Persuasive speech outline for creating an awesome keynote speech
One of our PublicSpeakKing community readers reached out to me for coaching help with a keynote speech. She was working as an education officer with the US government.
I agreed to help, as she seemed to be clear on what she wanted, at least at a high level. By the way, that’s important because if you are not sure what you want, then it will be hard for anyone to help.
Once the speech was over, this is what she sent back.
“Speech last evening was amazing”
I’ll outline the steps which most of them ignore.
This is not theory.
This is stuff that we actually did. Please pay attention to the nuances.
Here are the steps that we took to create the persuasive speech outline.
I’ll explain key concepts as we go along.
Step 1: Answer three critical questions
As the first step, I wanted my coaching student to find answers to the following questions. She came up with the answers the next day, and here is the Q&A for your reference.
Question: Who is your audience? Tips on finding them – What is their age group, what is their relationship to the occasion, what are they looking for from the graduation
Answer: GED graduates (who dropped out of regular school earlier), their family, friends, and school staff of GED students.
Question: What’s your purpose for giving the speech? Tips of finding the answer – Write the reason for giving the speech
Answer: To congratulate and motivate, and let others know what is involved.
Question: What’s the objective? Write what the organizers are trying to achieve
Answer: To show that we value the GED and the hard work it took to achieve it. And encourage them to set their next goal.
Step 2: Find the overall themes to create persuasive speech outline.
In our first Skype call, we discussed about the big idea.
This will help in understanding the overall themes.
I asked her what she wants to convey as the overall message. This is a critical step for creating the persuasive speech outline.
She had it in her head but not able to express in words. But, she drew a picture in a white board.
The picture had a curvy road with barriers. She had the word “Start” at the bottom. She had “Congratulations” at the top.
She told that she wanted to tell the audience to understand that they have to navigate the barriers with hard work and a compass (to help them navigate through barriers).
There were two things emerged out of the call. She wanted to “Congratulate” in the first part and then talk about “What next” in the next part.
Step 3: Interview your audience
I asked her to interview few from her potential audience.
Interview is not possible in all cases but it is highly recommended. Luckily, she had access to them and she did their interview.
Don’t get caught on formal interview. Just talk to them like you’ll talk to a friend.
The questions in the interview should be based on data you discovered during the earlier steps.
For example, in this case, she asked them:
- What kind of problems you faced when trying to prepare for the GED exams?
- Who was supporting you?
- What are you looking forward to?
Step 4: Mine stories for the speech
From the answers collected in previous step, it became clear that the audience were not regular graduates. They are dropouts who were part of GED program.
Clearly, the speaker (the one whom I was coaching) did not have any similarity in her personal story.
If you are a speaker, then it might not make sense to use your personal story here.
But you can leverage stories of famous people who had a similar story.
This part “who had a similar story” is really important.
Ok, now why stories at the first place? I am not getting into theory but the short and sweet answer is: Stories are the easiest way to persuade an audience at an emotional level.
This is a case study, so let’s get into what we did
The keynote speech is for GED graduates who dropped out of school. That’s their story. So while searching in Google, we used keywords like, “successful people who dropped out of school”.
We got the following links in search results.
https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/successful-dropouts
http://people.howstuffworks.com/15-notable-people-who-dropped-out-of-school.htm
https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/253724
https://www.buzzfeed.com/ashleyperez/23-famous-dropouts-who-turned-out-just-fine
Now, you go through the list. Then pick the story that will be a good fit for your audience and need.
This is not easy. It’s a manual process.
But here’s the key thing:
Try to select personalities who had a similar background, situations, etc. And also select their stories if those stories will fit you overall themes.
After this exercise, story of Steve Jobs seemed to fit the speech objective. I’ll tell you why.
Steve Jobs was a drop out. He was an American. He dabbled around with things before becoming successful (that’s creating Apple). Again, he got fired. Again he became successful.
The following are the events that made sense to jot down. Again, don’t think too much here. Just jot down, we can cut or add later.
I wrote the story of Steve Jobs as follows:
Steve jobs dropped out of mainstream subjects at Reed College, dabbled with calligraphy classes, went through a spiritual journey to India, and started assembling computer chips with his friend Woznaik, for some quick money. In fact, Apple was born after they got a contract to assemble and deliver computers.
In fact, that was his starting point. He built Apple and his life from that point onwards. Off course he too faced challenges. He was fired from Apple in 1985. Then, he made a comeback in 1997 and took Apple to one of the most respectable and profitable tech. companies in the world.
I would recommend that you do similar exercise and get more stories and anecdotes.
The output of this step will be raw stories and anecdotes that can be used during development of your persuasive speech.
You can collect as many stories as possible. It’ll be really helpful for this speech or for any other speech project.
Step 5: Write the messy draft
By now, you have answers (or at least some idea) about your potential audience, and you have some stories and anecdotes, and you might also feel that you are getting closer to your ultimate message.
This is where you sit down and write that first messy draft. Write down all the thoughts you have. Don’t worry about the end result.
Please put things in paper (or on word document :)) even if it seems messy.
If writing down seems difficult, you can use Google doc speech to text feature. It converts your words into text. This is exactly how my student wrote her first draft.
She was reluctant but I pushed her to do it anyway.
Remember you’ll never be able to create the final polished script the first time. Your perfect speech script is hiding somewhere in the 10th or 20th version.
Step 6: Develop the persuasive speech outline
Everyone starts talking about developing the speech as the first step, but I want to leave it as the last step because I believe outlining the speech is the critical part many people miss.
If you do all the above steps correctly, you’ll be able to create your persuasive speech outline, and then develop your speech with much more ease.
I want to share some key nuances and activities that will help you during the development of your persuasive speech.
1) Interactive speech development helps
Try to talk to someone when writing down the speech. You’ll get more clarity and the process will become enjoyable.
For example, the opening from messy draft was:
35 students to a classroom, some sleeping in the back. Students yelling in the front, and the students who always seem to know all the answers. Who’s ready for school??
I asked my coaching student, “What do you want the opening of your talk to do?”
She said, “I don’t want my audience who were school dropouts to think any less of them”
And I said, “Your opening should catch everyone’s attention too?” And she goes, “Yes.”
From the collection of stories we had, I suggested that we use Steve Jobs story as an opening. We brainstormed to decide if Steve Jobs was a good fit or not. Finally she agreed that her audience would know about Steve Jobs more than any other famous personality.
After different revisions, the opening changed to:
Steve Jobs dropped out of his undergraduate school, dabbled with calligraphy classes, went on a spiritual journey to India, and started assembling computer chips with his friend Steve Woznaik, for some quick money.
Did you realize what this “opening” did?
It’s telling about the lesser-known things about Steve Jobs. It shows Steve Jobs as a normal individual with whom the students can connect.
One other thing to observe is the use of the powerful principle of contrast.
We all see Steve Jobs as this larger than life persona. But these facts directly contrast that persona and it’s a powerful way to catch attention of your audience.
2) Break the rules based on need
Through our coaching sessions, we crystallized two things. This is the super high level themes for our speech outline.
- The theme for first part of the speech was “Congratulations”
- The theme for second part was “What next”
I suggested a simple structure called SOAR. It is not my discovery but this formula is around for a long while and often used in business presentations. SOAR stands for:
- Situation
- Objection
- Action
- Result
Here’s how I suggested to implement this formula for the first theme “Congratulations”
- Situation – Opening of speech should get attention, inculcate interest in audience and also introduce the situation.
- Objections – Then, talk about objections that the audience faced when trying to meet their goal.
- Action – Here we appreciate and build the confidence of the students. But the underlying intention is to introduce the solutions (Hard work, support system) and include all data points related to these solutions here.
- Result – Then, we congratulate them on succeeding in graduating the GED exams
Then, we implemented the SOAR formula, with slight modification, for next theme “What next”
Instead of Objection, we used Options. Did you realize that there are no hard and fast rules?
It’s ok to break the rules as long as you know the rules.
Now I want to talk about an important concept, which is ignored most of the times during a speech creation process.
And that’s transition. Transition is how you move from one part of the speech to the next part without any bumps. Its like moving in an elevator from one floor into the next floor.
For transition from first theme to next, I suggested on using Alice in Wonderland anecdote where Alice asks, “Where does this road go” and it fitted pretty well. Then, we used SOAR as described below.
- Situation – Introduce the theme “What next” by connecting with Alice situation
- Options – Instead of objections, here we introduce options of different paths for the students to set their next goal.
- Action – Tell the audience that the actions are the same that they took to achieve this graduation. We are using the power of logical argument to persuade them.
- Results – Conclusion will be the promise of achieving results if they follow the action plan. We used stories of Steve Jobs, and Alice in Wonderland once again to persuade the audience at an emotional level. Here we are playing with the power of emotional arguments to persuade them.
Thus, it formed our persuasive speech outline. Use the steps outlines above to create an awesome persuasive speech.
We then developed it into a full fledged persuasive speech. We polished the script, and finalized it well before the D-day.
My student diligently practiced the speech and delivered a wonderful speech. And what happened? Well, I broke the suspense earlier in the blog post. You know what happened :).
But I have something cool as well. She re-used the same speech and delivered it to prison graduates. Clearly the effort involved in creating the keynote speech was worth the investment.
See the note she sent me again.
“They LOVED it. They want me back next year”
Hope this post will help you outline an awesome keynote speech!
