How to Develop a Better Delivery

Speech delivery is both visible and vocal, it reflects the speaker’s personality. The visible aspect pertains to his physical action. The vocal or audible part deals with his voice and the inflections and pauses make for effective penetration.

Personality Plays a Part

Personality varies with people. Some have it, others don’t, but it can be developed. Personality is nature’s way of expressing your desire to be pleasing to other people. Practice in public speaking develops your personality-and it pays to practice. Your natural delivery carries conviction, and when you are natural, you run no risk of seeming stuffy or stilted. Don’t talk too slowly-but then again don’t talk too fast. About now it’s quite likely that we are a little “out of touch,” and you think it’s contradictory to say that you should speak naturally but improve your diction.

Let me tell you of an army sergeant’s plight. Finlay was a round little man and his figure showed that he’d enjoyed too many square meals. But good “Old Fin” who was nearly 40 was so imbued with patriotism that he volunteered for Officers Training School. When the command came to “Right dress,” Finlay would line up his beer barrel bulge with the men to his right. Eyeing the front of the line, the sergeant would snap out “Fin-lay, step back”; then when he’d sight down the rear of the line, he’d shout “Finlay, step up.” Poor Finlay was handicapped by these conflicting commands day after day, but his willingness to cooperate earned him a captaincy.

The day of the somber solon is done. Yesterday’s wordy wordsmith flaunting a white mane that curled at the ends; wearing a broad-brimmed hat, a high-winged collar, showing a flowing cravat and sporting a gold-headed cane, are gone for good. In his time audiences were more impressed by what they saw than by what they heard. The phoney fellow who seeks any resemblance to that image of an old-time orator will be found out-and lose out. Local TV networks have been known to replace an ordinary looking commentator who puts personality into his spiel, with an Adonis who reads canned copy. He lasts only as long as it takes for his listeners to get their fill of nondescript delivery and stereotyped expressions.

Most of us have one poor voice trait or another; careless enunciation, or a dull delivery lacking in change of pitch or pace. These faults can and-to be successful-MUST be corrected, as well as any tendency toward being too garrulous or too repetitious. But currying out these burrs is a far cry from adopting a phoney speaking front. The stuttering swain who promised to meet Kkkkkkkaty at the kkkkkkkitchen door when the moon came over the cowshed, conveyed more yearning than all the pages of poetry because that was his simple and natural expression. In like manner Hoagy Carmichael’s Hoosier harvest hand who sang of a buttermilk sky painted a clearer picture of nocturnal loveliness than any gallery of artificial goo.

An Army nurse, a recipient of a wide variety of compliments about her kind ministrations, considers the greatest one of all to be that of a battered little hillbilly. He held her hand, looked up into her eyes and haltingly told her, “If there ever was a fallen angel, it’s you!”

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