TJ WALKER - THE HABIT INFLUENCER - Personal Development | LIVE STREAM

17 Aug 2015 · 2 min

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2:18

Transcript excerpt from TJ Walker responding to a student (Shane) about problems with speech fluency and sentence organization. Walker explains that spoken language often contains fragments and repetitions that sound natural, recommends recording video, soliciting colleague summaries of the talk, avoiding memorized scripts or strict bullet-reading, and speaking conversationally to improve clarity and fluency.

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Shane writes in with the following questions related to his presentations. So, C.J. i had practiced for a few hours of video recordings, but I still have problems to make my speech more fluent. My sentences were unorganized and sometimes it was hard to understand what I was talking about. How can I make improvement? Thanks, Shane. He's one of my online public speaking classes. Shane, there's a couple of different issues here. You're saying that it's hard to understand. That is a problem. You're also saying the sentences aren't organized. I have found most people who seem incredibly articulate, forceful, dynamic speakers. If you actually were to analyze their sentence structure, it doesn't look good on paper. If you were just to transcribe their speech, there'd be stops, starts, sentence fragments, everywhere repetitions. So don't forget what sounds good to the ear doesn't look good to the eye. What looks good to the eye doesn't necessarily sound good to the ear. I do want to make sure that you can watch a video of yourself and say to yourself, that's interesting and that's understandable. Couple of points. Sometimes we get too close to it, especially if you've been practicing it many times. The first thing I prescribe for you is do your best job of a video. Send it to some colleagues you respect. Ask them not what they think, what they like. Ask them what do they take away from it. What do they remember from this video. If they had to summarize it to someone else after having only watched it once, how would they summarize? That's a better test. The other thing that sometimes trips people up is they're trying to sort of memorize a script. Or if you're using PowerPoint, going through bullet points that can mess you up. You need to be able to just talk to people about what it is that is your subject area and do it in a conversational way. That will probably solve most of your problems of making it come across fluent and understandable. And of course, post your video here in the online discussion of this course and I'll be happy to take a look at it and the other students will too. Thanks for writing.