This ever-interesting subject is featured in my e-book, Speechwriting for Leaders. Coming to your tablets soon, I hope. Here’s part of what I say:

How do you achieve that strong start?

For a speechwriter it’s mainly about words. But a speaker engages an audience on many different levels simultaneously: eyes, ears, mind, mood, instinct. By using these levels, a speaker can get a speech quickly up to top speed.

At a TEDx event, I watched a woman give a large audience a weak presentation about the merits of local organic food. She looked nervous and started feebly by apologizing for her poor English and never recovered. But her finish did have an incompetent attempt at dramatic impact: she produced from a bag a packet of cheap sliced bread and a delicious–looking crispy baguette, held them up, won a desultory clap from the bemused audience, then wandered off the stage.

Think how she could have transformed her presentation by using these props to start her speech without saying a word.

She might have pre–arranged for a small table and chair to be on the stage. She enters with her shoppingbag and sits down facing the audience. She takes from her bag two plates and a knife. Then she produces the two loaves.

Very deliberately, and with dramatic if not comic exaggeration, she unwraps the sliced bread. She holds up and slowly scrutinizes a dangling limp slice of processed bread. She lets it fall plop on to the plate. She cuts it into small, sad portions.

Then she unwraps the crusty baguette. She noisily cracks it open, and breaks it into pieces.

She carries the two plates across to the audience and offers the bread to the people she can reach. The crispy baguette pieces are much favored, the processed bread reviled. Once this mini–performance is over to noisy acclaim, she starts to explain the issues.

This is a powerful start, the more so for being unexpected. The speaker is talking directly to the audience, but not using words.

Another way to start strongly: jump straight to a conversation with the audience. I once faced an audience of 400 people to give a presentation on diplomatic spy scandals. I plunged in by abruptly asking a question: “Who here has secrets?”

I repeated it in a quieter voice. “Who here has secrets?” Then I stopped.

An uneasy extended silence ensued.

Everyone has secrets. Everyone knows that everyone else has secrets. Why are my own secrets so interesting? Because they’re secret! Why is he asking? What does he want to know about me?

By unswervingly appearing to open up deep personal issues inside the head of everyone present, I seized control of the occasion. Then I let silence do some of the talking for me, building a mood of expectation. Everyone was listening intently. That made it easy to move from discussion of why secrets are important for you and me to how governments handle secrets, and why they try to steal other governments’ secrets.

Or the speaker can begin by going straight into a story of some sort.

You know, something strange happened this morning, just as I was setting off to come here to talk to you.

This can be combined with a question for extra conversational effect:

Do you know who telephoned me this morning, just as I was setting off to come here to talk to you?

Contrast these two ways of opening a speech about health issues. First this:

My speech here today is all about health issues, and how our society deals with them. Let me tell you two stories that explain the problems.

Then this:

Has anyone here ever had an embarrassing health problem? [Long pause]

Has anyone here NOT had an embarrassing health problem? [Long pause while the audience mulls over those ghastly questions.]

Let me tell you two stories…

Terrific stuff, if I say so myself. Plenty more where that comes from. Watch this space. And treat yourself to a new Kindle or iPad to be 100% ready in time for the launch.