Public Speaking: The Complete Guide to Tone of Voice, Body Language and their Implementation

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I believe that many people, especially geek ones (like developers , statistician, etc ), sometimes need to deliver message to non-technical ones who are in different field. They may struggle communicating to each other.

To tackle this problem, I researched “Communication Arts” and have summarised all what I know about Public Speaking. I then have written this blog as a keynote. I hope that this blog will benefit every reader more or less.

Most people might understand that Public Speaking is talking on stage towards 100 or 1000 audiences. I, however, argue that it is formal, face-to-face talking of a single person to a group of ones. Though, I will, in this blog, focus on presentation.

There are two main types of communication, which are:

Verbal Communication such as controlling Tone of Voice
and
Non Verbal Communication like Body Language

This blog includes tricks about above two communication ways and their implementation in real world scenarios.

Tone of Voice

Speakers, who can control their tones of voice, could manipulate listeners’ feelings and emotion. Most human do not know what type of their voices is, its nature and how can it be exploit. It is a good opportunity to share my knowledge and you may adapt it, listen your own voice, and adapt it for the sake of better communication.

Tone of Voice composes of four parts.

1) Projection

It is how the direction of the voice goes from the mouth when pronouncing. There are two main kinds. They are Diffuse and Direct. Naturally, most human use only one of these two when speaking(only Diffuse or only Direct).

1.1) Diffuse

The voice start spreading out in various direction after it goes from the mouth. The picture below demonstrates this.

It has easy-listening sound. It can be used in all situation, including informative, persuasive and inspired.

HOW TO USE: While pronouncing, try making the voice out along with breath from your mouth

1.2) Direct

The voice goes directly to the audience like below.

It has power to attract attention from audience. It is typically used to keep audience focus on the conversation, not being distracted.

HOW TO USE: While belting the voice out, try making the breath from your mouth out as least as possible.

2) Range

It is widely known and used when singing a song. The Range could be adopted to influence or deliver emotion towards audience.

The Range is categorized as three ranges.

2.1) Head Tone

It expresses extreme emotions( happiest, angriest etc.).

If Head Tone is used correctly, you should feel vibration behind your head and its resonance also should occur around center between your eyebrows.

2.2) Mouth Tone

It expresses normal or indifferent emotion.

If Mouth Tone is used correctly, you should feel vibration around your sinus and oral cavity.

2.3) Chest Tone

It has bass and resonant sound. It expresses sad, discreet and romantic emotions.

If Mouth Tone is used correctly, the breath is used from the chest, you should feel
that the tone should be resonating in your chest, and more power should empower the tone up.

3) Pace

It can be considered as the speed of speaking, or pausing between sentence.

4) Inflection

Generally, it is simply combination of Projection, Range and Pace in order to generate a collection of voices.

Naturally, audiences lose focus within 5 minutes. Practically, the speaking obviously can not end by that. In other words, audiences tend to be sleepy after a few minutes. If the right tones of voice are adopt, the show will be interesting and draw attention from audiences. To demonstrate this, It is a graph which are not constant, always goes up and down throughout the speaking like picture below.

Each speaker has his or her own unique tone of voice.

But How I can find my own signature. The answer is that:

You need to experiment by yourself. You, for example, can try combining a Little bit faster pace with Diffuse Projection. A great possibilities of combination wait for you.

Nonetheless, I DO NOT suggest using Head Tone and Direct Projection at the same time, because it might shock some audiences.

Body Language

Apart form the verbal communication I described above, another component is non verbal one. It is body language. It does not only change how audiences view the speaker, but it also change our own perspective. Although some speakers may lack of confidence, they could use right body language to improve both confident and self esteem.

In this blog, I would like to these body language poses.

1) Stand Pose

I would recommend these 5 poses, If you do not have your own.

#1 Starting Pose

Put your both hand at the waist level and put your fingers like the picture below. I find it is an easy pose to start and change to next poses.

#2 & 3

From #1 Pose, when you want to introduce new or next points, you can put one hand to the either left or right like below.

When finishing the sentence, you could turn back to Pose #1.

#4 & 5 Circle Wrist

From #1 Pose, when you would like to speak about yourself or your experience, you can circle your wrist towards yourself.

Alternatively, you can circle your wrist out of yourself (#5).

2) Eye Contact

This is one type of communication. It helps audiences to keep focusing to the speaking.

Try to keep eye contact with EVERY audience if possible. As a result, Audiences see that the speaker pays attention to them, then these listeners feel that they are important.

Nevertheless, If you face slept audience, or those who do not make eye contact with you, Let them go, since this could affect the ongoing speaking. Instead, focus on only those who pay attention on you.

2) Microphone Pose

The correct way is to hold a microphone with
45 degree angle like below.

How to Organize Professional Presentation

For a successful presentation, three steps are required. They are
Preparation, Analysis and Presentation.

1) Preparation

Preparation is indeed a key success in any presentation. Time should taken to plan and prepare as much as possible, so that the message, which is going to be delivered, is totally conveyed to audiences. The two most important things that should be prepared for presentation are
content , its structure and tools.

1.1) Prepare Content

Let begin with “context” first

What context is

Context means either words or sentences which help clarifying the meaning of the message that speaker want to deliver to audiences.

In any public speaking, content should always be within context.

For example,

Which fitness club should I apply?

Change to:

The fitness club, which I was a member of, has been closed. So, I would like to apply for a new one. I prefer the location near __. It is close to your home. Could you please suggest me?

Typically, speakers generally talk “content” , but no
“context”. This is because those may understand that listeners have already known what they are going to speak.

Therefore,

This “Context over Content” Principle is simple to use and can be applied in every daily life.

It is clear that “Context over Content” lead to audiences’ perfect understanding.

1.2) Prepare its Structure

Before real presentation, speaker needs to plan for disposition with the
“Context over Content”.

1. “Open” component

This can include:

• Greeting words
• Objectives

2. “Context” component

Then, speaker may roughly talk about the “content” with “context”. Now, the content is introduced and linked with audiences. This could composes either of following:

• Main points( It should contains NO MORE THAN 3 points, as common audience can not memorize more than 3 ones)
• Agendas
• Benefits to audiences
• Values to audiences

3. “Content” component

Speaker starts going into details. Contents can be following:

• Problems -> Its Rationals
• Causes -> Its Results
• Pros and Cons

The order of the point depends on priority. For instance:

• Pros 1 (Most important)
• Pros 2 (Second most important)
• Pros 3 (Least important)

If the presentation topic is about problems or negative impacts, the order should instead be from low severity to high one. The reason is that it helps relieving negative feeling.

For example,

• Problems 1 (Least Impact)
• Problems 2 (Higher Impact)
• Problems 3 (Highest Impact)

In case that you do not know how you construct the collection of sentences, I recommend you to use “BIG SIX”, which comprises of:

1. WHAT
2. WHY
3. WHO
4. WHERE
5. WHEN
6. HOW

The order depends on various contents for different presentations.

If the content topic is about problems or negative impacts, WHO should be in last order so that feeling of slander could be reduced. This, for example, can be done by putting either
WHY, WHERE etc. to between WHAT and WHO.

4. “Close” component

This may be the most crucial component in presentation, because audiences are ALWAYS able to memorize only most final part of speaking. This means that speaker has to summarize main points of the content for audiences, as well as help them to DECIDE what they should do with the message they have recently gotten. In other words, speaker should make them feel that they have earned some BENEFITS or VALUES after presentation. They can be following:

• Results
• Suggestions
• Risks

Furthermore, I note that if speaker want audience to MEMORIZE and aware of keywords. They are, for example, Brand’s name or this-year revenue. Speakers should REPEAT them again and again. In particular these keywords should be put in ALL components if possible(including Open, Context, Content and Close ones).

“Key word” is a word which speaker wishes his or her audiences memorize it after the presentation ends.

1.3) Prepare Tools

Rule#1: Try to prepare some gimmicks to deal with inflection

Gimmick is a tool or trick, which can help attention drawing from audiences (such as games or a joke).

Could you remember “Inflection”  mentioned in earlier section ? It is the same concept as Tone of Voice section. When speaker notices that audiences are out of focus on what he or she is speaking, speaker could ask they to play a game, or release a joke on order to keep a graph( or
Inflection ) remain high. In other words, audience should be awake, not sleepy over the presentation period.

Looking in to joke stuff, “Call Back technique” should be adopt if possible. In fact, the joke could about what has happened or trendy one, since it is more effective than prepared or traditional ones.

AVOID playing dirty joke, as it is absolutely not appropriate for any public speaking and it can destroy ALL of speaker’s reputation. Plus, do not use a joke, which is only known within a close group.

Turning into Game gimmick, I would like to recommend a really cool tool, which I found it useful to create interactive game. Its name is
kahoot.it . It can generate a small game that allow audience to play a game together on the same screen via their own mobile phone.

Rule#2: Try to prepare some gimmicks to deal with inflection

Why?

1. Once slide is opened, audiences start reading. This means they do not interest in a speaker anymore.
2. The Speaker also read the slide too, as well as does not keep contact with audiences. As a result, they will lose focus.

What should I do ? Imagine how Apple does. That’s it!!!

Only a few bullet points and one of either image, a figure, or a graph are enough. This kind of slide does not draw do much attraction from audiences.

2) Analysis

While preparation, a good presentation also needs analysis. This includes
Listener Analysis and Feedback Analysis.

2.1) Listener Analysis

This is the most important part while developing content and plan disposition when preparation process.

Speaker has to know who audiences are and what they expect to hear.

For instance, speaker need to know how much is the proportion in art people, business people and developer?. If these figure are know, speaker also know which words speaker can use in each presentation. Specifically, if most of audiences are developers, Speaker may choose to use technical words for these geeks.

Moreover, speaker could set the objectives of the presentation after he or she know the audiences. They, for example, are:

1. Inform
2. Educate
3. Persuade
4. Inspire
5. Give Pleasure

Now,

Supposed that if you were audiences, brainstorm what doubt possibly arise during presentation

Next, speaker should try to answer all these questions. The purpose is to prevent the risk of argument and make a presentation flow seamlessly.

2.2) Feedback Analysis

During presentation, always checking feedback should not absolutely be ignored. Speaker should check whether the message has been properly delivered to audience, whether they are sleepy and whether they still focus on the speaking or not.

Try to ALWAYS have an interaction with audiences, namely KEEPING EYE CONTACT, asking them whether they understand the content or not?. Doing these allows speaker to know how the presentation is. If there is a mistake, speaker can solve it properly in time.

By way of illustration, in case that a flat joke , lame or dump ones are made, speaker needs a way to solve it and does not allow DEAD AIR.

3) Presentation

In a real presentation, speaker must not, as mentioned before, put EVERYTHING in the slides. It should include only bullet points and necessary elements.

In above case, someone may wonder if we forget the content, how can we do?

Some people advise to just use SCRIPT and read it. But, DO NOT DO SUCH THING. Engagement with audiences will be lost.

I have also provided the principle of memorization below.

Principle of Memorization

Not Only Words But also….
1) Status
2) Opinion
3) Feeling

Apart from content, speaker do not only have to memorize his or her status, they also must be aware of his or her opinion towards the status. If argument arises during presentation, speaker is responsible to argue and win it. Last but not least, memorize feelings towards content could possibly make the audience felt related with the speaking.

How to Memorize

There are several techniques, which are:

1. Find conjunctions
2. Filter contents
3. Make it a story telling
4. Disposition
5. Practice !!!

For these techniques, the most important one is obviously practice. Speaker should practice as much as possible, until speaker find that he or she can smoothly talk when just looking through the slide.

Conclusion

The most foremost part in public speaking is “audience”

To summarize, speaker needs to beforehand know who the audiences are and what they expect (Listener Analysis) . Then, preparation and disposition are required so that the contents are proper for the audiences. During real presentation, speaker should interact with audiences as much as possible.

Verbal Communication such as controlling tone of voice
and
Non Verbal Communication like body language , organizing mini games

Also, speaker have to make sure that audiences feel that they have gotten something after presentation.

Again,

Practice and exercise is must-have.

Try work out and look at feedback so that you use them to practice and develop yourself for the next round.

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