The ability to speak in public has been a useful skill at all times. People who have excellent public speaking skills will always be in demand by society and will be able to find work. It's no secret that there are few such people; they always stand out among others.
They turn out to be successful leaders, politicians, businessmen, journalists, writers, teachers, since in many professions knowledge of rhetoric plays a vital role. The purpose of this public speaking course is to provide everyone with the opportunity to learn free online materials, lessons, exercises, techniques and rules for mastering the basics of rhetoric.
And if you want to understand the topic in as much detail as possible, sign up for our “Modern Rhetoric” program.
What is rhetoric?
Rhetoric is a word that is of ancient Greek origin (Greek rhetorike), and literally means “ oratory .” What is “oratory”? And how to develop your abilities for it?
Each of us has had the opportunity to speak in public at least several times in our lives. And, for sure, no one doubts that in order to be fluent in the art of oratory, you need to know and be able to do a lot
. It can be said that the ability to speak in public reflects our intellectual development and our social skills.
Martin Luther King's famous speech
According to the definition of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, “ oratorical speech ” is a type of monologue speech used in a situation where the speaker addresses a large audience with the aim of persuasion or suggestion. Oratory is often identified with eloquence, so a good speaker must be well-read, have competent speech, and be able to clearly express his thoughts. But the speaker also needs to be able to cope with his anxiety, control his diction and have a well-trained voice. In addition, it is important to master speech improvisation, be able to answer questions, maintain contact with the audience, pronounce the text with the necessary intonation, and much, much more.
Most of the skills described, which together form public speaking, can be learned. To do this, it is important to work on yourself, to realize, analyze and correct the unsuccessful moments of your own and others’ public speaking, and most importantly, to train your skills in practice. Our training will help you work through all of these difficult steps towards developing excellent public speaking skills.
Internal classification
Rhetorical science is divided into two main types - general and specific.
They are understood as follows:
- General rhetoric is a science that studies universal paradigms (what is this?) and the rules for creating high-quality (effective and beautiful / only effective) speech. It does not affect specific areas.
- Private rhetoric is more applied in nature. It is built on separate types of communication (how is that?) and depends on the sphere of life activity.
How many private rhetorics ? Hard to say. As many as there are areas in which a person must communicate and communicate.
We can name the most voluminous ones:
- political,
- judicial,
- solemn,
- theological,
- academic,
- business,
- journalistic.
The first four are called traditional; they were identified a long time ago. The remaining three are acquisitions of recent centuries.
There is another classification . So, rhetoric happens:
- Theoretical. Explores the rules of creating good speech.
- Applied. Uses the highlighted rules in practice.
- Thematic. Studies the fields of different types of literature, united by one topic. As an example, the rhetoric of the presidential elections.
Online Rhetoric Lessons
The public speaking training posted on this website is an integration of many techniques described by public speaking experts. Each of the lessons involves the development of a specific skill that contributes to the development of your public speaking abilities. Naturally, each person can master these skills differently, so try to pay attention to those lessons that seem most useful to you.
Lesson 1. Preparing a speech
This lesson provides general guidelines for preparing a public speech. Speech preparation is the most important secret of oratory. Many rhetoric experts call preparation the main rule of successful speech. Dale Carnegie wrote that a well-prepared speech is nine-tenths a delivered speech. However, the process of preparing a speech is not only good content material, but also a set of certain stages of its design, structuring, and presentation, which allows you to avoid standard mistakes of a novice speaker.
Lesson 2. Speech plan
As you learned from the previous lesson, to prepare a good speech, it is important to know what to talk about and how to convey your thoughts to the audience. To do this, you need to draw up a plan for your speech, based on which you will be able to deliver an excellent oratorical speech. Naturally, the structure of each public speech is individual and depends on many things, which include: the number and characteristics of listeners, their interest, time of speech and much more. This lesson shows the basic rules for creating a public speaking plan that you can apply under any circumstances.
Lesson 3. Oratorical techniques
Having collected the necessary material and understood what you want to talk about in a public speech, as well as drawing up a plan, you can move on to the substantive design of the speech. To do this, it is useful to use special oratorical techniques that are aimed at improving the perception of information by listeners. There are a lot of oratory techniques. This lesson describes the main and most popular of them. In addition, here you will find examples and recommendations for using these techniques to develop your public speaking skills.
Lesson 4. Speech technique
In the last lesson, you were introduced to rhetorical techniques that help better reveal the content of your speech. In order to give a speech in front of an audience, it is important to use methods of presenting material from which speech technique is created: intonation, diction, articulation, tempo, gestures, etc. This lesson covers oratorical techniques that will help you when delivering your speech.
Lesson 5. Memorizing text
In the process of preparing for a speech, you often have to memorize important parts of your speech, the structure of the speech, various facts and quotes. Sometimes there is a lot to remember, and this can cause some difficulties. In addition, during a speech, due to anxiety, important things can simply fly out of your head. The ability to keep key details of a speech in mind and attention is a very useful skill for any speaker. This lesson provides important techniques and programs for memorizing the text of a public speech, and also suggests some useful techniques for developing memory.
Lesson 6. Working with the audience
Every occasion you give a speech is unique. If this is a work report at a meeting, you will be listened to by default. But it also happens when you need to fight for the audience’s attention, try to convey your views to them, and get support. The success of not only a specific performance, but also the realization of your global goal may depend on this. Remember how in the movie “Wall Street” the young broker, played by Ch. Sheen, had only 5 minutes to convince the “shark” of the stock market (M. Douglas) to take him on his team? And in fact, no matter how competently the speech is composed, no matter what artistic means and techniques are used, no matter what the preparation, the final success depends largely on how interested you are in the audience in perceiving what is said. Undoubtedly, the speech should be appropriate, but there are times when apathy, or even unfavorability, needs to be overcome not only by relevance or beautiful words. You need a strategy for working with the audience that will increase the significance of the speech, convey its message and turn the listener into a follower of your views. We want to talk about some mechanisms and tricks of interaction with the audience in this lesson.
Laws of word art
Rhetoric at any time had its ultimate goal - to influence listeners. A special role in achieving this is played by expressive speech, as well as visual and expressive means.
Scientists divide this science into two types - general and particular. The subject of general rhetoric includes general methods of behavior when pronouncing speech and the practical possibilities of their application in order to make speech effective.
This variety includes the following sections:
- rhetorical canon;
- speaking in front of an audience;
- rules on how to argue;
- conversation norms;
- teachings about everyday communication;
- communication between different nations.
By studying these sections, the speaker gains knowledge about the main features of speech use, which are the basis for every master of words.
General rhetoric studies ways to achieve mutual understanding between the speaker and the audience. For this purpose the following laws were developed:
- The law of harmonizing dialogue. The speaker must awaken the feelings and thoughts of the listeners, turning the monologue into a dialogue. It is possible to build harmonious communication only through dialogue between all people participating in the discussion. The essence of this rule is more accurately revealed by the following laws.
- The law of listener orientation and advancement. The person at whom the orator's influence is directed should have the feeling as if he, together with the speaker, is moving towards the intended goal. To achieve this effect, the speaker must use words in speech that determine the order of events, connect sentences and summarize expressions.
- The law of emotional speech. A person speaking in front of an audience must himself experience the feelings that he is trying to evoke in the audience, and also be able to convey them through speech.
- Law of pleasure. It implies the ability to present speech in such a way that it brings pleasure to listeners. This effect is easy to achieve if the speech is expressive and rich.
A particular type of rhetoric is based on a general type and involves the specific use of general provisions in certain areas of life. Thus, science studies what rules of speech pronunciation and behavior a speaker needs to apply depending on the situation.
There are a lot of private rhetorics, but they all fall into two main groups:
- Homiletics.
- Oratory.
The first group implies the speaker’s ability to repeatedly influence the audience. This includes church and academic types of eloquence. In modern rhetoric, this group includes propaganda that is carried out in the media.
Thus, with academic eloquence, a speaker, giving several lectures, should not speak anew each time about the purposes of their conduct, their necessity, and so on. It is enough for him to talk about this in the first lecture, and in all the rest the general task will be expanded through the study of a new topic.
Oratory is not capable of influencing people many times over. In this regard, the speaker must be able to correctly conclude each speech. This group includes judicial, everyday, socio-political and other types of eloquence.
Currently, oratory has grown quite widely, so a specific type of rhetoric has already begun to be divided into its own subspecies. For example, administrative, diplomatic, parliamentary and other rhetoric were distinguished from socio-political eloquence.
Video
In this section of the training on public speaking skills, you can watch videos of famous speeches by outstanding speakers: Martin Luther King, Steve Jobs, Vladimir Lenin and others. Also here you can find videos from various competitions, presentations and speeches of people to investors. In addition, the section contains video lessons from leading experts in the field of public speaking.
Watch all videos →
In Dahl's dictionary
and. Greek rhetoric, the science of eloquence, eloquence. Rhetor, -rka, teacher of eloquence; an eloquent, eloquent person, an eloquent speaker, an artificially elegant writer. Rhetorical, related to rhetoric and rhetoric. Rhetorical, characteristic of rhetoricians. Rhetorical tropes, figures, artificial decorations of speech, given in the rules. To rhetoric, rhetorically, speak or write eloquently, eloquently, flowerily, skillfully and artificially, diligently imitate elegant writers, and therefore speak pompously and coldly. Rhetorism, rhetoric, action according to the verb. There is no soul in his speeches, it is just rote rhetoric. Rhetorical, in which there is a lot of rhetoric. Rhetoric, yes cloying.
