3 Minute Speech: How to Craft a Memorable Short Speech?

whether it's a business pitch wedding toast

or even a public speaking competition three-minute speeches can be tricky to craft

because they're long enough for us to have some juicy content in them but they're not so

long that we can actually do justice to all that content so how do we tackle this issue and go

about crafting a compelling three-minute speech let's break it down into three very simple paths

you have the introduction the body and the conclusion

part of almost any speech of any length in a three-minute speech the introduction should take

about 30 seconds the body should take about two minutes and the remaining 30 seconds go

into the conclusion but before we get into all of that

we need to understand why a lot of short speeches whether they're three five or even one minute long

tend to fall apart and it's many times because the speaker is confusing the audience with too many

messages so before we sit down to actually write our speech it's important 

for us to take a step back and ask ourselves two very important things

number one what is our main center idea what is that one thing that we want to communicate to the

audience just one because anything more than that tends to be too much 

for a three minute speech and secondly what is the takeaway for the audience

do we want them to take some sort of action do we want them to adopt an idea what we want

them to do at the end of the speech once we have both these things in place crafting 

the rest of the speech would become a lot easier okay so getting back to our 

structure let's start with the introduction we can break this down into two parts if you're

giving a speech for entertainment or for competition purposes then the introduction 

needs to be captivating needs to hook our audience from the very beginning 

if you want to be outlandish we can also use some sort of unusual prop to capture

their attention from the very beginning look how this speaker Darren Tere does it when he

delivers his presentation or if you don't want to use something like a prop

we can also use the imagination scenario this simply means making 

the audience shut their eyes and making them imagine something

check out this example by Ric Elias in his ted talk

so imagine a big explosion as you climb through 3 thousand feet

imagine a plane full of smoke imagine an engine going clock clock 

clock clock clock sounds scary well i had a unique seat that day

i was sitting in one d and now if you're giving a more formal three-minute speech 

or presentation we don't necessarily need to have some sort of a hook we can simply start off with

telling the audience why we're here by getting straight to the point and telling them why is it

important that they need to listen to this topic by simply starting off with

i'm here to talk to you about whatever your topic is

and this is important for you whatever the reason is

that's good enough for a short speech in formal settings

next comes the body the main part of your speech we're going to be spending 

approximately two minutes the best way to communicate a large chunk 

of your speech even if it's just two minutes is to convey it in the form of a story

now a lot of us know the importance of storytelling but sometimes we may 

find it difficult to take a bunch of information and convert it into a narrative

so i'm not going to get too deeply into this topic because we've made a lot of 

videos around storytelling they'll all be linked in the 

description but to give you a small gist of it almost 

every story will be broken up into four parts you have the 

desire the conflict the solution and finally the climax for 

example if you're pitching a particular company or idea the desire would be

what is the vision for that particular company the conflict will be what 

is the problem or challenge that we're solving for our end customer

the solution will be how the product or service works

that will help solve that particular challenge and finally the climax will be 

the way forward in terms of the plan that will help them 

achieve the overall desire or vision of the company 

we have a lot more examples in the other videos so if 

you're interested to go deeper into this topic check them out and finally we have 

the conclusion this is the remaining 30 seconds of your speech over here we don't want to get too

fancy we simply need to have our main takeaway put at the end of the speech 

what is the final action we want the audience to take or the final idea

we want them to adopt and that should be the closing statement this is 

because the end is what the audience tends to remember the most so it just

makes sense to have the most important part of our speech as one of the last lines an alternative

to this is if your speech is very information heavy

you can summarize it towards the end to make sure that the audience don't miss out on

anything important now your speech might not exactly be three minutes long it might be two

minutes or five minutes long there are different nuances that go even when we're playing around

with such less minutes but we've made videos on topics with specific speech lengths I

highly recommend you check out our two minute and a five minute video in case you have those

particular lens of speeches to give as well