Methods of Delivery 13.2 259
Impromptu Speaking
You have undoubtedly already delivered many impromptu presentations. Your
response to a question posed by a teacher in class and an unrehearsed rebuttal to
a comment made by a colleague during a meeting are examples of impromptu
presentations. Impromptu speaking is often described as “thinking on your
feet” or “speaking off the cuff.”
The advantage of impromptu speaking is that you can speak informally,
maintaining direct eye contact with the audience. But unless a speaker is ex-
tremely talented or has learned and practiced the techniques of impromptu
speaking, the speech itself will be unimpressive. An impromptu speech usually
lacks logical organization and thorough research.
There are times, of course, when you may be called on to speak without
advance warning or to improvise when something goes awry in your efforts to
deliver your planned message. This was the case when President Bill Clinton
was delivering his first State of the Union address in 1993 and the teleprompter
scrolled the wrong text of his speech for seven minutes. What did he do, as mil-
lions of people watched on television? He kept going. Drawing on his years of
speaking experience, he continued to speak; no one watching knew about the
error until afterward.
If you know you will be giving a speech, prepare and rehearse it. Don’t just
make mental notes or assume that you will find the words when you need them.
It was Mark Twain who said, “A good impromptu speech takes about three weeks
to prepare.” When you are called on to deliver an improvised or impromptu
speech, the guidelines in the How To box can help to ease you through it.
Extemporaneous Speaking
If you are not reading from a manuscript, reciting from memory, or speaking
impromptu, what’s left? extemporaneous speaking is the approach that most
communication teachers recommend for most situations. When delivering a
speech extemporaneously, you speak from a written or memorized general out-
line, but you do not have the exact wording in front of you or in memory. You
have rehearsed the speech so that you know key ideas and their organization,
but not to the degree that the speech sounds memorized.
An extemporaneous style is conversational; it gives your audience the
impression that the speech is being created as they listen to it, rather than as
though it was prepared yesterday or weeks ago, and to some extent it is. Seeing
something happening now provides added interest and excitement. The extem-
poraneous method reflects the advantages of a well-organized speech delivered
in an interesting and vivid manner.
Martin Luther King Jr. was an expert in speaking extemporaneously; he
typically did not use a manuscript when he spoke. He had notes, but he often
drew on the energy of his audience as well as his own natural speaking talents