The heart and soul of a speech – an (un)scientific derivation

"What is the most important aspect of a speech?" When asked this question, some are often perplexed and don’t have a ready answer, some even more so because they are Toastmasters! Ah….the irony of it….who else knows the innards and anatomy of a speech better than them? Starting from the beginning of a Toastmaster’s journey, the Competent Communicator manual projects guide them through the process of writing and delivering a speech – how to write an organized speech, how to make it apt and to the point, how to add shine and sparkle to it; what is body language, voice modulation, visual aids and how these can add value to a speech; how a speech should always be backed up by extensive research; and how to persuade or inspire an audience combining all the aforementioned attributes together.

With all that background knowledge, to single out the most important facet is indeed difficult. Being an engineer expert at drawing a graph first and noting the readings later, I decided to apply similar logic to this burning question and arrive at an answer. Reverse engineering is the second best solution to the most challenging issues, ask anyone working in the IT industry! (The best one is of course a machine reboot, but that’s sadly not applicable here.)

So for any given speech, if we take out the body language and expressions, would it still be a reasonably good speech? This one is easy; sometimes just listening to a speech and not watching the delivery arouses such emotions that hundreds of people are moved and motivated to take some action. Who can forget Pandit Nehru’s iconic ‘At the stroke of the midnight hour’ speech once they have listened to its audio clip? This conjuncture rules out two major factors and makes the choice that much easier for us, even Cassandra would agree. In other words, this ‘Listening can sometimes be as good as watching’ theory leaves us with the confidence that visual aspects can definitely be forgotten for now.

Does that mean voice modulation takes the cake? Again applying the same theory, let’s try removing that too - we are not watching a speaker, not listening to his/her speech delivery, but we are, wait for it…reading (yes! Genius thought, wasn’t it!)…reading the speech transcript. Now if anyone says that reading a speech has not made them laugh or cry at times, is definitely lying. We know that any speech worth its while would deal with an appealing subject, and would have an introduction that would immediately grab your attention, a body which doesn’t bore you and a conclusion summarizing and reinforcing the thought. Wouldn’t reading such a speech still have some degree of effect on you and serve its core purpose? There you have it – the heart of any great speech has to be its content. A syntactically and semantically correct artistic prose, laced with rich vocabulary, impeccable and relevant facts, aptly placed quotes, text that flows from one paragraph to another flawlessly and makes you think, feel, or understand: even reading such a speech material would have a profound impact. Q.E.D.

The next step in our logical analysis should be a corollary of the theorem we not just constructed, but even proved. For this, let us consider a speech that was delivered with the required conviction, with appropriate hand and body movements, expressions defying a mime artist, voice graph more rhythmic than an  ECG report, but with such grammar that made you flinch. Or some statistic that you know for sure is made up. Or with such a vocabulary that even your kid could manage better. Or a hasty introduction and abrupt conclusion. Could the immaculate delivery save such a speech? Surely not. Q.E.D.

In a nutshell, content is the lifeblood of a speech, its basis, its foundation. You add other aspects to it to make it stronger, more impactful and attention-grabbing; whereas content is what you use to even build up and utilize the other parameters effectively. Without good content, a speech is spineless. It’s like eating the cherry on top, without having tasted the dessert. Like tearing out the glittering gift wrapper to find an utterly disappointing gift within. A river sans water. A body sans soul.

Being a blogger myself, I admit that I am not totally impartial in this derivation, but hey….I did present a valid argument (thanks to reverse engineering!).