How Much to Say?

A professional speechwriter put it succinctly: "No one will get mad at a speaker who made a twenty-minute speech when he was scheduled for twenty-five minutes." The tolerance level of the typical audience, con­ditioned by half-hour television sitcoms, is not what it used to be. Even captive audiences (employees, fellow professionals, students in class­rooms) become restless when the big hand on the clock completes a full circle. If you've narrowed your topic sufficiently, you can be complete and still be brief. If you've been commissioned to fill an hour, why not plan to devote half of it to fielding questions?

When managers are going to address a friendly and familiar audience, they probably will not ask the public relations department for help in preparing the speech. On the other hand, many managers attained their positions because they were superb engineers, planners, or economic analysts, not because they have a knack for getting an audience in the palms of their hands.

Even when the manager is a competent speaker, making an effec­tive speech is not merely a matter of turning on the charm or reaching into a bag of oratorical tricks. One of the most important contributions the PR department can make, for example, is to research the composi­tion of the audience in order to advise the speaker who the listeners are, what their interest level is, what they already know about the subject, and what kinds of questions they are likely to ask.