emphasize the most important points in your speech. Select these points carefully; if you emphasize everything, nothing will seem important. You also want to be sure to adjust your volume to the physical setting of the presentation. If you are in a large auditorium and your audience is several yards away, you will need to speak louder. If you are in a smaller space, with the audience a few feet away, you want to avoid overwhelming your audience with shouting or speaking too loudly.

Rate is the speed at which a person speaks. To keep your speech delivery interesting, your rate should vary. If you are speaking extemporaneously, your rate will naturally fluctuate. If you’re reading, your delivery is less likely to vary. Because rate is an important tool in enhancing the meanings in your speech, you do not want to give a monotone drone or a rapid “machine-gun” style delivery. Your rate should be appropriate for your topic and your points. A rapid, lively rate can communicate such meanings as enthusiasm, urgency, or humor. A slower, moderated rate can convey respect, seriousness, or careful reasoning. By varying rapid and slower rates within a single speech, you can emphasize your main points and keep your audience interested.

Pitch refers to the highness or lowness of a speaker’s voice. Some speakers have deep voices and others have high voices. As with one’s singing voice range, the pitch of one’s speaking voice is determined to a large extent by physiology (specifically, the length of one’s vocal folds, or cords, and the size of one’s vocal tract). We all have a normal speaking pitch where our voice is naturally settled, the pitch where we are most comfortable speaking, and most teachers advise speaking at the pitch that feels natural to you.

While our voices may be generally comfortable at a specific pitch level, we all have the ability to modulate, or move, our pitch up or down. In fact, we do this all the time. When we change the pitch of our voices, we are using inflections . Just as you can use volume strategically, you can also use pitch inflections to make your delivery more interesting and emphatic. If you ordinarily speak with a soprano voice, you may want to drop your voice to a slightly lower range to call attention to a particular point. How we use inflections can even change the entire meaning of what we are saying. For example, try saying the sentence “I love public speaking” with a higher pitch on one of the words—first raise the pitch on “I,” then say it again with the pitch raised on “love,” and so on. “ I love public speaking” conveys a different meaning from “I love public speaking,” doesn’t it?

There are some speakers who don’t change their pitch at all while speaking, which is called monotone . While very few people are completely monotone, some speakers slip into monotone patterns because of nerves. One way to ascertain whether you sound monotone is to record your voice and see how you sound. If you notice that your voice doesn’t fluctuate very much, you will need to be intentional in altering your pitch to ensure that the emphasis of your speech isn’t completely lost on your audience.

Finally, resist the habit of pitching your voice “up” at the ends of sentences. It makes them sound like questions instead of statements. This habit can be disorienting and distracting, interfering with the audience’s ability to focus entirely on the message. The speaker sounds uncertain or sounds as though he or she is seeking the understanding or approval of the listener. It hurts the speaker’s credibility and it needs to be avoided.

The effective use of pitch is one of the keys to an interesting delivery that will hold your audience’s attention.

Pauses are brief breaks in a speaker’s delivery that can show emphasis and enhance the clarity of a message. In terms of timing, the effective use of pauses is one of the most important skills to develop. Some speakers become uncomfortable very quickly with the “dead air” that the pause causes. And if the speaker is uncomfortable, the discomfort can transmit itself to the audience. That doesn’t mean you should avoid using pauses; your ability to use them confidently will increase with practice. Some of the best comedians use the well-timed pause to powerful and hilarious effect. Although your speech will not be a comedy routine, pauses are still useful for emphasis, especially when combined with a lowered pitch and rate to emphasize the important point you do not want your audience to miss.

Vocal Variety

Vocal variety has to do with changes in the vocalics we have just discussed: volume, pitch, rate, and pauses. No one wants to hear the same volume, pitch, rate, or use of pauses over and over again in a speech. Your audience should never be able to detect that you’re about to slow down or your voice is going to get deeper because you’re making an important point. When you think about how you sound in a normal conversation, your use of volume, pitch, rate, and pauses are all done spontaneously. If you try to overrehearse your vocalics, your speech will end up sounding artificial. Vocal variety should flow naturally from your wish to speak with expression. In that way, it will animate your speech and invite your listeners to understand your topic the way you do.

Pronunciation

The last major category related to vocalics is pronunciation , or the conventional patterns of speech used to form a word. Word pronunciation is important for two reasons: first, mispronouncing a word your audience is familiar with will harm your credibility as a speaker; and second, mispronouncing a word they are unfamiliar with can confuse and even misinform them. If there is any possibility at all that you don’t know the correct pronunciation of a word, find out. Many online dictionaries, such as the Wiktionary ( http://wiktionary.org ), provide free sound files illustrating the pronunciation of words.

Many have commented on the mispronunciation of words such as “nuclear” and “cavalry” by highly educated public speakers, including US presidents. There have been classroom examples as well. For instance, a student giving a speech on the Greek philosopher Socrates mispronounced his name at least eight times during her speech. This mispronunciation created a situation of great awkwardness and anxiety for the audience. Everyone felt embarrassed and the teacher, opting not to humiliate the student in front of the class, could not say anything out loud, instead providing a private written comment at the end of class.

One important aspect of pronunciation is articulation , or the ability to clearly pronounce each of a succession of syllables used to make up a word. Some people have difficulty articulating because of physiological problems that can be treated by trained speech therapists, but other people have articulation problems because they come from a cultural milieu where a dialect other than standard American English is the norm. Speech therapists, who generally guide their clients toward standard American English, use the acronym SODA when helping people learn how to more effectively articulate: substitutions , omissions , distortions , and additions .

• Substitutions occur when a speaker replaces one consonant or vowel with another consonant ( water becomes wudda ; ask becomes ax ; mouth becomes mouf ).
• Omissions occur when a speaker drops a consonant or vowel within a word ( Internet becomes Innet ; mesmerized becomes memerized ; probably becomes prolly ).
• Distortions occur when a speaker articulates a word with nasal or slurring sounds ( pencil sounds like mencil ; precipitation sounds like persination ; second sounds like slecond ).
• Additions occur when a speaker adds consonants or vowels to words that are not there ( anyway becomes anyways ; athletic becomes athaletic ; black becomes buhlack ; interpret becomes interpretate ).

Another aspect of pronunciation in public speaking is avoiding the use of verbal surrogates or “filler” words used as placeholders for actual words (like er , um , uh , etc.). You might be able to get away with saying “um” as many as two or three times in your speech before it becomes distracting, but the same cannot be said of “like.” We know of a student who trained herself to avoid saying “like.” As soon as the first speech was assigned, she began wearing a rubber band on her left wrist. Each time she caught herself saying “like,” she snapped herself with the rubber band. It hurt. Very quickly, she found that she could stop inflicting the snap on herself, and she had successfully confronted an unprofessional verbal habit.

Effective Physical Manipulation

In addition to using our voices effectively, a key to effective public speaking is physical manipulation , or the use of the body to emphasize meanings or convey meanings during a speech. While we will not attempt to give an entire discourse on nonverbal communication, we will discuss a few basic aspects of physical manipulation: posture, body movement, facial expressions, and dress. These aspects add up to the overall physical dimension of your speech, which we call self-presentation.

“Stand up tall!” I’m sure we’ve all heard this statement from a parent or a teacher at some point in our lives. The fact is, posture is actually quite important. When you stand up straight, you communicate to your audience, without saying a word, that you hold a position of power and take your position seriously. If however, you are slouching, hunched over, or leaning on something, you could be perceived as ill prepared, anxious, lacking in credibility, or not serious about your responsibilities as a speaker. While speakers often assume more casual posture as a presentation continues (especially if it is a long one, such as a ninety-minute class lecture), it is always wise to start by standing up straight and putting your best foot forward. Remember, you only get one shot at making a first impression, and your body’s orientation is one of the first pieces of information audiences use to make that impression.

Body Movement

Unless you are stuck behind a podium because of the need to use a nonmovable microphone, you should never stand in one place during a speech. However, movement during a speech should also not resemble pacing. One of our authors once saw a speaker who would walk around a small table where her speaking notes were located. She would walk around the table once, toss her chalk twice, and then repeat the process. Instead of listening to what the speaker was saying, everyone became transfixed by her walk-and-chalk-toss pattern. As speakers, we must be mindful of how we go about moving while speaking. One common method for easily integrating some movement into your speech is to take a few steps any time you transition from one idea to the next. By only moving at transition points, not only do you help focus your audience’s attention on the transition from one idea to the next, but you also are able to increase your nonverbal immediacy by getting closer to different segments of your audience.

Body movement also includes gestures. These should be neither overdramatic nor subdued. At one extreme, arm-waving and fist-pounding will distract from your message and reduce your credibility. At the other extreme, refraining from the use of gestures is the waste of an opportunity to suggest emphasis, enthusiasm, or other personal connection with your topic.

There are many ways to use gestures. The most obvious are hand gestures, which should be used in moderation at carefully selected times in the speech. If you overuse gestures, they lose meaning. Many late-night comedy parodies of political leaders include patterned, overused gestures or other delivery habits associated with a particular speaker. However, the well-placed use of simple, natural gestures to indicate emphasis, direction, size is usually effective. Normally, a gesture with one hand is enough. Rather than trying to have a gesture for every sentence, use just a few well-planned gestures. It is often more effective to make a gesture and hold it for a few moments than to begin waving your hands and arms around in a series of gestures.

Finally, just as you should avoid pacing, you will also want to avoid other distracting movements when you are speaking. Many speakers have unconscious mannerisms such as twirling their hair, putting their hands in and out of their pockets, jingling their keys, licking their lips, or clicking a pen while speaking. As with other aspects of speech delivery, practicing in front of others will help you become conscious of such distractions and plan ways to avoid doing them.

Facial Expressions

Faces are amazing things and convey so much information. As speakers, we must be acutely aware of what our face looks like while speaking. While many of us do not look forward to seeing ourselves on videotape, often the only way you can critically evaluate what your face is doing while you are speaking is to watch a recording of your speech. If video is not available, you can practice speaking in front of a mirror.

There are two extremes you want to avoid: no facial expression and overanimated facial expressions. First, you do not want to have a completely blank face while speaking. Some people just do not show much emotion with their faces naturally, but this blankness is often increased when the speaker is nervous. Audiences will react negatively to the message of such a speaker because they will sense that something is amiss. If a speaker is talking about the joys of Disney World and his face doesn’t show any excitement, the audience is going to be turned off to the speaker and his message. On the other extreme end is the speaker whose face looks like that of an exaggerated cartoon character. Instead, your goal is to show a variety of appropriate facial expressions while speaking.

Like vocalics and gestures, facial expression can be used strategically to enhance meaning. A smile or pleasant facial expression is generally appropriate at the beginning of a speech to indicate your wish for a good transaction with your audience. However, you should not smile throughout a speech on drug addiction, poverty, or the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. An inappropriate smile creates confusion about your meaning and may make your audience feel uncomfortable. On the other hand, a serious scowl might look hostile or threatening to audience members and become a distraction from the message. If you keep the meaning of your speech foremost in your mind, you will more readily find the balance in facial expression.

Another common problem some new speakers have is showing only one expression. One of our coauthors competed in speech in college. After one of his speeches (about how people die on amusement park rides), one of his judges pulled him aside and informed him that his speech was “creepy.” Apparently, while speaking about death, our coauthor smiled the entire time. The incongruity between the speech on death and dying and the coauthor’s smile just left the judge a little creeped out. If you are excited in a part of your speech, you should show excitement on your face. On the other hand, if you are at a serious part of your speech, your facial expressions should be serious.

While there are no clear-cut guidelines for how you should dress for every speech you’ll give, dress is still a very important part of how others will perceive you (again, it’s all about the first impression). If you want to be taken seriously, you must present yourself seriously. While we do not advocate dressing up in a suit every time you give a speech, there are definitely times when wearing a suit is appropriate.

One general rule you can use for determining dress is the “step-above rule,” which states that you should dress one step above your audience. If your audience is going to be dressed casually in shorts and jeans, then wear nice casual clothing such as a pair of neatly pressed slacks and a collared shirt or blouse. If, however, your audience is going to be wearing “business casual” attire, then you should probably wear a sport coat, a dress, or a suit. The goal of the step-above rule is to establish yourself as someone to be taken seriously. On the other hand, if you dress two steps above your audience, you may put too much distance between yourself and your audience, coming across as overly formal or even arrogant.

Another general rule for dressing is to avoid distractions in your appearance. Overly tight or revealing garments, over-the-top hairstyles or makeup, jangling jewelry, or a display of tattoos and piercings can serve to draw your audience’s attention away from your speech. Remembering that your message is the most important aspect of your speech, keep that message in mind when you choose your clothing and accessories.

Self-Presentation

When you present your speech, you are also presenting yourself. Self-presentation, sometimes also referred to as poise or stage presence, is determined by how you look, how you stand, how you walk to the lectern, and how you use your voice and gestures. Your self-presentation can either enhance your message or detract from it. Worse, a poor self-presentation can turn a good, well-prepared speech into a forgettable waste of time. You want your self-presentation to support your credibility and improve the likelihood that the audience will listen with interest.

Your personal appearance should reflect the careful preparation of your speech. Your personal appearance is the first thing your audience will see, and from it, they will make inferences about the speech you’re about to present.

One of the biggest mistakes novice public speakers make is to use the same gesture over and over again during a speech. While you don’t want your gestures to look fake, you should be careful to include a variety of different nonverbal components while speaking. You should make sure that your face, body, and words are all working in conjunction with each other to support your message.

Practice Effectively

You might get away with presenting a hastily practiced speech, but the speech will not be as good as it could be. In order to develop your best speech delivery, you need to practice—and use your practice time effectively. Practicing does not mean reading over your notes, mentally running through your speech, or even speaking your speech aloud over and over. Instead, you need to practice with the goal of identifying the weaknesses in your delivery, improving upon them, and building good speech delivery habits.

When you practice your speech, place both your feet in full, firm contact with the floor to keep your body from swaying side to side. Some new public speakers find that they don’t know what to do with their hands during the speech. Your practice sessions should help you get comfortable. When you’re not gesturing, you can rest your free hand lightly on a lectern or simply allow it to hang at your side. Since this is not a familiar posture for most people, it might feel awkward, but in your practice sessions, you can begin getting used to it.

Seek Input from Others

Because we can’t see ourselves as others see us, one of the best ways to improve your delivery is to seek constructive criticism from others. This, of course, is an aspect of your public speaking course, as you will receive evaluations from your instructor and possibly from your fellow students. However, by practicing in front of others before it is time to present your speech, you can anticipate and correct problems so that you can receive a better evaluation when you give the speech “for real.”

Ask your practice observers to be honest about the aspects of your delivery that could be better. Sometimes students create study groups just for this purpose. When you create a study group of classroom peers, everyone has an understanding of the entire creative process, and their feedback will thus be more useful to you than the feedback you might get from someone who has never taken the course or given a speech.

If your practice observers seem reluctant to offer useful criticisms, ask questions. How was your eye contact? Could they hear you? Was your voice well modulated? Did you mispronounce any words? How was your posture? Were your gestures effective? Did you have any mannerisms that you should learn to avoid? Because peers are sometimes reluctant to say things that could sound critical, direct questions are often a useful way to help them speak up.

If you learn from these practice sessions that your voice tends to drop at the ends of sentences, make a conscious effort to support your voice as you conclude each main point. If you learn that you have a habit of clicking a pen, make sure you don’t have a pen with you when you speak or that you keep it in your pocket. If your practice observers mention that you tend to hide your hands in the sleeves of your shirt or jacket, next time wear short sleeves or roll your sleeves up before beginning your speech. If you learn through practice that you tend to sway or rock while you speak, you can consciously practice and build the habit of not swaying.

When it is your turn to give feedback to others in your group, assume that they are as interested in doing well as you are. Give feedback in the spirit of helping their speeches be as good as possible.

Use Audio and/or Video to Record Yourself

Technology has made it easier than ever to record yourself and others using the proliferation of electronic devices people are likely to own. Video, of course, allows you the advantage of being able to see yourself as others see you, while audio allows you to concentrate on the audible aspects of your delivery. As we mentioned earlier in the chapter, if neither video nor audio is available, you can always observe yourself by practicing your delivery in front of a mirror.

After you have recorded yourself, it may seem obvious that you should watch and listen to the recording. This can be intimidating, as you may fear that your performance anxiety will be so obvious that everyone will notice it in the recording. But students are often pleasantly surprised when they watch and listen to their recordings, as even students with very high anxiety may find out that they “come across” in a speech much better than they expected.

A recording can also be a very effective diagnostic device. Sometimes students believe they are making strong contact with their audiences, but their cards contain so many notes that they succumb to the temptation of reading. By finding out from the video that you misjudged your eye contact, you can be motivated to rewrite your notecards in a way that doesn’t provide the opportunity to do so much reading.

It is most likely that in viewing your recording, you will benefit from discovering your strengths and finding weak areas you can strengthen.

Good Delivery Is a Habit

Luckily, public speaking is an activity that, when done conscientiously, strengthens with practice. As you become aware of the areas where your delivery has room for improvement, you will begin developing a keen sense of what “works” and what audiences respond to.

It is advisable to practice out loud in front of other people several times, spreading your rehearsals out over several days. To do this kind of practice, of course, you need to have your speech be finalized well ahead of the date when you are going to give it. During these practice sessions, you can time your speech to make sure it lasts the appropriate length of time. A friend of ours was the second student on the program in an event where each student’s presentation was to last thirty to forty-five minutes. After the first student had been speaking for seventy-five minutes, the professor in charge asked, “Can we speed this up?” The student said yes, and proceeded to continue speaking for another seventy-five minutes before finally concluding his portion of the program. Although we might fault the professor for not “pulling the plug,” clearly the student had not timed his speech in advance.

Your practice sessions will also enable you to make adjustments to your notecards to make them more effective in supporting your contact with your audience. This kind of practice is not just a strategy for beginners; it is practiced by many highly placed public figures with extensive experience in public speaking.

Your public speaking course is one of the best opportunities you will have to manage your performance anxiety, build your confidence in speaking extemporaneously, develop your vocal skills, and become adept at self-presentation. The habits you can develop through targeted practice are to build continuously on your strengths and to challenge yourself to find new areas for improving your delivery. By taking advantage of these opportunities, you will gain the ability to present a speech effectively whenever you may be called upon to speak publicly.

Key Takeaways

• Conversational style is a speaker’s ability to sound expressive while being perceived by the audience as natural. Conversational quality is a speaker’s ability to prepare a speech and rehearse a speech but still sound spontaneous when delivering it.
• Eye contact helps capture and maintain an audience’s interest while contributing to the speaker’s credibility.
• Vocalics are the nonverbal components of the verbal message. There are six important vocalic components for a speaker to be aware of: volume (loudness or softness), pitch (highness or lowness), rate (fastness or slowness), pauses (use of breaks to add emphasis), vocal variety (use of a range of vocalic strategies), and pronunciation (using conventional patterns of speech formation).
• Physical manipulation is the use of one’s body to add meaning and emphasis to a speech. As such, excessive or nonexistent physical manipulation can detract from a speaker’s speech.
• Good delivery is a habit that is built through effective practice.
• Find a speech online and examine the speaker’s overall presentation. How good was the speaker’s delivery? Make a list of the aspects of delivery in this chapter and evaluate the speaker according to the list. In what areas might the speaker improve?
• Record a practice session of your speech. Write a self-critique, answering the following questions: What surprised you the most? What is an area of strength upon which you can build? What is one area for improvement?

Koch, A. (2010). Speaking with a purpose (8th ed.). Boston, MA: Allyn & Bacon, p. 233.

Lucas, S. E. (2009). The art of public speaking (9th ed.). Boston, MA: McGraw-Hill, p. 244.

Mehrabian, A. (1972). Nonverbal communication . Chicago, IL: Aldine-Atherton.

Mitchell, O. (n.d.). Mehrabian and nonverbal communication [Web log post]. Retrieved from http://www.speakingaboutpresenting.com/presentation-myths/mehrabian-nonverbal-communication-research

O’Hair, D., Stewart, R., & Rubenstein, H. (2001). A speaker’s guidebook: Text and reference. Boston, MA: Bedford/St. Martin’s.

Stossel, J. (2011, March 2). An Academy Award–winning movie, stuttering and me [Web log post]. Retrieved from http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=42081

Stand up, Speak out Copyright © 2016 by University of Minnesota is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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10 Tips for Improving Your Public Speaking Skills

Few are immune to the fear of public speaking. Marjorie North offers 10 tips for speakers to calm the nerves and deliverable memorable orations.

Marjorie North

Snakes? Fine. Flying? No problem. Public speaking? Yikes! Just thinking about public speaking — routinely described as one of the greatest (and most common) fears — can make your palms sweat. But there are many ways to tackle this anxiety and learn to deliver a memorable speech.

In part one of this series,  Mastering the Basics of Communication , I shared strategies to improve how you communicate. In part two, How to Communicate More Effectively in the Workplace , I examined how to apply these techniques as you interact with colleagues and supervisors in the workplace. For the third and final part of this series, I’m providing you with public speaking tips that will help reduce your anxiety, dispel myths, and improve your performance.

Here Are My 10 Tips for Public Speaking:

1. nervousness is normal. practice and prepare.

All people feel some physiological reactions like pounding hearts and trembling hands. Do not associate these feelings with the sense that you will perform poorly or make a fool of yourself. Some nerves are good. The adrenaline rush that makes you sweat also makes you more alert and ready to give your best performance.

The best way to overcome anxiety is to prepare, prepare, and prepare some more. Take the time to go over your notes several times. Once you have become comfortable with the material, practice — a lot. Videotape yourself, or get a friend to critique your performance.

Communication Strategies: Presenting with Impact

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2. Know Your Audience. Your Speech Is About Them, Not You.

Before you begin to craft your message, consider who the message is intended for. Learn as much about your listeners as you can. This will help you determine your choice of words, level of information, organization pattern, and motivational statement.

3. Organize Your Material in the Most Effective Manner to Attain Your Purpose.

Create the framework for your speech. Write down the topic, general purpose, specific purpose, central idea, and main points. Make sure to grab the audience’s attention in the first 30 seconds.

4. Watch for Feedback and Adapt to It.

Keep the focus on the audience. Gauge their reactions, adjust your message, and stay flexible. Delivering a canned speech will guarantee that you lose the attention of or confuse even the most devoted listeners.

5. Let Your Personality Come Through.

Be yourself, don’t become a talking head — in any type of communication. You will establish better credibility if your personality shines through, and your audience will trust what you have to say if they can see you as a real person.

6. Use Humor, Tell Stories, and Use Effective Language.

Inject a funny anecdote in your presentation, and you will certainly grab your audience’s attention. Audiences generally like a personal touch in a speech. A story can provide that.

7. Don’t Read Unless You Have to. Work from an Outline.

Reading from a script or slide fractures the interpersonal connection. By maintaining eye contact with the audience, you keep the focus on yourself and your message. A brief outline can serve to jog your memory and keep you on task.

8. Use Your Voice and Hands Effectively. Omit Nervous Gestures.

Nonverbal communication carries most of the message. Good delivery does not call attention to itself, but instead conveys the speaker’s ideas clearly and without distraction.

9. Grab Attention at the Beginning, and Close with a Dynamic End.

Do you enjoy hearing a speech start with “Today I’m going to talk to you about X”? Most people don’t. Instead, use a startling statistic, an interesting anecdote, or concise quotation. Conclude your speech with a summary and a strong statement that your audience is sure to remember.

10. Use Audiovisual Aids Wisely.

Too many can break the direct connection to the audience, so use them sparingly. They should enhance or clarify your content, or capture and maintain your audience’s attention.

Practice Does Not Make Perfect

Good communication is never perfect, and nobody expects you to be perfect. However, putting in the requisite time to prepare will help you deliver a better speech. You may not be able to shake your nerves entirely, but you can learn to minimize them.

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About the Author

North is a consultant for political candidates, physicians, and lawyers, and runs a private practice specializing in public speaking, and executive communication skills. Previously, she was the clinical director in the department of speech and language pathology and audiology at Northeastern University.

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Speech Prosody: The Musical, Magical Quality of Speech

When we speak, we can vary how we use our voices. Our speech can be high or low (pitch), loud or soft (loudness), and fast or slow (duration). This variation in pitch, loudness, and duration is called speech prosody. It is a bit like making music. Varying our voices when we speak can express sarcasm or emotion and can even change the meaning of what we are saying. So, speech prosody is a crucial part of spoken language. But how do speakers produce prosody? How do listeners hear and understand these variations? Is it possible to hear and interpret prosody in other languages? And what about people whose hearing is not so good? Can they hear and understand prosodic patterns at all? Let’s find out!

During their first year at Hogwarts, Harry Potter and his friends learn the levitation charm “Wingardium Leviosa”. While practicing, Harry’s best friend, Ron, has a hard time making the feather on his desk obey his command and lift into the air. Hermione knows exactly why: “You’re saying it wrong. It’s Levi- o -sa, not Levio- sa ”. “You do it, then, if you’re so clever. Go on, go on!”, replies Ron. With a swish and a flick of her wand, Hermione speaks the charm “Win- gar -dium Levi- o -sa!” and her feather slowly rises from her desk. It turns out that the levitation charm only works if you say the magic words properly. In other words, what you say matters, but how you say it also makes a big difference. Hermione actually uses speech prosody to convince her feather to levitate.

What Is Speech Prosody?

Speech prosody is often described as the musical quality of speech [ 1 ]. If you think of vowels and consonants as the sounds of language that make up what you say, then prosody is related to how you say these sounds. When Hermione corrects Ron’s pronunciation, she does not correct any vowels or consonants. In fact, the vowels and consonants in “Levi- o -sa” and “Levio- sa ” are the same. What Hermione corrects instead is the stress pattern . Ron mistakenly places emphasis on “ sa ” in “Leviosa” when he is supposed to place it on “ o ”. Without the correct stress pattern, the words “Wingardium Leviosa” no longer have the intended meaning and the levitation charm does not work. Now, you might think: “great example, but the Harry Potter stories are fictional, and I could never make an object fly”. This may be true, but speech prosody works just as well in our Muggle (non-magic) world. Have you ever thought about how “object” can be pronounced in two ways? When we mentioned “object” a few sentences ago, we meant the noun that refers to a thing that can be seen and touched. In this context, you would pronounce “object” with stress on the first part of the word, like “ ob -ject”. But if you were to stress the second part, instead, it takes on a new meaning. The verb “ob- ject ” describes someone expressing disagreement. Think of how Hermione ob- jects to Ron’s pronunciation of the levitation charm. So, by simply changing the stress pattern, the word changes from a noun to a verb. Now that really is magic!

Speech prosody is more than just changing stress patterns though. When you speak, everything you do with your voice that is not directly related to pronouncing vowels and consonants is prosodic. Think of the rhythm and intonation of speech. Prosody makes speech sound less monotonous and boring. It can also change the meaning of speech—the meaning of a whole sentence can change by emphasizing different words! You can also make serious sentences sound sarcastic, or make happy stories sound sad, when you change the tone of your voice. Or you can turn statements into questions by changing the prosodic pattern. Try saying this sentence aloud: “See you tomorrow!”. Now say the sentence again, but this time turn it into a question: “See you tomorrow?” Notice how your voice goes up in pitch at the end of the sentence? This is speech prosody!

How Do We Use and Understand Prosody?

When we speak, we can (and do!) vary how high or low, how loud or soft, and how fast or slow our speech is. This variation in pitch , loudness , and duration is what creates the prosodic patterns of speech [ 1 ]. Everyone uses prosody when they speak. Even Ron uses prosody when he says “Levio- sa ” by pronouncing “ sa ” slightly higher, louder, and longer than the other parts of the word. Compare this to when Hermione says “Levi- o -sa”. She pronounces “ o ” higher, louder, and longer than the other parts of the word ( Figure 1 ). Whatever the prosodic pattern may be, it is always described in terms of the relative increase or decrease in pitch, loudness, and duration.

• Figure 1 - The different pronunciations of “Wingardium Leviosa” visualized in two ways.
• The speech waveform (top) shows the loudness of the recorded speech over time and the spectrogram (bottom) shows the loudness at different frequencies over time. In the spectrogram, the blue lines show the voice frequency, related to the perceived pitch, and the yellow lines show the intensity, related to the perceived loudness. You can see in (A) that “ o ” is higher (blue) and louder (yellow) than the other parts of “Levi- o -sa” and in (B) that “ sa ” is higher (blue) and louder (yellow) than the other parts of “Levio- sa ”.

When we listen to speech, we can usually hear the variation in pitch, loudness, and duration that a speaker produces. These prosodic patterns help us understand what was said [ 2 ]. Over time, we learn to recognize commonly used prosodic patterns and attach meaning to them. For example, when you were very young, you learned that someone is asking a question if their voice rises in pitch at the end of the sentence. But you may not always be aware of such connections. As a Muggle, you might never have realized how important the correct stress pattern is in “Levi- o -sa”, since these magic words have no function in the Muggle world. Ron, on the other hand, must learn the correct stress pattern if he wants to make objects fly. As a wizard, he has to make the connection between the stress pattern “Levi- o -sa” and its function: producing a proper levitation charm.

How Does Our Native Language Influence Prosody?

When Harry, Ron, and Hermione are in their fourth year, students from Durmstrang and Beauxbatons visit Hogwarts to compete in the Triwizard Tournament. These international students speak English, but English is not their native language. Now, imagine that Hermione wants to teach one of these international students the levitation charm. You might think that the difference between “Levi- o -sa” and “Levio- sa ” would be obvious to everyone, but in fact, people who speak another language might not be able to tell the difference as easily as you or Ron can. This is because not all languages use the same prosodic patterns. Have you, for instance, ever noticed how English or German sound very different from French or Italian? We have seen that, in English, a word can change meaning if you change the stress pattern (like in “ ob -ject” and “ob- ject ”), but in some other languages, stress patterns are always fixed. In French, for instance, stress is always on the final part of a word. So, Fleur, a student from the French wizarding school Beauxbatons, will probably say “Levio- sa ”, just like Ron does. But the question is: would Fleur realize that the correct pronunciation has a different stress pattern? Listeners tend to stick to what they know, and their native languages may influence how they perceive speech in another language. If Fleur listens to Hermione teaching her the spell, she might be able to hear that “Levi- o -sa” is different from “Levio- sa ”, but she will probably not realize how important the stress contrast is for the meaning of the word because stress contrasts do not exist in French. So, she may not recognize the stress contrast for what it is [ 3 ]. But do not worry, she can still learn to recognize it and if anyone can teach her, it is Hermione!

How Does Our Hearing Ability Influence Prosody Perception?

Good hearing is important for understanding prosody. After all, it would be hard to link prosodic patterns to their function if you could not hear the patterns in the first place. This is the case for listeners who hear very little or are completely deaf. Fortunately, a device called a cochlear implant ( Figure 2 ) can bring back some hearing for these listeners. A surgeon implants a wire with tiny electrodes into part of the inner ear called the cochlea. This is the place where healthy ears transform soundwaves into electrical signals that are then sent to the brain via the auditory nerve. For listeners with cochlear implants, the transformation of soundwaves into electrical signals happens via the device and the electrodes send these signals to the auditory nerve directly. Listening with a cochlear implant is sometimes called electric hearing. In a sense, it is magical that this device can bring back some hearing, but electric hearing is far from perfect. Listeners with cochlear implants have difficulty hearing pitch differences [ 4 ]. If Ron had a cochlear implant, it would have been very hard for him to hear that Hermione pronounces “ o ” slightly higher in pitch than the other parts of the word “Levi- o -sa”. However, he would still be able to hear it as louder and longer, so there is a chance he would be able to learn the correct stress pattern with practice. In time, he would probably still be able to make sense of the prosodic pattern based on what he could hear, although this would be much harder work than if his hearing was not impaired.

• Figure 2 - Ear with a cochlear implant.
• The wire with electrodes is implanted in the spiral-shaped cochlea, which is the blue part that looks like a snail. The electrodes of the cochlear implant send sound-like electrical signals directly to the auditory nerve. The yellow lines attached to the cochlea are part of the auditory nerve. The auditory nerve carries the electrical signals to the brain (Image credit: https://media.healthdirect.org.au/images/inline/original/cochlear-implant-illustration-445004.jpg ).

What Is the Magic of Speech Prosody?

The fact that speech prosody can make objects fly is pretty magical. But do you know what is even more magical? That you now know how important speech prosody is! It is like you have been waiting for a Hogwarts letter announcing you are off to Wizarding school so you can finally learn all about the magical powers of speech prosody. Well, here it is. Your letter has arrived. So, what are you waiting for? Get ready to go out into the Muggle world and use your speech prosody magic!

Speech Prosody : ↑ The musical quality of speech, like stress, rhythm, and intonation. It can express sarcasm and emotions, and it can also change the meaning of speech.

Stress Pattern : ↑ The way parts of a word or sentence are stressed or unstressed. Stressed parts are emphasized by increasing the relative pitch, loudness, and duration.

Rhythm : ↑ The structured organization of speech parts over time, like the beat of a song. Speech usually has a rhythm that you can tap along to.

Intonation : ↑ The way pitch varies over time, like the melody of a song.

Pitch : ↑ How high or low speech is. What we hear as pitch can be measured as the frequency of a voice—when the frequency goes up, the perceived pitch goes up.

Loudness : ↑ How loud or soft speech is. What we hear as loudness can be measured as the intensity of a voice—when the intensity goes up, the perceived loudness goes up.

Duration : ↑ How long or short speech is. The duration of speech is measured over time.

Cochlear Implant : ↑ An electronic device that can bring back hearing for deaf individuals. It uses electrodes to send sound-like electrical signals to the auditory nerve directly.

Conflict of Interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Acknowledgments

This project was supported by the Center for Language and Cognition Groningen (CLCG) and by the VICI grant 918-17-603 from the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) and the Netherlands Organization for Health Research and Development (ZonMw). Further support was provided by the Heinsius Houbolt Foundation. We would like to thank Caryl Hart for her feedback on an earlier draft of the manuscript.

[1] ↑ Cole, J. 2015. Prosody in context: a review. Lang. Cogn. Neurosci. 30:1–31. doi: 10.1080/23273798.2014.963130

[2] ↑ Cutler, A., Dahan, D., and van Donselaar, W. 1997. Prosody in the comprehension of spoken language: a literature review. Lang. Speech 40:141–201. doi: 10.1177/002383099704000203

[3] ↑ Dupoux, E., Peperkamp, S., and Sebastián-Gallés, N. 2001. A robust method to study stress “deafness”. J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 110:1606–18. doi: 10.1121/1.1380437

[4] ↑ Everhardt, M. K., Sarampalis, A., Coler, M., Başkent, D., and Lowie, W. 2020. Meta-analysis on the identification of linguistic and emotional prosody in cochlear implant users and vocoder simulations. Ear. Hear. 41:1092–102. doi: 10.1097/AUD.0000000000000863

Top 10 Qualities of a Good Speech

Oral communication is the oldest and most widely used medium of communication. It can take place in different forms and speech is one of them. Speech is generally, the most effective medium of delivering the message in a meeting, seminars, conferences, etc. Speech refers to delivering the message through words of mouth or spoken words in front of the audience gathered in a meeting, seminar or conference.

Through speech, the speaker can present his opinions and thoughts on any matter to a large number of audiences at a time.

Therefore, it is widely used in delivering an oral message in business, social, political and religious gatherings.

A speech is a highly structured form of address in which a speaker addresses an audience gathered to hear a message.

At least, we can say that speech is a kind of formal address delivered to an audience gathered in a place to hear a message.

Related:  7C’s of Business Communication

What does a Good Speech have?

A good speech has 10 qualities that can effectively deliver a message through words of mouth or spoken words in front of an audience gathered in a meeting, seminar or conference.

Speech is an effective means of oral communication. It is delivered in front of a large gathering.

Therefore, speech serves as an important medium for presenting information in meetings, political or business gatherings.

However, a speech becomes effective when it fulfills the following features:

• Clarity Clarity is an essential feature of a good speech. A speech should be clear and unambiguous so that the audience can understand it easily. If it is not clear enough to express its meaning to the audience, it will become ineffective.
• Definiteness of Message The message of the speech should be definite and relevant to the subject matter.
• Conciseness The audience becomes impatient with a long speech. Hence, speech should be as concise as possible. However, it should not incomplete.
• Interesting A speech should be delivered in an interesting and pleasing way so that the audience is motivated to pay attention. In order to make the speech interesting, various stories, examples, quotations, and jokes can be cited.
• Informal Touch Though speech is a formal address, it should be presented in a personal and informal way.
• Considering the Audience Speech is delivered to a specific audience. So the speaker should actively consider the expectations, interest, and nature of the audience.
• Speaking Slowly An ideal speech is one that is delivered slowly and in the usual tone. It helps the audience to hear and understand the message clearly.
• Free from Emotions Another important feature of a good speech is that it should be delivered in an unbiased and unemotional way. Speaker’s emotion may drive him away from the main theme.
• Use of Body Language Good Speech goes with necessary body language. Therefore, at the time of delivering a speech, the speaker should use various nonverbal cues.
• Ensuring Participation of Audience A good speech is one that ensures the participation of the audience with the speaker. That means the audience will ensure their attention through effective listening, expressing their solidarity with the speech and so on.

If your speech fails to hit the checkboxes for these qualities, then it will lose its edge.

Despite a few limitations of a speech; if done well enough you make the audience move the earth for you.

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Assessing Speech

Causes of abnormal speech.

• Psychiatric disorder - mood disorder, anxiety, schizophrenia
• Confusion - delirium, dementia, intellectual disability
• Dysphasia / aphasia
• Dysarthria - stroke, brain injury, Parkinson's, MS
• Dysphonia - laryngitis, neuropathology, trauma, mass, atrophy, systemic disease
• Hearing impairment
• English as a non-native language
• Intoxication

Rate of Speech

Interpretation.

• Slow speech (bradylalia) Depression, Parkinson's disease, cognitive impairment
• Normal speech rate
• Rapid speech (tachylalia) - fast speech but able to be redirected Normal, mania, anxiety, stimulants
• Pressured speech - fast and without taking breaks, talking over other people and unable to be redirected Mania, anxiety

Volume of Speech

• Loud (hyperphonia) Personality trait, hearing impairment, mania
• Normal speech volume
• Weak (hypophonia) - low or soft speech Shyness, anxiety, depression, Parkinson's disease

Quantity of Speech

• Excessive talking (logorrhoea) - speaking at length and apparently without end Mania, ADHD, anxiety
• Talkative - actively takes part in conversation. Normal
• Poverty of speech - very little speech, even with persuasion. Shyness, depression, schizophrenia, cognitive impairment

Examples of Dysfluency

• Stuttering - repetition, prolongation, or pauses in speech May be developmental, neurogenic, or psychogenic
• Cluttering - rapid, disorganized speech with excessive word and phrase repetitions Often related to language or learning disabilities

Causes of Impaired Speech Fluency

• Foreign language
• Expressive - varied pitch and intonation Normal tonality
• Monotone - the patient uses a single tone for vocal expression. Boredom, depression, schizophrenia, autism spectrum disorder
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Why the Tone of Your Voice Makes Such a Difference

Shifting your tone doesn't mean being phony; it's about being grounded..

Posted September 14, 2021 | Reviewed by Chloe Williams

• People are more sensitive to tone than to the explicit content of spoken or written language, and a sharp tone can hurt others.
• Shifting one's tone doesn’t mean becoming sugary or phony. In fact, paying attention to tone can make people stronger communicators.
• When one is already in a critical frame of mind, taking a break or dealing with feelings directly can help people avoid a harsh tone.

Feeling a little sour?

The Practice:

The tone of your voice is important.

Tone matters.

I remember times I felt frazzled or aggravated and then said something with an edge to it that just wasn't necessary or useful. Sometimes it was the words themselves: such as absolutes like "never" or always," or over-the-top phrases like "you're such a flake" or "that was stupid." More often, it was the intonation in my voice, a harsh vibe or look, interrupting, or a certain intensity in my body. However, I did it, and the people on the receiving end usually looked like they'd just sucked a lemon. This is what I mean by tart tone.

People are more sensitive to tone than to the explicit content of spoken or written language. To paraphrase the poet Maya Angelou, people will forget what you said, but they'll remember how you made them feel. And we are particularly reactive to negative tones due to the negativity bias in the brain (written about in previous posts).

Consequently, a tart tone hurts others. This is bad enough, but it also often triggers others to react in ways that harm you and others.

On the other hand, paying attention to tone puts you more in touch with yourself because you have to be aware of what's building inside—promoting mindfulness and builds up its neural substrates. Containing negative tones prompts you to open to and deal with any underlying stress , hurt, anger . It reduces the chance that the other person will avoid dealing with what you say by shifting attention to how you say it. Cleaning up your style of expression puts you in a stronger position to ask people to do the same or act better toward you in other ways.

As a proverb says, "Getting angry with others is like throwing hot coals with bare hands: both people get burned." Much the same could be said about throwing tart tone.

Shifting your tone doesn't mean becoming sugary, saccharine, or phony. Nor does it mean walking on eggshells, becoming a doormat, or muzzling yourself. Actually, when people shift away from being snippy, curt, snarky, derisive, or contentious, they usually become stronger communicators. They're now more grounded, more dignified when they bring up something. They haven't squandered interpersonal capital on the short-term gratifications of harsh tone.

Sometimes people are tart with each other in playful ways, and that's OK. But keep watching to see how it's landing on the other person.

Be mindful of what's called " priming ": feeling already mistreated, annoyed, irritated—or already in a critical frame of mind. Little things can land on this priming like a match on a pile of firecrackers, setting them off. Maybe simply take a break (e.g., bathroom, meal, shower, run, gardening, TV) to clear away some or all of the priming. And/or try to deal with hurt, anger, or stress in a straightforward way (if possible), rather than blowing off steam with your tone.

Then, if you do, in fact, get triggered, notice what comes up to say. If it's critical, acerbic, cutting , etc., then slow down, say nothing, or say something truly useful. Watch those eye rolls or the sharp sigh that means "Duh-oh, that was kind of dumb" (my wife has called me on both of these). Give a little thought to your choice of words: Could there be a way to say what you want to say without pouring gasoline on the fire? Look for words that are accurate, constructive, self-respecting, and get to the heart of the matter. Be especially careful with an email; once you push the "send" button, there is no getting it back, and the receiver can read your message over and over again, plus share it with others.

If you do slip, clean it up as soon as possible—which could be a minute after you say it. Sometimes it works to explain—not justify or defend—the underlying reasons for your tart tone (e.g., you're fried and hungry, and it's been a tough day) to put it in context. Take responsibility for your tone and its impacts, and recommit to a clearer, cleaner, more direct way of expressing yourself.

At the end of an interaction, you may not get the result you want from the other person—but you can get the result of self-respect and feeling that you did the best you could.

Facebook image: Mangostar/Shutterstock

LinkedIn image: Josep Suria/Shutterstock

Rick Hanson, Ph.D. , is a senior fellow of the Greater Good Center at UC Berkeley.

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At any moment, someone’s aggravating behavior or our own bad luck can set us off on an emotional spiral that threatens to derail our entire day. Here’s how we can face our triggers with less reactivity so that we can get on with our lives.

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Release type: Speech

Date: 16 May 2024

Education Services for Overseas Students Amendment (Quality and Integrity) Bill 2024

Australians understand the importance of education.

The power of it.

We value it. What it can do to open the doors of opportunity for Australians. To change lives.

We invest in it. You see evidence of that in this year’s budget.

And we export it to the world.

And it’s a big export. The biggest we don’t dig out of the ground. Our fourth largest export overall.

In the last decade we have helped to educate more than 3 million people from around the world.

A $48 billion dollar industry.

But it doesn’t just make us money.

It also makes us friends.

Because when a student comes here to study they don’t just get an education.

A bit of Australia rubs off on them.

They fall in love with the place. And when they go home, they take that love and affection for us back home with them.

And they use the knowledge and the qualifications they’ve gained in Australia to become leaders and scientists, teachers and entrepreneurs in our neighbouring countries.

That makes this no ordinary export industry.

It’s important to our economy. And it’s important to Australia.

That’s why this bill is important. It ensures its integrity and quality. And it provides long term certainty for the sector and sustainable growth over time.

The pandemic kneecapped international education. The former government told students to go home and they did.

Almost overnight, an industry worth $40 billion was effectively halved to $22 billion.

The students are now back, but so are the shonks.

The shonks and crooks looking to take advantage of students and make a quick buck at the expense of this critical national asset.

Unscrupulous actors who are a threat to our good name as a place where the best and the brightest from around the world can come and get the best education in the world.

Since we were elected we have been working on this.

In September 2022 we announced the Parkinson Review of the Migration System.

In January 2023 the Nixon Rapid Review into the Exploitation of Australia’s Visa System.

These reviews brought urgent attention to integrity issues in international education.

We moved quickly on the recommendations of those reviews.

In July last year, we got rid of unlimited work rights for international students by re-introducing a working hours cap at 24 hours per week.

This allowed students to support themselves but not at the expense of their studies. And it was the first step in reducing the lure of getting a student visa as a backdoor to work here.

In August last year I closed the “concurrent enrolment” loophole that allowed agents and providers to shift international students who had been here for less than six months from one course to another, a cheaper one. From genuine study to no study at all. Another backdoor way just to work here.

In October last year we boosted the capacity of the VET regulator, ASQA, through a $38 million investment and establishing an integrity unit.

The same month we increased the amount of savings that international students now require to get a student visa – to $24,505. It’s now $29,710.

In March of this year we increased the English language requirement for students, introduced a new Genuine Student requirement and increased the number of “no further stay” conditions on certain cohorts of visa students.

Many of these measures are in response not only to the Parkinson and Nixon reviews, but to feedback from the sector.

They know that dodgy education agents and providers create problems for the whole industry. And they are a threat to the reputations of the universities and providers who are doing the right thing.

It’s very important that this important part of our economy maintains its social licence to operate.

Not only are the students back, Mr Speaker, but they’re back faster than anyone unexpected.

Here and in other countries.

At the Universities Australia Gala Dinner in February last year I spoke about how the trajectory of the total number of international students enrolled in our universities wouldn’t get back to pre-pandemic levels until the end of 2025.

Well, they are back already.

That’s a vote of confidence in our institutions and providers.

And in Australia as a place where the best and brightest come to study.

But it is also something we need to manage carefully and protect from bad actors.

And that’s what this bill does.

It amends the Education Services for Overseas Students Act to include measures which directly respond to issues identified in the Nixon and Migration Reviews.

The amendments are also informed by the 2023 interim report of the Joint Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade, entitled “Quality and Integrity – the quest for sustainable growth: Interim report into international education”, and I take this opportunity to thank my colleagues, in particular the Member for Bruce who is with us in the Chamber, and  Senator O’Neill and the other members of that Committee, for their outstanding work on that interim report.

One of the issues this bill addresses is the activities of education agents and their interaction with providers in Australia.

There’s an important role for education agents in helping students navigate their move from one country to another to study.

But what the reviews and sector feedback have told us is that we have a problem with collusive and unscrupulous practices between some agents and providers.

In response, the bill inserts a new definition of “education agent” which better captures their activities. It strengthens the fit and proper requirement used by regulators to apply increased scrutiny to cross-ownership of businesses, including those between an education agent and an education provider.

The bill also inserts a definition of “education agent commission”. This will allow for complementary amendments to be made to the National Code of Practice for Providers of Education and Training to Overseas Students 2018 to ban commissions from being paid to education agents for onshore student transfers.

It's something that the sector has asked for and will help address agents poaching newly arrived students to shift from their original course into a cheaper one, a more limited course, at a different provider.

To further support this and to increase transparency around the operation of education agents, the bill requires providers to give information to the Secretary on request about education agent commissions they have given, and strengthens the ability of the Secretary of the Department of Education or the relevant regulator to give information to registered providers about education agents.

Access to performance data about all education agents, not just agents they have an existing relationship with, will enable providers to make better informed decisions about who they choose to engage with.

The bill also introduces measures to improve the management of applications for registration as a provider or the addition of courses to an existing provider’s registration.

Importantly, it allows the Minister for Education to direct via legislative instrument that relevant regulators, called ESOS agencies in the Act, are not required to, or must not, accept or process these applications for a period of up to 12 months.

The Joint Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade heard evidence of instances where some providers were offering courses to international students only, which can be an indicator of poor quality.

The bill addresses this by changing the registration requirements for education providers to require that new providers deliver a course to domestic students for two years before they can apply to register to deliver courses to international students.

This builds on the requirements recently introduced in the National Vocational Education and Training Regulator Act 2011 and means that new providers will need a track record with their domestic students before extending delivery to international students.

And it means that ESOS agencies have time to focus on any integrity issues with a new provider before they enter the international market.

It will also deter dodgy providers from setting up “ghost colleges” – fronts that exist mainly to get students a visa so they can work without ever attending a class.

English-language courses – ELICOS – and Foundation programs will be exempt from these measure as they only deliver to international students, as will be Table A providers under the Higher Education Support Act 2003 to ensure that they remain able to restructure their existing business operations without attracting the limitation.

The bill also helps build quality in the sector by enabling the automatic cancellation of a provider’s registration where it has not delivered a course to an overseas student over 12 consecutive months.

This complements recent changes to the National Vocational Education and Training Regulator Act 2011 and targets integrity risks posed by dormant providers. 

These providers are not demonstrating a commitment to international students, and can be a vehicle for unscrupulous actors to bypass registration requirements for entering the sector through the purchase of dormant providers.

There are protections to ensure that schools are exempt due to the smaller number of overseas students they teach, and applications for extensions may be made to ensure that genuine providers are not affected or inconvenienced.

Finally on providers, the bill strengthens the fit and proper test applied by ESOS agencies to providers to take into account whether a provider is under investigation for a specific offence, such as human trafficking, slavery or slavery-like practices.

Mr Deputy Speaker, I said earlier that we have to ensure that we manage the international education industry in a way that delivers the greatest benefit to Australia, whilst maintaining its social licence from the Australian people.

In keeping with the responsible approach from this Government, the bill introduces powers for the Minister for Education to manage sector enrolments to deliver sustainable growth.

These are to make enrolment limits by legislative instrument, or by individual notice, for providers. These may relate to a provider level ‘total enrolment limit’, or at the course level imposing a ‘course enrolment limit’, or a combination of the two.

In setting enrolment limits, the Minister for Education will take into account the relevance of courses to Australia’s skills needs.

An additional consideration for the Minister for Education when setting limits will be the supply of purpose built student accommodation available to both domestic and international students. 

Where a limit impacts the VET sector, the Minister for Education must obtain agreement from the Minister for Skills and Training prior to introducing a limit.

There are transitional provisions to ensure that any limits only apply to new enrolments for the 2025 calendar year, and the Minister for Education is able to exempt specific courses from any total enrolment limit imposed on a provider.

Finally, the bill enables the automatic suspension and cancellation of courses specified by the Minister for Education, with agreement from the Minister for Skills and Training where it affects the VET sector, by legislative instrument.

This allows the Minister for Education to limit the delivery of courses with systemic quality issues, limited value to Australia’s critical skills need, or where it is in the public interest to do so – for instance, where students are being exploited.

At the Australian International Education Conference in October last year I said that the Government wanted to work with the international education industry to make sure we get these reforms right.

And I am serious about doing this in consultation with the sector.

This week the Government released a draft international education and skills framework for consultation.

We will consult with the sector on the implementation of the powers set out in the bill.

This will be through broad and continued engagement with the Council for International Education, and with the sector.

Stakeholders like Universities Australia, the Group of Eight, the International Education Association Australia, TAFE Directors Australia, the Independent Tertiary Education Council Australia and the Regional Universities Network.

This work will take place over the next few months, with the intention that any limits will have a start date of 1 January 2025.

One thing that the framework makes clear is that international education is not a one-way street.

In the last couple of years we have made great strides in taking Australian education overseas – teaching in international branch campuses where students can get the benefit of an Australian education without having to  leave home.

We are already a global leader here. There are more than 10 Australian universities operating International Branch Campuses across 10 countries, with 3 further branch campuses expected to open later this year.

Universities like Monash, who have the first foreign university campus in Indonesia.

Or Wollongong, with their campus in GIFT City, India and Western Sydney University soon to open in Surabaya.

That’s a key part of this too. And I look forward to working with the sector as consultation on the framework progresses.

Mr Deputy Speaker, the important measures in this bill are the next steps in strengthening our international education sector, shutting out the shonks, giving our providers long term certainty and setting this national asset up for future success.

I commend the bill to the House.

GenTranslate: Large Language Models are Generative Multilingual Speech and Machine Translators

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have stepped forward the development of multilingual speech and machine translation by its reduced representation errors and incorporated external knowledge. However, both translation tasks typically utilize beam search decoding and top-1 hypothesis selection for inference. These techniques struggle to fully exploit the rich information in the diverse N-best hypotheses, making them less optimal for translation tasks that require a single, high-quality output sequence. In this paper, we propose a new generative paradigm for translation tasks, namely GenTranslate, which builds upon LLMs to generate better results from the diverse translation versions in N-best list. Leveraging the rich linguistic knowledge and strong reasoning abilities of LLMs, our new paradigm can integrate the rich information in N-best candidates to generate a higher-quality translation result. Furthermore, to support LLM finetuning, we build and release a HypoTranslate dataset that contains over 592K hypotheses-translation pairs in 11 languages. Experiments on various speech and machine translation benchmarks (e.g., FLEURS, CoVoST-2, WMT) demonstrate that our GenTranslate significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art model.

• Large Language Models are Efficient Learners of Noise-Robust Speech Recognition
• HyPoradise: An Open Baseline for Generative Speech Recognition with Large Language Models
• It's Never Too Late: Fusing Acoustic Information into Large Language Models for Automatic Speech Recognition
• Whispering LLaMA: A Cross-Modal Generative Error Correction Framework for Speech Recognition

The Analysis of Voice Quality in Speech Processing

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Voice quality has been defined as the characteristic auditory colouring of an individual’s voice, derived from a variety of laryngeal and supralaryngeal features and running continuously through the individual’s speech. The distinctive tone of speech sounds produced by a particular person yields a particular voice. Voice quality is at the centre of several speech processing issues. In speech recognition, voice differences, particularly extreme divergences from the norm, are responsible for known performance degradations. In speech synthesis on the other hand, voice quality is a desirable modelling parameter, with millions of voice types that can be distinguished theoretically. This article reviews the experimental derivation of voice quality markers. Specifically, the use of perceptual judgements, the long-term averaged spectrum (LTAS) and prosodic markers is examined, as well as inverse filtering for the extraction of the glottal source waveform. This review suggests that voice quality is best investigated as a multi-dimensional parameter space involving a combination of factors involving individual prosody, temporally structured speech characteristics, spectral divergence and voice source features, and that it could profitably complement simple linguistic prosodic model processing in speech synthesis.

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Keller, E. (2005). The Analysis of Voice Quality in Speech Processing. In: Chollet, G., Esposito, A., Faundez-Zanuy, M., Marinaro, M. (eds) Nonlinear Speech Modeling and Applications. NN 2004. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 3445. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11520153_4

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Remarks by the Deputy Prime Minister on building more $10-a-day child care spaces in Nova Scotia

From: Department of Finance Canada

Our budget is about ensuring fairness for every generation—especially younger Canadians. That’s why an important part of our plan is about helping young parents across Canada by improving access to affordable, high-quality early learning and child care.

May 14, 2024 - Nova Scotia

CHECK AGAINST DELIVERY

It is great to be in Bridgewater today. I’m glad to be here with my colleague, Minister Jenna Sudds, and with Minister Becky Druhan. And I am so glad to be here with the Lunenburg County YMCA Childcare Centre. You guys do an amazing job.

Child care is expensive. Without government help, monthly fees can easily add up to a second rent or mortgage payment.

Young people—and let’s be honest, especially young women—often have to choose between having a family and having a career. It’s not fair. Our government is changing that.

And that’s why, three years ago, we launched our national system of early learning and child care from coast to coast to coast.

And I am so thrilled to be right here in Bridgewater, where this system is working.

Today, child care fees are down by at least 50 per cent across Canada. This year, families in Nova Scotia are saving up to $6,000—per child. 

Early learning and child care is feminist social policy, and we are proud of that. It is also feminist economic policy.

Our affordable system of early learning and child care has already enabled a near record-high labour force participation rate of 85.5 per cent for working age Canadian women. And that is driving jobs and growth in communities across the country.

This is incredible progress. But we need to do more. If you talk to young parents across Canada, they will tell you how hard it is to find a space for their kid.  

That’s why I’m very glad to announce that our government is investing $19.8 million to help reach our goal of 9,500 $10-a-day child care spaces here in Nova Scotia by March 2026.

And as we’ve already heard, and thanks to a great partnership with the Government of Nova Scotia, we are well on our way.

This funding comes through our $625 million Early Learning and Child Care Infrastructure Fund, which supports provinces and territories to invest in infrastructure that will make child care more accessible in underserved communities—including rural and remote communities, and high-cost or low-income neighbourhoods here in Nova Scotia.

Today’s announcement builds on measures we introduced in our 2024 budget, including expanding student loan forgiveness for early childhood educators in rural and remote communities.

The education of educators is such an important investment.

One of the things I really loved about the room that we walked through was that many educators have a little page up introducing themselves so that families can get to know the people who are caring for their children. I thought that was wonderful. And in her introduction, one of the educators paid tribute to her own family, to her husband and to her kids, for supporting her as she got the education she needed to do her important work.

So expanding student loan forgiveness for early learning and childhood educators in rural and remote communities is about helping more educators like that know that they can afford to get the education they need to do their important jobs.

It’s a program that’s already in place now for doctors and nurse practitioners because I think we all know how urgently we need doctors and nurse practitioners in our rural and remote communities.

By extending the student loan forgiveness program to early learning and child care educators, we’re offering direct financial support but we’re also offering recognition.

What we're saying is: your work is essential too, and we know it.  

We are creating more child care spaces in Nova Scotia and across Canada to help provide what we urgently need as a country: more places in great daycare centres like the one here at the Lunenburg County YMCA.

I’m going to conclude by sharing some great economic news:

Last week, we learned that Canada added 90,000 new jobs in April. That means today, 1.3 million more Canadians are working compared to before the pandemic.

The OECD expects the Canadian economy to see the second fastest rate of growth among the G7 this year and the fastest growth in 2025, tied with the U.S.

And last month, Moody’s, one of the leading credit ratings agencies, re-affirmed Canada’s triple-A credit rating with a stable outlook.

Moody’s also predicts that, over the medium term, Canada will see stronger economic growth than some other triple-A economies and that inflation will be near the Bank of Canada’s midpoint target of two per cent.

These are very powerful economic proof points. They show that Canada’s economy is strong and resilient. They show that our economic plan is fiscally responsible. And that really matters, because it means we can afford to make the investments Canada needs—investments in things like a national system of early learning and child care and a national school food program—that will create the good jobs Canadians need. It means the federal government can responsibly invest and borrow at lower costs, as can other orders of government and Canadian businesses. 

Our government is acting now—and acting with purpose—with a fiscally responsible economic plan. Because younger Canadians are counting on it.

Thank you very much.

Page details

Tavia Hunt, wife of Chiefs CEO, supports Harrison Butker’s commencement speech

KANSAS CITY, Mo. ( KCTV /Gray News) – Tavia Hunt, the director of the Kansas City Chiefs Women’s Organization and wife of Chiefs CEO Clark Hunt, is supporting Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker after he gave a controversial commencement speech.

In an Instagram post Thursday, Tavia Hunt said that getting married and raising a family is one of the “greatest blessings this world has to offer.”

Read her full statement:

“I’ve always encouraged my daughters to be highly educated and chase their dreams. I want them to know that they can do whatever they want (that honors God). But I also want them to know that I believe finding a spouse who loves and honors you as or before himself and raising a family together is one of the greatest blessings this world has to offer. Studies show that committed, married couples with children are the happiest demographic, and this has been my experience as well.

*Affirming motherhood and praising your wife, as well as highlighting the sacrifice and dedication it takes to be a mother, is not bigoted. It is empowering to acknowledge that a woman’s hard work in raising children is not in vain.* Countless highly educated women devote their lives to nurturing and guiding their children. Someone disagreeing with you doesn’t make them hateful; it simply means they have a different opinion. Let’s celebrate families, motherhood and fatherhood. Our society desperately needs dedicated men and women to raise up and train the next generation in the way they should go. Proverbs 31:28 says, “Her children arise and call her blessed; her husband also, and he praises her: Many women do noble things, but you surpass them all.” Embracing the beautiful roles that God has made is something to celebrate.

*I also caution against taking things out of context. Sound bites overlaid with hateful comments are not what we want to model for our children or others. We need more dialogue (and VALUES, IMO) in this country and less hate.*”

Tavia Hunt’s post came five days after Butker gave a commencement speech at Benedictine College that touched on COVID, President Joe Biden’s policies, Pride month and the role of women and men in society.

At one point during the speech, Butker told the women he thought they’d had “the most diabolical lies” told to them.

“I think it is you, the women, who have had the most diabolic lies told to you,” Butker said. “Some of you may go on to lead successful careers in the world, but I would venture to guess that the majority of you are most excited about your marriage and the children you will bring into this world. I can tell you that my beautiful wife Isabelle would be the first to say her life truly started when she started living her vocation as a wife and as a mother.”

Butker also gave the commencement speech at his alma mater Georgia Tech in May 2023. In it, Butker said he had a “controversial anecdote” to young adults’ feelings of “loneliness, anxiety and depression.”

“Get married and start a family,” Butker told Georgia Tech graduates.

The comments from Tavia Hunt are the only public comments from anyone in the Chiefs organization. The NFL distanced itself from Butker’s comments Thursday.

“Harrison Butker gave a speech in his personal capacity. His views are not those of the NFL as an organization,” said Senior Vice President Jonathan Beane, the league’s chief diversity and inclusion officer. “The NFL is steadfast in our commitment to inclusion, which only makes our league stronger.”

Copyright 2024 KCTV via Gray Media Group, Inc. All rights reserved.

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Racism, hate speech, harassment evident on Kempsville baseball team, VBCPS says

By Web Staff , Brendan Ponton

Click here for updates on this story

    VIRGINIA BEACH ( WTKR ) — The Kempsville High School boys varsity baseball team is forfeiting the rest of the season due to an investigation into allegations of racism, hate speech, and harassment, according to a message from the school’s principal.

A message from Kempsville High School principal Melissa George sent to parents, shared with News 3, says the following:

“After our lengthy investigation after we received allegations of racism on the baseball team earlier in April, we have found that racism, hate speech, and harassment have been an ongoing issue for multiple years. Due to additional information we have through our investigation, at this time we are forfeiting (the May 2) game against PA (Princess Anne). Working with the Senior Executive Director of High Schools, Dr. Walter Brower, the Chief of Schools, Mr. Matt Delaney, and Coach Penn, we came to the decision that we can not in good faith play baseball knowing the number of players involved. We will continue to work with VBCPS officials and school level personnel to determine what the remainder of the season will look like. Please know that this is much broader than the initial allegations brought forth and stems across multiple years. Should you have questions or concerns, you can reach out to Dr. Brower… More information will be sent out once a decision has been made.

Thank you, Melissa George”

The allegations appear to stem from the mother of a player who says her son was called racial slurs, including the n-word.

Since April, the mother has posted multiple videos publicly to her Facebook page.

She says the comments were sometimes jokes, sometimes not.

“I am absolutely disgusted,” she says in one of the videos.

The mother says she is looking into getting legal representation.

As for the other players, News 3 spoke with multiple parents, who mostly said no comment.

One parent said his son was suspended from school for six days, but still able to attend senior prom.

He contends he was not involved in the allegations.

Wednesday afternoon, VBCPS shared an additional statement about the situation, confirming that hate speech, harassment, and racism were evident:

Kempsville High School administration and VBCPS Department of School Leadership conducted an investigation of the Kempsville High School varsity baseball team. Evidence of racism, hate speech and harassment were confirmed.

Appropriate action was taken, including forfeiture of the remainder of the baseball season. Know that this type of behavior will not be tolerated in our school division. VBCPS values inclusive communities and works to ensure that our staff, students and community embrace our core values.

Virginia Beach City Public Schools Previously, the school division has said the next year will “bring a stronger varsity baseball team that represents the core values of Kempsville High School and VBPCS.”

In a statement Wednesday, the Virginia Beach Branch of the NAACP said the following:

VBNAACP President Dr. Eric Majette issued the following statement: “We call attention to the ongoing acts of hate and racism within the Virginia Beach Public School System at Kempsville High School and are extremely concerned about how this situation has existed for quite sometime. We applaud the brave young men who spoke up in an effort to advocate for equality within this system. It is unfortunate that racism still exist and that our youth have had to endure its ugly head. It must be stamped out everywhere. It is our goal to ensure that the residents do not live in fear or with undue anxiety, just because they are African American.

We will continue to monitor this situation and look forward to the findings of this ongoing investigation within the Virginia Beach Public School system.

The VB NAACP , in the tradition of Dr. Martin Luther King, will continue to fight against injustice and racism anywhere in recognition of its threat to justice everywhere. We call upon the administration to take direct action as well.”

The Kempsville Chiefs were 5-11 on the season, according to the Beach District website, putting them in eighth place.

Please note: This content carries a strict local market embargo. If you share the same market as the contributor of this article, you may not use it on any platform.

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