On the Art of Speaking

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On the Art of Speaking

“You must be confident” is the famous sentence everyone blurts out whenever you seek advice of progressing at speaking. Curiously, most of the people fail to tell that how to build up this confidence, and, even the seekers don’t bother to question how to gather the thing called confidence. So, let’s see how can we style ourselves confident.

In this piece since I will try to shine some light on improving speaking, so I will be limited to it. Nevertheless, if the readers cleverly transferred some of these confidence-building ideas to their respective fields, they will be benefited.

Practice

By practicing one catches the errors and works to become perfect. In order to sound polished, most of the great speakers used to devote some time to reading aloud. So pick up any passage of your interest, read it aloud, and then recapitulate it aloud as well. The words you find new or difficult to pronounce in the passage, look the meaning and pronunciation of them in the dictionary.

There are a lot of dictionaries that are coming as software. A great feature these dictionaries offer is that one can listen to the correct pronunciation. The words you find difficult to utter, key them in the dictionary, and carefully listen to the pronunciation. Jot down these words anywhere and keep on speaking them till you feel you have properly fitted them into your mouth.

I come across many people complaining that there is nobody to speak English with. Rejoice, as this recapitulation practice will fulfill that need and you will become a fluent speaker. I too improve speaking by the same practice.

Listening to good speakers is also a good idea, but as there are several slang, paroles and dialects in English, so like others I won’t warmly suggest it. However, one must always listen to good speakers in order to grasp the expressing technique, which is very crucial.

Be Expressive

The best technique to be expressive is to deeply understand the topic you are discussing, because by doing this, your voice would naturally jell with the nature of the topic. Another very crucial point is to understand the words and try to form the images of those words in your mind while practicing. You must do this only while practicing and not when you are in public otherwise your concentration will skirt. In time, these expressions in your words will come effortlessly. This will bring liveliness in your speaking, and your words will leave a totally different impression on your listeners.

Vocabulary

Always be eager to learn new words. Building up a good vocabulary will make you fluent at speaking as you will have many words in your mind to express your thoughts. Agreed, you may not use even half of the words you learn, but even the unused half will play a very crucial role to ease your speaking.

If you don’t have a good vocabulary, you will often slip into yawning gaps accompanied with embarrassing hems and haws. Remember, a good vocabulary will boost your confidence as well.

Idioms and phrases, besides adding a relish to speaking, show your familiarity with the language and leave the listeners spellbound.

Logic and originality

Be passionate for speaking, but like others I don’t accept the idea of going crazy for it. Don’t misuse your time and energy by acting on the illogical suggestions offered in many personality-development courses and those available on many websites.

Be original by neglecting such needless innovations. We are so much gifted that if we remain original the world will place us on top of all the admirations. A child charms everybody because of his originality. Things go wrong when as an adult he resorts to artificiality to do the same.

Tailpiece: it is knowledge and practice that implants confidence in you. The more you will learn and practice the subject of your interest, the more confident you will feel. In your way of speaking well you will find a host of obstacles. If you have confidence, you will break each and every obstacle - but lacking it means each and every obstacle will break you.