Making your Speeches Memorable

How can we make people remember and understand the points that we are trying to make in our speeches? Some speakers keep on rambling points after points without clear explanation, examples or elaborations. Others keep on telling stories one after another that finally make the audience go into 'screen saver mode'.

You can avoid all the above if you use the 4As below to spice, color and anchor your speeches for better retention and understanding;

Anecdotes - Anecdotes are short stories that help to explain your key points. Use wisely, it will keep your audience entertained, More importantly, it will help you to illustrate the point better and clearer. Just make sure that the story is short (2-3 minutes), simple and without any complicated plots. Then, tie up the story with the point that you want to deliver.

Analogy - Analogy uses the concept of prior knowledge of the audience to explain your ideas. For example, if you are talking about financial savings, then you can use the analogy of planting a tree and watching it grows to illustrate the concept of growing one's assets. One caveat to this idea is to use simple analogy that all of your audience can follow and understand.

Activity - Short and content-relevant activity is another powerful tool to explain a point. The classic activity to teach the audience about resistance to change is the 'arm folding' activity. To make it more impactful, debriefing is a must at the end of every activity. One key point to remember is to keep it sort ie 2-3 minutes.

Acronym - Acronym is another attention grabber that help to hammer your points to your ideas. For motivational speeches to youths and students, I use the acronym DREAM to illustrate and explain my points. Just ensure that your acronym is not too long ie less than 9 letters as audience will have problems remembering them if it is too long.