What is the best way to write a speech? Some of you are not going to like this advice, you professional speech writers are not going to like this. But here's my recommendation if you actually have to give a speech. And my advice is do not write a speech out word for word. It's different if you're a professional keynote speaker and you're being paid 50,000. It's different if you are a president of a country, and people are going to be analyzing and transcribing every single word.

I'm speaking here primarily to adults who are speaking business civic occasions. And here's why I say don't write it out. It's really hard. It's time consuming. If you write it all out, and you get a little bit nervous, there's this tendency to start reading and what reads well doesn't necessarily start sound good to the ear. My recommendation is come up with bullet points, come up with a list of your top five ideas, your main ideas and have a sentence fragment three, four or five words, to remind you what the concept is.

If they're a couple of facts, statistics you need listed under that, and then a few words to tell you story associated with that. And to work from notes and outline, it's much, much more effective. For most people. Most of the time, I'm not trying to give something that's a solution for everyone 100% of the time. But if you have to give any sort of business presentation, political speech, anything that is not in the academic world, and you're not a president of a country and the whole media world is looking at you, then I would recommend don't write out the whole speech. come up with ideas.

Work from a single sheet of notes and then practice on video far more important than writing the speech out perfectly. Word for word.