Oratory: rhetoric lessons - free course from 4brain, training 6 lessons, Date November 30, 2023.
Miscellaneous / / December 03, 2023
The ability to speak in public has been a useful skill at all times. People who have excellent public speaking skills will always be in demand by society and will be able to find work. It's no secret that there are few such people; they always stand out among others.
They turn out to be successful leaders, politicians, businessmen, journalists, writers, teachers, since in many professions knowledge of rhetoric plays a vital role. The purpose of this public speaking course is to provide everyone with the opportunity to learn free online materials, lessons, exercises, techniques and rules for mastering the basics of rhetoric.
Rhetoric is a word that has ancient Greek origin (Greek. rhetorike), and literally means “oratory”. What is “oratory”? And how to develop your abilities for it?
Each of us has had the opportunity to speak in public at least several times in our lives. And, for sure, no one doubts that in order to be fluent in the art of oratory, you need to know and be able to do a lot. It can be said that the ability to speak in public reflects our intellectual development and our social skills.
According to the definition of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, “oratory speech” is a type of monologue speech, used in a situation where the speaker addresses a large audience for the purpose of persuasion or suggestions. Oratory is often identified with eloquence, so a good speaker must be well-read, have competent speech, and be able to clearly express his thoughts. But the speaker also needs to be able to cope with his anxiety, control his diction and have a well-trained voice. In addition, it is important to master speech improvisation, be able to answer questions, maintain contact with the audience, pronounce the text with the necessary intonation, and much, much more.
Most of the skills described, which together form public speaking, can be learned. To do this, it is important to work on yourself, to realize, analyze and correct the unsuccessful moments of your own and others’ public speaking, and most importantly, to train your skills in practice. Our training will help you work through all of these difficult steps towards developing excellent public speaking skills.
Before starting your training, we advise you to pay attention to the four key rules of rhetoric, which one of the famous public speaking experts, Dale Carnegie, spoke about at the beginning of the 20th century:
These four rules of public speaking are essentially the foundation of any good speech. If you do not set yourself the goal of achieving great success in rhetoric, but are only trying to prepare for a specific speech, then they may be useful to you.
If you plan to take a more detailed approach to studying the art of public speaking, we will be happy to provide you with useful and interesting information in the lessons on our website.
Online Rhetoric Lessons
The public speaking training posted on this website is an integration of many techniques described by public speaking experts. Each of the lessons involves the development of a specific skill that contributes to the development of your public speaking abilities. Naturally, each person can master these skills differently, so try to pay attention to those lessons that seem most useful to you.
Lesson 1. Speech preparation
This lesson provides general guidelines for preparing a public speech. Speech preparation is the most important secret of oratory. Many rhetoric experts call preparation the main rule of successful speech. Dale Carnegie wrote that a well-prepared speech is nine-tenths a delivered speech. However, the process of preparing a speech is not only good content material, but also a set of certain stages of its design, structuring, presentation, allowing you to avoid standard beginner mistakes speaker.
Lesson 2. Speech plan
As you learned from the previous lesson, to prepare a good speech, it is important to know what to talk about and how to convey your thoughts to the audience. To do this, you need to draw up a plan for your speech, based on which you will be able to deliver an excellent oratorical speech. Naturally, the structure of each public speech is individual and depends on many things, to which include: the number and characteristics of listeners, their interest, speaking time and much more. This lesson shows the basic rules for creating a public speaking plan that you can apply under any circumstances.
Lesson 3. Oratorical techniques
Having collected the necessary material and understood what you want to talk about in a public speech, as well as drawing up a plan, you can move on to the substantive design of the speech. To do this, it is useful to use special oratorical techniques that are aimed at improving the perception of information by listeners. There are a lot of oratory techniques. This lesson describes the main and most popular of them. In addition, here you will find examples and recommendations for using these techniques to develop your public speaking skills.
Lesson 4. Speech technique
In the last lesson, you were introduced to rhetorical techniques that help better reveal the content of your speech. In order to give a speech in front of an audience, it is important to use methods of presenting material from which speech technique is created: intonation, diction, articulation, tempo, gestures, etc. This lesson covers oratorical techniques that will help you when pronouncing text. speeches.
Lesson 5. Memorizing text
In the process of preparing for a speech, you often have to memorize important parts of your speech, the structure of the speech, various facts and quotes. Sometimes there is a lot to remember, and this can cause some difficulties. In addition, during a speech, due to anxiety, important things can simply fly out of your head. The ability to keep key details of a speech in mind and attention is a very useful skill for any speaker. This lesson provides important techniques and programs for memorizing the text of a public speech, and also suggests some useful techniques for developing memory.
Lesson 6. Working with the audience
Every occasion you give a speech is unique. If this is a work report at a meeting, you will be listened to by default. But it also happens when you need to fight for the audience’s attention, try to convey your views to them, and get support. The success of not only a specific performance, but also the realization of your global goal may depend on this. Remember how in the movie “Wall Street” the young broker played by C. Shin received only 5 minutes to convince the “shark” of the stock market (M. Douglas) take him to your team? And in fact, no matter how competently the speech is composed, no matter what artistic means and techniques are used, no matter what no matter the preparation - the final success depends largely on how interested you are in the audience to perceive what was said. Undoubtedly, the speech should be appropriate, but there are times when apathy, or even unfavorability, needs to be overcome not only by relevance or beautiful words. You need a strategy for working with the audience that will increase the significance of the speech, convey its message and turn the listener into a follower of your views. We want to talk about some mechanisms and tricks of interaction with the audience in this lesson.