Quora Answer: Do All Professional Public Speakers Practice Their Speeches in Advance?

The following is my answer to a Quora question: “Do all professional public speakers practice their speeches in advance?” 

Yes, but not in the same way non-professionals do.  A person, new to public speaking, or who does not do it often, would tend to memorise the entire speech.  This may be helpful in the beginning, or when you are in a public speaking competition, but it is an impediment to public speaking for a specific purpose, in the real world. 

What we do is go over the specific points we want to convey, and note the tone, the pauses, the body language, the facial expressions, even the particularities of the word, and rhetorical devices for maximum impact.  As a general rule, it should not be more than three points, the sentence structure should be smooth, but short, and the tenses consistent.  When speaking professionally, it is important to consider the proper pronouns.  There is a psychological subtlety in the use of “I”, “we”, and “us”.  This is used to separate the audience from the speaker persona, and to bring them to our side, depending on what we want to convey, and the effect we want. 

Speaking professionally, with a purpose, is a manipulation of the psychology of the crowd.  It is not merely stringing together words into a series of sentences.  A master at rhetoric plays the crowd in the same manner a puppet master moves a mannequin.  In this case, however, it has to be subtle, and the audience must be utterly convinced they have arrived at the same conclusions independently. 

There are two things that are practiced here: the speech, and the delivery.  They are done independently, and then brought together to see if they make a cohesive whole.  We look into the mirror, and take note of facial expressions, especially the eyes.  Public speaking is a subtle performance.