How many points should a speech make?
Media trainer and speaker, TJ Walker, warns against cramming too many points into a speech. “The bigger a corporation or organization you are in, the harder the pull will be on you to add more and more points to your presentation. There won’t be anyone advocating for you to have fewer message points. Everyone will be making a forceful and compelling case to add more messages. There is only one little flaw with this strategy—it doesn’t work on audience members.”
Walker advocates no more than 5 points in a speech, which means the writer has to learn how to decline the request from the marketing director for 15 points, the sales director asking for 10 points and legal wanting some other clauses or conditionals added. Adding points to a speech is the easy option. No tough decisions to make. Pleases everyone in manamgement, but puts the audience to sleep.
TJ outlines the way a professional should approach this:
“Instead of setting yourself up for failure, you need to list all of your message points in a numbered fashion and then go though them all and put them in priority. Isolate your top five ideas. Those are the ideas you should speak about. All of the other ideas you can give in a handout, email people in a slide format, give them a t-shirt with the bullet points on it—whatever! Just don’t talk about more than five in your actual spoke presentation.”
Sound advice. Read the full article.
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