The most memorable speeches inspire, entertain, and praise. By blending stories and eloquence, great speeches highlight the core values motivating an audience. You might need to do this in a keynote address, a eulogy, or simply a business meeting. Inspiring audiences is a common, but difficult writing challenge. You want a speech that elevates the topic and the audience.
This course gives you a method for preparing and delivering speeches that inspire and entertain. By the end of this course, you should be able to compose and deliver moving speeches that praise core audience values through evidence, storytelling, and humor. You should be able to write eloquent passages in tones appropriate to the audience and occasion and speak fluidly from either a well-prepared manuscript or from memory. Learners will record speeches, providing and receiving peer feedback.
From the lesson
Week 1. Using values and storytelling to develop a great speech
Welcome! We begin this week with an overview of the course: What it is and what we’ll be doing. With a sense for the topic, we can then get to know each other with an introductory speech. It’s a fun and easy speech that allows you to get to know some of your classmates. From there we can start preparing our speeches. We’ll start by finding the core values that will drive the speech. Values that speak to the topic and inspire your audience. We’ll then explore how to discuss those values through evidence and storytelling. By the end of the week, you’ll have a list of values and stories to write a speech. If you want, you can end the week by telling us a story and getting some feedback on it. This is a longer week. The storytelling material goes better in week one than week two. If you feel a bit overwhelmed, just know that this week will have a bit more content than the other weeks.