Any audience for a speech quickly works out what it has to face. Boring or Interesting? Routine or Inspiring?

Getting off to a good start is essential, as top US speech-writer John Shosky explains in the latest Total Politics:

Audiences decide if they like you, and if you are a person of character, in between eight and 20 seconds of the start. 

They give you only about 30 seconds of attentive listening before you begin to lose some of them. In other words, the audience will listen carefully to what you have to say for about a half minute then, with each second, more people start to fade away.

He gives examples:

That is why I applaud any speech that starts with the heart of the matter, such as Boris Yeltsin’s speech at the burial of Tsar Nicholas Romanov’s family in St Petersburg in 1998:

"It’s an historic day for Russia. Eighty years have passed since the slaying of the last Russian emperor and his family. We have long been silent about this monstrous crime. We must say the truth: the Yekaterinburg massacre has become one of the most shameful pages of our history."

Now that is the way to start: bold, direct, concise, clear, and quotable.

In an age where audiences have a very short attention span, you have to get right to the point. No dawdling, no setting the stage, no easing in and getting comfortable, no joke and jive prelude: right to the point…

No doubt much the same can be said for written work too.

Read the whole thing.

And other articles too. Total Politics is surging along nicely now – well done Iain Dale and his team.