Hi, class. This is William again.
As you can see from your grade sheet for both your
informative and your persuasive speech,
that your grade is going to be about 25% based on
the content of the speech and 75% based on delivery.
Now there are nine elements of
delivery that you're going to be graded on,
and they're the same elements for both speeches.
Five elements are in vocal delivery,
four elements are in physical delivery.
In this video, I want to talk to
you about vocal delivery.
This is the use of our voice
to present the message to the audience.
Your voice plays four important roles in communication.
The first one is we use our voice to produce words.
In other words, we say words.
I'm going to spend a lot of
time on this video about that.
I think we're all pretty familiar with that role.
But saying words is actually not
the most important role
your voice plays in communication.
The most important one
is something called paralinguistics.
Now, paralinguistics is probably
a new term for many of you,
but the elements probably are not.
For example, the word linguistics, the root word.
Linguistics means language, and
para means side by side, parallel.
When we are saying words to somebody,
our voice is sending
messages parallel or side by side with the language.
This is very important.
The reason for that is anytime
our paralinguistics and our words do not match,
your audience will tend to accept
the paralinguistics rather than the words.
Now, what this basically means is that we are
communicating messages through things like tone of voice.
The third main role that your voice
plays in communication is that
your voice has a powerful psychological effect on others.
Now, many of you probably
have anecdotal evidence of this.
Somebody whose voice just
causes your blood pressure to go up.
Maybe they speak with a whiny voice or a squeaky voice.
They talk too loud, they talk too quiet, whatever it is,
there's just something about the sound of
their voice that you find annoying.
This puts you in a negative mindset
just as you're evaluating their ideas.
Conversely, there are others
whose voice put you in a very positive state of mind.
You could listen to them speak about
almost any topic for an hour.
People like James Earl Jones,
who did the voice for Darth Vader
in the Star Wars movies.
For CNN, this is CNN.
People who are able to create
that very positive psychological effect on
their audience puts them in
a positive state of mind just
as they're evaluating their ideas.
Finally, your voice actually has
a strong psychological effect on you.
Research has suggested that
when you speak with a more confident,
secure voice, you actually become more confident.
If you speak with a very timid or insecure voice,
it can actually cause you to become
less confident and your anxiety to rise.
Those are the four important roles
that your voice plays in communication.
The next thing I want to talk to you about are
the five elements of vocal delivery.
These are the five elements
that you're going to be graded
on in both your
informative as well as your persuasive speech.
Please note that,
as indicated on the grade sheet,
these elements are not of
equal importance to one another.
The first one is enunciation.
Enunciation is pronouncing
the words correctly and clearly.
This is very important in communication.
Your goal is to make it as easy as
you possibly can for your audience to listen.
Poor enunciation requires the audience
to expend more energy to
try to understand what you're saying.
The most common mistake that people make in
enunciation is failing to
open their mouth enough when they speak.
They just mumble like this.
Now, they probably think this
is okay because when they talk to their friends,
they talk like this and
their friends understand I'm just fine.
But when you're only talking to one or two friends,
there's not a lot of ears absorbing the sound.
When you're speaking to an audience,
it becomes far more challenging.
You want to open your mouth and
pronounce the words very clearly.
The next common mistake that people make in
enunciation is they add
sounds to words that do not belong.
The most common sound that people
erringly add to a word is the R sound.
For example, they might say mention the state
of Washington or wash the dishes.
The problem with this is our ears are not
attuned to that sound being added to the word,
and as a result, it causes an internal distraction.
The second element of
delivery these are not the order of importance.
The second one is projection.
Now, a lot of people think projection
is talk loud enough for everybody to hear.
In actuality, projection is speak at
a volume so that your audience can comfortably listen.
See, talking too loud is actually just
as big of a problem as talking too quietly.
Either of them cause
the audience to think about your volume,
and any attention they're paying to
your volume is attention
they're not paying to your speech.
You want your volume to disappear.
If the audience is not paying attention to your volume,
you're doing projection correctly.
The next element of vocal delivery is vocal variety.
Now, a major advantage that
speakers have over writers in terms of
communicating is
this wonderful instrument we call the human voice.
We want to vary that voice to not
only increase engagement with the audience,
but also to help us convey
meaning through things like paralinguistics.
Now, here I mentioned
two specific aspects of how we want to vary our voice.
First is through tone or pitch.
This refers to how high or how low you talk.
Now, the average untrained adult voice
has a range of five notes.
That means you can speak at five different notes with
virtually no strain on
your voice and no risk of your voice cracking.
I want you to try to utilize that five-note
range to vary your pitch or tone throughout your speech.
Now, this does not mean I want
the first five notes to be
a scale and monotone the rest of the way.
I want you to vary throughout.
This also does not mean that I'm
going to be in the back counting notes.
You probably could accomplish
a good vocal variety and tone with using three notes.
I say that I would like you to try to expand that to
around five notes merely because
I used to say don't be monotone,
and that ended up causing people to pick
two notes and ping pong back and forth.
That was just as distracting as a monotone voice.
The second way that I want you to
vary your voice is through rhythm.
Rhythm refers to your rate or how fast you talk,
as well as your pausing.
If you only take notes during
one part of this video, please have it be this.
Variation of rhythm is to spoken
word what punctuation is to written word.
That's so important, I want to repeat it.
Please again, get this that variation
of rhythm is to spoken word,
what punctuation is to written word.
Everything you know about the importance
of punctuation in writing,
how it helps us convey the meaning of our message,
please understand that the exact same thing
applies to varying our rhythm in speech.
If you give a five-minute speech
and there's no variation of rhythm at all,
that would be like turning in
a four-page essay with no grammar or punctuation.
It becomes very difficult to understand.
But actually, no variation in
speech is worse than the no punctuation paper,
because the no punctuation paper
allows the reader to be able to
go through it again and try to
piece together where the punctuation would have been.
But when you're listening to a speech,
you only get it once, and as a result,
you don't have the opportunity to go through and
correct their lack of variation.
This ends up leading the audience to have
what we refer to as the fallacy of competence.
Our brain knows that it understood the words,
and it can pull out a few of the topics.
Therefore, it concludes that it
must have understood the message.
An example of the fallacy of
competence happens for many of us in math class.
A math teacher is writing
on the board and goes through how to do a problem.
As you listen to the math teacher explain it,
you feel like you understand how to do it.
But then you're told to do a problem,
and suddenly you look at it and you
realize you
didn't understand it like you thought you did.
Well, after a speech, we rarely get the opportunity
to be tested to find out if we understood.
But that fallacy of competence
is still every bit as real.
The fourth element is a fluid or smooth delivery.
With this, we want to cut out things like audible pauses.
Audible pauses, sometimes referred to
as filler words as uh,
like, you know, we want to reduce those.
Another aspect of the fluid smooth delivery is
we want to avoid chasing the clock.
Chasing the clock happens when maybe we've got
45 seconds left and we don't have much to say.
So we start to talk really slowly.
Now we're just really trying to
take 45 seconds to speak 10 seconds of the speech.
I would rather you just finish the speech.
The fluid smooth delivery is,
I want you to stay conversational.
Be professional. Don't get into being too casual,
but still having nice fluid smooth delivery.
Finally, the fifth element is energy.
This is by far the most important element
of vocal delivery.
With energy, it's simply a sense of enthusiasm.
If you come across like you're very
bored with your speech or bored with a topic,
the audience will be more
likely to be bored with the topic, as well.
Now, enthusiasm and energy
doesn't make the topic more interesting.
Believe me, I wish that it did,
but being real low energy can take interest away.
I have a personal example of this.
There was a time that I really enjoyed history.
I still enjoy reading about it and learning about it.
But I actually considered
being a history major at one time,
and I had a history teacher, a super nice guy.
I really liked him, but he was very low energy.
And some of you might have a low-energy teacher yourself.
This is my impersonation of him.
The root cause of
the American Revolution was the French and Indian War.
The French and Indian War was
a conflict between the French and
their Native American allies
against the British and their German allies.
The Native American tribes believed that the French
would win the war because they won the first two battles.
What they failed to realize is
the French had beaten the Americans.
The British and the Germans hadn't arrived yet.
Imagine listening to that for two hours.
As interested as I was in history,
it was hard to stay engaged.
These are the first five elements of delivery.
These are the vocal elements
that you're going to be graded on.
Please remember these are not in the order of
importance and they're not of equal importance.
If I were to place them in order of importance,
I would put energy by far the most important.
After that, enunciation and
projection are approximately tied,
and then the fluid, smooth delivery
and vocal variety are approximately tied.
If you haven't already, please now
watch the video on physical delivery,
and that will present you with the other four elements
of delivery. Thank you very much.