A good talk should have been well structured with the following elements.
1. Provide overview (an introduction)
2. Talk one idea at a time
3. Link ideas
4. Link with the people (listener)
5. Transition (summary of recent ideas + link to the next idea)
6. Provide final closing (a summary or conclusion)
The details of each element will be discussed below.
1. Provide an overview
You should give an overview of the whole conversation or speech, i.e. what you are going to talk next. In other words, you give your audience a hint of what they can expect in your talk.
This can be a set of topics of several ideas that you are going to talk soon.
2. Talk one idea at a time
Next, you start talking real points of our talk. One of the most important points to note here is that you should never talk too many ideas at the same time. If you do it, ideas will be mixed up and audience may find it difficult to understand or catch them. Therefore, just talk one idea at a time. Also, you always start with what the idea is about, i.e. the topic or overview of an idea. Next, you provide evidences for your idea. These may be explanations, factual information, famous quotations or even opinions by others. The most important point here is always talk one idea at a time; start with overview of an idea followed by evidences.
3. Link ideas
Once you have finished talking one idea, you have to switch yourself to a next idea. Sometimes, two ideas may not be related. However, most of the times, two ideas are somehow related to one another. Therefore, if you find yourself hard to move to a new idea, you just try to summarize the idea that you have just discussed. Next, find a way to link it up with the next idea. This will provide a smooth transition for both you and your ideas.
However, if you suddenly shift to a new idea without linking up with the recent idea, audience may find it hard to follow you because they are still in thinking of the recent idea. Therefore, providing a transition with linking between recent and new ideas is important for better and effective communication between you and your audience.
4. Link with the people (listener)
What happens when you lose yourself during talking an idea? You may have definitely experienced this before in the middle of your talking. It may be because you are not well-prepared, or you just do not have enough factual information to provide to convince your audience, or you are just too overwhelmed by your big audience etc. If you find this kind of situation during your talk, the best way to avoid such kind of sudden stop during talk is to link yourself or yours ideas with your audience. You may try to link by using phrases such as "Oh, what is your idea on this?", "How do you think about it?", "I think Mary has some points to highlight on this", "I am sorry that although I have written it down somewhere, I could not find it now, so could you please refresh me what I have just talked about?", "I think we have seen it before together", etc.
Therefore, to make your talk more lively, Rule 4 is link with your audience and it will make you easy for moving to a next point and you will have better understanding from the audience.
Of course, this may not be useful if the part of the ideas that you are talking is mainly your responsibility. In other words, if you have to provide credentials so that the audience can judge you, in this case, you cannot ask their opinions by linking up with them.
However, it must finally be reminded here that too much use of linking with your audience is also not good. If you overdo it, the audience may think that this guy is not well-versed on what he is talking and always asking helps from audience!
5. Transitions
As we have seen above, transition is very important during your talk. This can be done by linking your own ideas, with your audience and with their ideas. Actually, Rule 5 is the summary of Rules 3 and 4. It is put here again so that you can see its importance. To repeat it here, smooth transitions are very important so that you audience can catch your ideas easily and quickly. You can use the phrases such as "This kind of problem (summary of recent idea) needs a special way of approaching to solve it (heading to a new idea).", "So far we have just discussed the advantages of late marriage (summary of recent idea), but (transition word) there are also some drawbacks (moving to a new idea) in late marriage", "I think that what Mr. Smith has just pointed out is absolutely true (linking with audience). Actually (transition word), I have planned to talk about it in next slide (shifting to a new idea)."
It is hoped that you have now seen the importance of different linking styles to provide a smooth transition. Therefore, please use these techniques to enrich your conversation skills.
6. Provide a closing (a summary or conclusion)
Now, you have just given an overview followed by different ideas with different smooth transitions and links. However, what comes next? How can you stop your talk? If you think that well, I have just provided all my ideas with good links, it should be enough, and then you are hanging your ideas and your audience in the air. They are still with your ideas and you need to sum them up properly so that they can see what your stand is and what they can bring home. You can fulfil this by providing a conclusion for each of your ideas. Then, link each conclusion and provide final main conclusion. This will nicely sum up your talk. You may use phrases such as "All these points (a summary of all of your ideas) lead to (transition word) a conclusion that late marriage has both good and bad points (main conclusion). However, (transition word) we have found that there can be no specific rules or advices on whether the couple should get married early or late (another main conclusion). It really depends on each individuals (providing final take-home gift for the audience). I hope now you have seen how important your conclusion is to sum up your talk.
In this unit, we have studied the structure of a good talk with different elements. The most important points are (i) provide an overview, (ii) talk an idea at a time, (iii) link your ideas, (iv) link with audience, (v) provide smooth transitions, and (vi) provide a summary of the whole talk. You can visit or return this unit again if you need the details of each element. I hope that this unit is really useful for you and you may use these techniques to have a higher level communication skill.
