Public Speaking Tips
I always enjoy sharing my public speaking tips with you. In this post I would like to explain the use of gestures and how you can use them in your presentations. Gestures give life to a talk by animating the speaker and more. Visualisation can be achieved by using the right kind of gestures.
Public Speaking Tips: Gestures
The use of gestures is one of those public speaking tips that when applied can really raise the ability of a speaker. Gestures fall into a number of categories and I will explain these for you now.
Facial, Hands and Body
By using your hands and body you can help your audience to see a point by enforcing it with gestures. Your face can usually be relied on to convey emotion.
Public Speaking Tips – Examples of the use of Gestures
The use of gestures in the right way is vital and gestures with the hands and body will usually fall into two types. These are descriptive and emphatic.
Descriptive gestures are used for emphasising things like size, shape, speed and so forth. You could for example shape your hand movements to represent a circle or point for a direction. We often do these gestures naturally when speaking informally but often when if front of an audience we can clam up. Emphatic gestures are for as the word would indicate emphasising for example words such as “no” a swift horizontal arm movement would do this well.
Facial gestures can be used to represent happiness with a smile or laugh, deep thought with a furrowed brow and so on. With the use of facial gestures we have to make sure that they are appropriate, a smile when talking about someone’s misfortune may not be appropriate and would detract from what we are saying, possibly causing offence. As with all my public speaking tips they will only work if you practice them. In view of the fact that we may be nervous when speaking especially as a new public speaker gestures are something that we should think about and practice.
Gestures can show that you are enthusiastic, relaxed, confident and well prepared. A speaker who looks stiff and uncomfortable will not put their audience at ease.
Gestures need to be a natural part of our speaking skills. New speakers will often stand upright and then you can see that they now have a gesture to use, do it and then return to arms by their side. It’s good to practice in front of a mirror or record ourselves on video so that we can see that we are applying these public speaking tips.
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