What quality is vital to virtually all creative art forms, including literature, music, painting, sculpture, photography, drama, and speechwriting?
What quality both sharpens the attention of your audience and makes them understand you better?
Contrast!
In this article, we’ll define contrast, explore its benefits, and examine many strategies for using contrast in your next presentation.
If you could easily highlight key messages in your speech, would you do it?
If there were a simple way to be more memorable, would you do it?
If you could craft speech phrases that are more quotable, would you do it?
Epiphora is the key to spicing up your speechwriting. In this article, we define epiphora, cite several famous examples, and help you add this rhetorical device to your speechwriting toolbox.
Do you ever find yourself wishing that your audience understood you better? Do you have difficulty conveying your great ideas clearly?
One of the most important writing techniques I ever learned was parallelism. Parallelism leads to clear writing, and clear writing leads to clear speaking.
In this article, we define parallelism, study numerous examples, and discuss how you can incorporate it into your speeches.
You can’t give the speech of your life until you first give life to your speeches.
One way to breathe life into your speeches is to craft memorable phrases that will linger on the lips of your audience, and a great tool to help you achieve this goal is chiasmus.
In this article, we define what chiasmus is, study several famous (and not-so-famous) chiasmus examples, and give some tips for crafting chiasmus into your own speeches.
A rhetorical question is a common rhetorical device where a question is asked by a speaker, but no answer is expected from the audience. This distinguishes it from explicit verbal audience interaction where a speaker asks a question, and then waits for a response or calls on someone to answer it.
You are certainly aware of this technique, but are you aware that you can use a rhetorical question in at least nine different ways? No? Read on!
This article identifies nine ways to use rhetorical questions, and provides examples throughout.
What if your speeches were more quotable?
What if your speeches were more powerful?
What if your speeches were more memorable?
Anaphora can do this for you. In this article, we examine how strategic use of repetition can elevate your speechwriting.
Thomas Carlyle once observed:
Music is well said to be the speech of angels.
You can make your speechwriting sing by learning lessons from songwriters. By applying these eight songwriting techniques, you will get your audiences to virtually tap their feet, nod their heads, and even hum along to your message.
Thank You For Arguing is a fascinating introduction to classical and modern rhetoric, packed with speechwriting lessons for every public speaker.
It is grounded in the wisdom of the past (beginning with Aristotle’s ethos, pathos, and logos) and yet written for modern speakers with countless references to everyday persuasive examples.
This article is the latest of a series of public speaking book reviews here on Six Minutes.
Metaphors help a skeptical or apathetic audience better embrace and value a new concept or idea.
Metaphors make the connection of that new idea to an object the audience already knows.
Read on to discover a treasure chest of metaphor speech examples.
In the first two articles of this series, we learned how using the rule of three can improve your speeches by [1] writing triads of words, phrases, and sentences and [2] by applying three-part speech outlines.
In this article, you will learn how adding an unexpected twist to the third element can add power or humor to your speech.
Previously, we learned how the rule of three improves speeches when used at the micro-speech level, to craft memorable triads of words, phrases, and sentences.
In this article, we will learn how the rule of three improves speeches at the macro-speech level when applied to speech stories or to entire speech outlines.
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