At the risk of repeating myself
Repeating oneself is often viewed as a sign of old age. However repeating oneself is not always a bad thing.
When you give a talk you must remember that people will remember relatively little of what you have said after just a few hours of leaving the venue. How can you help them remember at least the key points of your talk?
One way is to use repetition. By repetition I do not mean simply keep saying the same things over and over again like children who are learning their mathematical tables. Repetition is repeating key ideas, the theme, and phrases that will help your audience to remember. This is a skill that once learnt will be invaluable as your audience will not only remember your talk but will likely talk about it to others for longer.
This subject is covered in my one day intensive speaking course in much more detail and you will be encouraged to practice this skill throughout your speaking career. When you compose your talk note carefully the key ideas that you want your audience to take away with them. This will form the basis of where you will build your repetition into the talk. You will be able to use phrases such as “Did you notice”, “I am just going to say that again” and then repeat or rephrase that point. Other useful phrases to commence your repeating of a point could be “what have we learnt so far?”, “let’s just go over that again”, “I just want to go back to” and of course many more. I am sure though that you can see that making sure your audience understands the reason for your talk and remembers the key thoughts is vital and using repetition is a tool to achieve this.
The key to repetition is to make it a natural part of the talk and not look like an after thought as though you were thinking “they did not understand.” You must also not appear to talk down to your audience or treat them like 5 year old children at school. With careful planning and thought your use of repetition will come naturally. Observe your audience and if puzzled looks are on their faces you may have to repeat your point so that they can understand. It has to be said that if people do not understand what you have said, simply repeating the same words is unlikely to make things clearer. You will need to put things in a different way. Therefore to make sure you do not have to do this too often prepare well and choose your words and illustrations according to the audience that will be listening. If you are talking about a matter that will be well understood by your audience it will require different explanations than a subject that is ‘foreign’ to them.
So let me say that again…..
Repetition is vital and its proper use is a skill that must be developed to become a successful speaker.
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Great article Roland and some points in it that I hadn’t thought of. I used to do Public Speaking Competitions (I did win once!!) and I was taught that when writing your speech you should – ‘say what you are going to say’, ‘say it’, then ‘say it again’. I always come back to this when I am writing an article too. The phrases you have mentioned would also be useful when you are explaining things to clients. Often you are talking about terminology that they are not used to and often have to repeat information. I will keep this article in mind.