Verbal Graphics

The TalkPower Action Formula (refer to TalkPower Kindle) provides a perfect vehicle for stylizing the look and sound of your talk. Verbal graphics is the TalkPower method of breaking a speech down into sections and then shaping the speech with strategically placed pauses. These pauses give your presentation the same design you would find in a poem of an essay. Just as the written page is designed with headlines, margins, bold print, bullets, and spaced, spoken word needs the contrast of silence and sound for style, beautiful design and dramatic effect.

Verbal graphics create the space (silence) for the audience to take in and reflect upon what you are saying. These pauses create a rhythm that brings your presentation to life. The rhythm causes the speaker and the audience to move back and forth, figuratively, in unison. This movement is the catalyst for the intensity that occurs between speaker and audience when so-called dynamic speakers perform. For example:

Speaker: When I was doing my research for this talk I got the strangest call. (Pause)

Audience: (leans in)

Contrast this with the following:

Speaker: when I was going my research for this talk I got the strangest call. It was a young man that claimed he had been abducted by aliens!

As you can see, a pause brings dramatic tension to a speech, providing the speaker with a mysterious quality called presence or charisma. I can think of many well-known speakers (I will not name them because I do not wish to embarrass them) who speak well, but are not thought of as dynamic presenters. They speak in endless even blocks of sentences with no pauses at all. In that case, the entire speech becomes one long ribbon unraveling with no values, colors, shades, or changes.

If speech without the logical pause is unintelligible, without the psychological pause it is lifeless

                                                            -Constantine Stanislavski

Even if the speaker has an interesting voice filled with a variety of intonations, he/she will not project a dynamic personality if he/she does not pause properly. What begins with and exciting liftoff for the audience when the speaker first appears, fades as the speech progresses and the attention of the audience suddenly begins to diminish. I have seen this happen on numerous occasions, and I thought, “if only there were 10-15 well places pauses in this speech, the speaker would surely receive a standing ovation instead of polite applause.”

TalkPower Inc