The TalkPower Word Budget

Students tell me that their inability to edit material is a major problem. Often they accumulate enough research material to talk for hours even though they only have 10 minutes to do their presentation. Cutting this down for your allotted task is a herculean task, leaving you feeling totally overwhelmed.

            It’s like a dream I sometimes have. In this dream I go into my office and all of the files are turned upside-down and emptied out on the floor. I need certain documents quickly, to prepare a summation for a jury, and I don’t know where anything is. I feel rushed and helpless. I don’t know where to begin. That’s what it’s like when I have to prepare a summation or a speech, or any kind of presentation.

                                   

                                                                        -Jason, Attourney

Almost every presentation has a time limit. Since there are approximately 150 words to 1 minute of speaking time, once you know how much time you have for your talk you can keep track of the amount of material you need by using a word count to limit yourself. This is how you do it.

If you are given 10 minutes to give a presentation, you will have to prepare fewer than 1500 words, including time for pauses. The combination of a time limit and word count gives you and approximate word budget to work with (there area bout 250 words per double space type written page, given 1-inch margin and a 12 point font).

If this idea seems radically different from your normal procedure don’t panic. Writing a talk will become as familiar as driving to work, when you understand the rules. Once students learn how to edit themselves in terms of minutes and word counts, they are amazed at the beauty and clarity of their talks. In addition, the time saving factor of using this formula is considerable.

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