How to Speak in Sound Bites | Public Speaking

So how can you speak in sound bites? First of all, what is a sound bite? A sound bite is when you're being interviewed by a TV reporter, any news reporter who's going to edit your comments from an interview and put just part of it on tv, radio, video, or a segment of it in text. So if a reporter talks to you for 10 minutes, you might have a thousand words come out of your mouth, but only eight words get on the TV newscast tonight or that video webcast. Why were 992 words thrown away and eight words kept? The reporter took the bite out of your sound that was most interesting. What's a reporter trying to do when they quote you? They're looking for a way to make the story more interesting, more understandable, and they're looking for perspective that can't just be put in by the reporter. Typically, reporters, when they are quoting you, will only quote you if one of ten different speech patterns come out of your mouth. These are speech patterns that repeat themselves again and again and again. Doesn't matter what medium, highbrow, low brow, tv, radio, it doesn't matter what language. This is a universal truth. And these soundbite elements are analogies. Bold action words, cliches, humor, pop culture, references, rhetorical questions, absolutes, specific examples, quotes and sound bites come from these categories. So once you know what the categories are that reporters are looking for, you have to look at the message points that you prepared, and then you have to package them with these sound bite elements. If you do this and do this consistently, you will know before the interview even starts what quote, what sound bite will get into the final story.