Academy Awards weekend was The King’s Speech weekend for me. I read the book, saw the movie, and watched as Hollywood named the film Best Picture at the Oscars.
Interestingly, the movie was not based on the book, the film already having started production when Mark Logue, grandson of King George VI’s speech therapist Lionel Logue, decided to write a book based on his grandfather’s diaries.
While the book offers much more background on Logue than does the film, it offers surprisingly little in the way of explanation of Logue’s techniques, other than to say they had to do with breathing. Logue also believed that stammering was not related to psychological trauma, a fact that the film seems to contradict in its depiction of the Logue character probing the royal’s past (this was when he was a duke, before ascending the throne upon his brother’s abdication).
In both book and film, Logue scrutinizes the scripts for the king’s speeches (virtually is nothing is said about who wrote the speeches, although the book mentions Winston Churchill’s authorship of one of the king’s wartime speeches) to help King George break the text into short phrases and to come up with substitutions for words that were difficult for the monarch to say. The king practiced speeches over and over in Logue’s presence.
The convergence of my King’s Speech consumption roughly coincided with delivering my third Toastmasters speech, so I was thinking a great deal about speech preparation. I don’t know for sure, but I am guessing that learning a speech and preparing to deliver it is similar to the preparations am oral-performance storyteller undergoes to tell a story well. Perhaps one of my oral-performance storyteller friends can confirm.
With my third Toastmaster’s speech, I felt I had fine-tuned my speech-preparation process (I did win Best Speaker this time). I’ve described that process in the extended entry.
I write my speech about two weeks before delivering it. I’ll do a little editing and tweaking of the text before practicing, but the real tweaking comes after the first time I’ve recorded it.
Most of the speeches in the first-level Toastmasters are 5-7 minutes. I try to write my speeches toward the 5-minute mark because they will inevitably be longer when delivered. A very rough formula for how much to write is 100 words equals a minute of speech. In actual practice, my speeches run about 132 words per minute.
Next comes recording. I have a very awesome app on my iPad called SoundNote. (It’s an especially useful app for attending classes, lectures, conferences, and the like, because you can type notes while the app is also recording the event — so if you miss any important points in your note-taking, you can go back and listen.) My first step is to read the speech while recording it on the iPad using SoundNote. When read, the speech is about 5 minutes. I now know that I can add about another minute and a half when the speech is delivered rather than read.
Based on playing back the first reading, I may further tweak the speech — fixing passages that don’t sound right, changing repetitive words, and so forth.
Now it’s time to “learn” the speech. I like to think I learn rather than memorize. Memorization is obviously part of the process, but I hope my speeches don’t sound memorized — just as I’m sure storytellers don’t want their stories to sound memorized. During the first of the two weeks before the speech, my learning consists of listening to the recording repeatedly, as well as reading the text repeatedly.
When I get to the one-week-before-the-speech mark, I create a set of cards or a cheatsheet with phrases to refer to in case I draw a blank while delivering the speech. The Toastmasters manual recommends using keywords as reminders, but during preparation for my third speech, I realized that keywords don’t work nearly as well for me as beginnings of sentences. If I see the beginning of a sentence on a card or cheatsheet, I can visualize the rest of the sentence.
Once I have the cards/cheatsheet, I’ll start doing run-throughs of the speech referring only to the memory aid. Here, I will discover which parts of the speech I’m having the most difficulty learning. I then break down the speech into parts, dividing the parts into the number of days available before the speech (I reserve the last 3 days before the speech for full run-throughs). I record the parts separately on the iPad. To further cement the parts in my mind, I might also type the text in SoundNote along with the recording for that part. I don’t necessarily practice the parts in order.
Toastmasters meetings are on Tuesdays, so my final countdown starts Sunday. Based on the difficulty of the speech, I will determine the number of run-throughs I plan to do in each of the final 3 days. For example, for the most recent speech, I did 6 run-throughs using my cheatsheet on Sunday, 8 run-throughs without cheatsheet Monday, and 10 on Tuesday morning (I do it in the morning so as to not blow out my voice before the meeting). I also do a final time-check by recording myself delivering the speech without notes, which, again adds about a minute and a half to the read version of the speech.
On Tuesday afternoon before the meeting, I’ll do something to relax myself and calm my nerves — usually a steaming hot bath. I like to dress up a bit for the meeting because it makes me feel confident and professional. On my 40-minute drive to the meeting, I like to play the recorded speech over and over.
And that’s my process. What’s yours?
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