Quora Answer: What are the Best Tips & Hacks for Speaking with Eloquence & Sophistication?

The following is my answer to a Quora question: “What are the best tips and hacks for speaking with eloquence and sophistication?”

Speaking with sophistication and eloquence relies less on natural ability, and a lot on practice.  You need to speak, and speak often.  This makes you comfortable with speaking, especially to multitudes.  For starters, your foundation is a good command of the language.  The basis of rhetoric is mastery of grammar.  This takes a lot of practice.  In the beginning, to minimise errors, try and stick to the past tense, and short sentences.  Pithy statements give you the illusion of great wisdom.

You need to learn to incorporate common rhetorical devices, enhancers of speech such as allusions, alliterations and idioms.  One of the ways to learn this is to watch videos of famous speeches by great orators such as Martin Luther King Jr., Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill, and John Fitzgerald Kennedy.  A fun way would be watching the performances of stand-up comedians such as George Denis Patrick Carlin, whose material is based on word play.  British comedies such as the “Black Adder”, and “Yes, Minister” all have excellent dialogue based on rhetorical devices.

It helps to be widely read with good general knowledge, so that you are comfortable addressing a wide variety of issues, particularly pertaining to current affairs.  People want to talk about things that affect them here, and now.  You must develop an interest in the issues of the day so that you have a position, and a coherent, cogent argument explaining and defending it.

Finally, it is important to collect quotes.  Quotations tie our position to the wisdom of others, and grants us an air of reflected sophistication.  Being able to quote others within the context of a speech lends your performance a credibility it might, otherwise, not have.