People & Blogs

COMM 101 Video Nine- Wording the Speech

by Adam Jenkins

📚 Main topics

Conversational wordingSpeeches often benefit from a casual, conversational style rather than overly stiff or formal language. 0:01
Concrete and vivid languageConcrete words help audiences understand a speaker’s meaning, while vivid words convey extra information without taking more speaking time. Metaphors, similes, and analogies can also make unfamiliar ideas easier to grasp. 0:32
Defining unfamiliar termsExplain specialized jargon that your audience may not know, so they can follow the speech without missing key information. 3:43
Avoiding weakenersPhrases such as “that’s just my opinion” can undermine a speaker’s credibility and make them sound uncertain. 4:43
Connecting with the audiencePhrase ideas as if speaking to one person, and build rapport by emphasizing shared experiences or offering sincere compliments. 6:17

✨ Key takeaways

Be specificClear, concrete wording makes it more likely that listeners will interpret a message as intended. 1:04
Make words do moreA vivid word such as “destroyed” can communicate the result and the size of a win, unlike the more neutral “defeated.” 2:06

🧠 Lessons learned

Sound confident and approachableSpeak conversationally while avoiding language that casts doubt on your expertise or weakens your claims. 4:43
Keep the audience in mindChoose language they can understand and create a personal sense of connection, even when speaking to a group. 3:43

🏁 Conclusion/next steps

Use these strategies in speechesWord your speech to be conversational, clear, vivid, and audience-focused; contact the instructor with any questions. 6:17

Transcript excerpt

0:01 and on to our last chapter for this video for this section of the semester for this first exam and this last chapter you can see has to do with wording the speech and i deliberately say wording the speech and not writing the speech because again the idea is to speak extemporaneously so these are some things that you can keep in mind as far as how you phrase things in your speech so one of the key words here is conversational i mentioned that word when we're talking about delivery as well a lot of times people think oh i'm giving a speech i've got to get really

0:32 stiff and really formal and certainly there are some speaking occasions that call for a more formal delivery but a lot of speaking occasions call for a casual conversational delivery style so kind of keep that in mind most of the rest of this slide here has to do with encoding and decoding that we talked about earlier in the video this idea of concrete terms and vague terms concrete terms are terms or words that are really specific really precise the opposite of that is a vague term a vague term is a term or word that's subject to a lot of different possible

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