The Public Speaking Drills Toolbox, Part 1: Individual Drills

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 The dawn of a new competition season may be daunting both for new students and those returning from months out of competition. Regardless of experience level, consistent drilling is an essential step in developing and polishing your speech and debate skillset. Well constructed, consistently used drills allow for engaging and targeted improvement that cannot be provided solely from writing and delivering speeches or debating a round. Whether you find yourself a bit bored with your own drills or are preparing to start drilling for the first time, this article is the place for you. In the first of this two-part series, you will find a variety of drills for you to work on at home. Keep an eye out for a set of club and group friendly drills in a future article!

The targeted skills in these drills include: 

  • Creating accurate outlines and flows

  • Delivering from outlines

  • Critical thinking in a timed environment

  • Polishing individual speaking style

  • Mastering a consistent character voice

  • Delivering evidence and scripted content smoothly 

  • Strengthening story recall for limited preparation events

  • Correcting fast or slow delivery pace 

Reverse-Engineering: Mastering Delivery From an Outline

Skills drilled: creating accurate outlines, delivering from outlines

No matter how well-constructed an argument is, it lives and dies by your ability to communicate it. Learning to deliver from a sparse flow outline is difficult and overwhelming because you must master all three of these skills: 

  1. Create the content of the argument.

  2. Condense the content into an outline.

  3. Remember how to explain the content off of the outline. 

Reverse-engineering a flow is a great way to break down this skill and make it less intimidating by focusing on the last two steps. Simply take something you’ve already fully written—an essay, a case, even a speech script—and work on condensing sections into an outline. Then, try to deliver the original message from your outline only. The goal here is not to create a word-for-word version of the original script (although this is a great step toward memorizing a script, if you want to multitask); rather, because you are confident and well versed on the content, you can focus on building the bridge between the outline and your explanation. This experience with creating functional outlines and delivering them clearly will make a difference when you’re faced with the real deal. 

Speed Outlines

Skills drilled: critical thinking in a timed environment, creating accurate outlines

While reverse engineering targets creating and delivering an outline, speed outlining drills the fast paced creation of both the content and outline itself. This is especially useful for limited preparation and debate events, as it trains you to overcome the initial panic that tends to eat up what little preparation time you have. Find any topic—you could scroll through a list of popular quotes, use a random word generator, even look at headlines in a newspaper—and give yourself no more than 60 seconds to prepare a thesis and 2-3 points about the topic. You may well have horrible outlines, or not finish in time, but that doesn’t matter. Just keep finding new topics and practice instantly creating outlines for them. When you are comfortable with instantly creating content, shift your focus to forming usable outlines that you could either memorize or easily deliver from a flow. This may be a frustrating process, but challenging yourself with these time limits will acclimate you to creating and organizing content under pressure. 

Reading Aloud

Skills drilled: polishing individual speaking style, mastering a consistent character voice, delivering evidence and scripted content smoothly. 

It may seem simple, but this drill is surprisingly effective. The next time you find yourself reading anything from a textbook to a novel, try reading it out loud to strengthen any of these skills: 

  • polishing individual speaking style: If you haven’t written a speech or case, or if you are just tired of staring at it, use any book to practice your speed, tone, intonation, annunciation, and anything else that you’d like to improve in your general speaking style. If you can, record yourself or have someone else listen and give you pointers. 

  • mastering a consistent character voice: If you are having trouble with a tricky character voice for an interpretation, nothing helps more than simply using it consistently. Reading in your character voice may feel awkward at first, but it will quickly feel more natural and help you nail down a consistent voice that you won’t accidentally switch up mid-speech. 

  • delivering evidence and scripted content smoothly. The ability to concurrently read and speak well is worth investing practice. On the wonderful occasions where you can present something fully scripted, such as a piece of evidence, make sure you sound just as smooth and polished as you do when speaking from memory or an outline. 

Telling Your Stories: Improve Limited Preparation Content

Skills drilled: Strengthening story recall for limited preparation events

It is common for limited-preparation speech competitors to keep some sort of book or list of personal stories, statistics, or historical examples for use in speeches. While such a list is helpful, it does little good if you can’t remember your stories, have trouble explaining them, or are unable to connect them to any of your limited preparation topics. The best way to familiarize yourself with your story content is to simply practice delivering them consistently outside of a speech. Work on your phrasing, and keep track of any meaning or applications that come to mind. As your delivery of each story becomes more consistent, begin to keep track of the time you use for each and shorten or lengthen them as you see fit. Overall, the more familiar you are with your stories and examples, the better they will serve you in a round. 

The Parcel Method: Master Your Speaking Pace

Skills drilled: Correcting fast or slow delivery pace

One of the most difficult things to monitor with your speaking style is your speed. Rapid speaking may be a problem because you know an argument like the back of your hand, because you’re nervous, or even because your normal speaking pace is naturally quick. 

In any case, it’s very difficult to monitor your own pace, and you may not realize that the audience is having trouble keeping up. Appropriate pace changes between events and between sections of your speech, but in general, a good bar to hold yourself to is around 120-150 words per minute, or 40-50 words per 20 seconds. If you have a habit of talking too fast, the parcel method is helpful both for prompting self awareness, and familiarizing you with an appropriate pace. Break down a written speech or case into sections of 40-50 words, and time yourself delivering them. Aim to spend no less than 15-20 seconds on each section, and repeat the section if you finish before this time window (it helps to have a timer with a ‘lap’ function for this, most phone timers do). This works well for scripted speeches, but also leads to greater awareness of your speaking pace that may help with non-scripted delivery. An example of a pre-sectioned speech that you can start practicing with may be accessed here.

Anna RussellComment