A nondescript, gray-haired professor worked at one university: he wore thick glasses and terribly old-fashioned suits. It is very easy to miss such a person in a crowd.
But as soon as he entered the classroom and began to speak, a miracle of transformation took place: the eyes of the entire audience were riveted on the professor, and even the lazy people in the last rows listened to his every word.
From his lips flowed such competent, clear speech, such intelligent and deep thoughts that from an old man he turned into a stately, representative speaker. Nobody noticed his thick glasses, bald head and threadbare suit anymore. Isn't it amazing?
Agree: clear, consistent and convincing presentation of your thoughts is a real art. And in order for your words to be listened to in the same way as that professor, you need to give a speech and learn to speak competently. This will be useful to you in any area of life.
Thanks to these skills, you can be the life of the party, easily convince a potential partner to sign a contract with you, speak effectively in front of an audience and achieve any goals you set.
Where does beautiful speech come from?
A child’s beautiful speech is the merit of his parents. It is advisable to develop conversational skills from childhood. This is facilitated by visiting a theater studio or poetry club, as well as constantly reading and learning poetry.
The childhood of the modern generation is inextricably linked with computers, which is why there is practically no time left for books. This is a very important shortcoming of many parents, because in the question of how to learn to speak beautifully, reading is indispensable.
Language and literature lessons at school make a significant contribution to the development of children's speech. If school teachers do not produce the desired results, parents must take matters into their own hands.
It is worth considering individual lessons with your child, or enrolling him in private lessons with another teacher who will help him develop the art of speaking freely on any topic.
But what if your parents missed out on the development of beautiful speech as a child? Don't get upset and think that you have no chance of learning to speak clearly. You can still catch up, it’s never too late to improve!
Arrangement of future words
Make it a rule to start each lesson by saying the phrase: “I dream, I want to speak beautifully.”
Thoughts, having a material basis, will definitely turn into reality, and the right actions to promote your dream into life will take on a special spirit. So, let's move on to the first point, which will bring us closer to understanding the main task:
- Sentence construction is important for communication and comprehension. The narrator, when communicating information to others, must mentally arrange the events taking place in chronological order so as not to disrupt the theme.
- People who do not have experience may have their thoughts confused, and the presentation will turn out to be incoherent and illogical. Therefore, keep a diary, where on the pages you describe the dialogues you heard, interesting details, daily reflections, and family relationships.
- The paper, hiding the absurd expressions, will gradually present a beautiful surprise. Well-structured beautiful statements will form a meaningful content with eloquent quotes, reasonable turns of phrase, and logical phrases. The brain, clogged with unnecessary “garbage,” freed from a large amount of news, stories, experiences, will give free rein to a new stream of thoughts, bringing you closer to the answer to the question: “How to learn to speak correctly and beautifully.”
How to make your speech beautiful
First of all, in your quest to learn how to speak correctly, you need a responsible approach and a clearly developed strategy. It will also be useful for you to follow several rules in the process of improving your speech:
- Eliminate parasitic words from circulation.
- Read fiction.
- Constantly enrich your speech with new words.
- Deal with diction or pronunciation defects.
- Listen to beautiful and correct speech.
- Retell what you read or heard.
- Avoid tautologies. Highlight the main thing.
- Develop memory
- Dealing with public fear
These tips seem simple, but only constant adherence to them will lead to the desired result. You can deliver a speech without outside help, all you need is self-control and discipline.
Vocabulary expansion
When you see an unfamiliar word, be sure to determine its meaning. The explanatory dictionary provides their detailed explanatory characteristics and scope of application. With representatives of different professions, age-old categories and social strata, rare words have their own special position.
By accumulating new knowledge, status increases, serious respect arises, and interesting acquaintances are acquired. How to learn to speak beautifully is no longer an unresolved dilemma, because beautiful syllables and amazing phrases slip into your conversation, becoming an excellent foundation.
Parasite words
Getting rid of parasitic words is not an easy task. They become a habit, and therefore during a conversation we simply do not notice our speech impediment.
The words “in short”, “well”, “like”, “this”, “as if”, “how to say”, “in general”, “you know”, “actually”, “let’s say”, when repeated many times, destroy all the charm of our presentation, even if we are talking about “smart” things.
Of course, this habit is not so easy to get rid of, which is why we gradually learn to speak without parasites. To do this, you can ask your family or friends to correct you.
As soon as others hear a forbidden word, let them immediately reprimand you. To increase efficiency, come up with a punishment for using filler words.
Get a special piggy bank and put a certain amount of money into it for each mistake you make in a conversation. There are “punishment boxes” in many offices. In this way, companies are fighting slang and profanity among their employees.
If you are an athlete, you may punish yourself differently. For every parasitic word spoken, force yourself to do push-ups.
It is not convenient to do exercises everywhere and not always, so you can write down tasks in a notebook and complete everything that has accumulated during the day in the evening or the next morning.
Just don't evade punishment. Your best assistant is self-control. Over time, you will speak clearly and intelligibly, the main thing is not to give up.
Learning to describe objects
This exercise will help you learn to speak beautifully, express your thoughts clearly and easily talk about a particular subject all day long. Focus your attention on some object that you have in your home: a wall clock, a plate, a gas stove, a sink, etc. Think about this subject and try to talk only about it for 5–7 minutes. Try to use beautiful literary language.
At first it will be very difficult for you, but over time you will learn to describe objects in literary language. As soon as you see progress, complicate the task: gradually increase the training time and choose those items whose description causes you certain difficulties.
Reading and reading again
An effective way to develop speech in adults and children is reading. You don't need to read everything. Classic literature or special books on speech development are perfect.
We can recommend such works as “The Living and the Dead Word” by Nora Gal, “From Adam’s Apple to the Apple of Discord” by Vadim Khrapp and “Alive as Life” by Korney Chukovsky.
There is a lot of worthy literature on the Internet, reading which will help you improve your speech and expand your vocabulary.
Retelling what you read can increase efficiency. Just ask someone to monitor how correctly and consistently you present the text.
As you read, you will come across interesting quotes. We recommend writing down the ones you especially like in a notebook so that you can re-read them and remember them from time to time.
In addition to books, social networks are also teeming with clever phrases and excerpts from books. It doesn’t matter where the quotes come from, it’s much more important to remember them.
In the right situation, your brain will tell you who is worth quoting. Such a sudden coloration of speech can turn your words into a real masterpiece of oratory.
Public performance
There comes a crucial moment when your speech is intended for a large audience:
- Here it is advisable to think through all the dialogues and lines. Write down the points of the plan. According to the plan, gradually develop the topic of conversation.
- Record your speech on a voice recorder. As you listen to the speech several times, weak expressions will become noticeable. Prepare your speech in advance so that you have enough time to correct the gaps and then the motto of the day: “I want to speak beautifully” will become an indispensable companion.
- It is impossible to learn to speak beautifully without an audience. Those close to you get used to the style of communication and do not notice errors in speech. Unfamiliar listeners will immediately react to an uninteresting story, showing this by behavior and noticeable noise. Before speaking, it is important to know the age characteristics of your upcoming interlocutors.
- Seek advice from friends who have had to speak in public. Take into account their beautiful performances, speech, note key points, use the information received as a “magic wand”.
- Choose answers to the expected questions to learn how to direct your presentation in the right direction. Study books on the topic, write down catchphrases and famous quotes. Base your report on familiar names. With such a basis, your presentation will take on a scientific and fundamental appearance.
- The art of speaking requires mandatory training. Settle for a small and familiar audience at first. Having developed the skills to communicate with a group of people, gradually increase their number in order to learn how to change the flow of the conversation and thematic focus.
Proper communication with a man
If in the case of girls it is possible and necessary to show interest from the first minutes of communication, then when communicating with guys, restraint has never harmed anyone. This does not mean that you need to put on a stone face and look at one point. You just have to remember who is the stronger sex here, and in whose hands the initiative should be. A woman should be easy to communicate with a man - this is attractive. Many girls are prone to constant expression of attention, but hourly calls, SMS, letters, invitations to meet and everything else in quantities that clearly exceed the norm, work against them. A guy under such pressure will feel squeezed into a corner and will quickly find a way to get rid of an overly intrusive girlfriend.
Always leave room for a man to take initiative and act only against its background.
If you need to come to an agreement with a guy or get what you want from him, remember that in most cases it is better to act directly. Men's psychology is very different from women's: men are simpler, more decisive and less susceptible to long-term doubts. When making decisions, a man is guided by common sense and logic, unlike a woman, who more often relies on intuition and is dependent on her mood. In other words, where a woman has to be persuaded, a man will only need to be convinced with compelling arguments.
Tips from professional actors
Courses in acting, the psychology of influencing people, or the psychology of business negotiations will help you master the art of competent nonverbal communication, develop the correct structure of speech and gestures when communicating, and master manners. Training in these courses and courses of a similar focus begins with mastering oneself, getting rid of pressures and complexes, studying the psychology of communication and developing the ability to understand people.
Professional actors are people who, due to their profession, constantly have to try on other people's characters and non-standard situations. An actor's bread and butter is persuasiveness, and it is achieved by deep penetration into the psychology of the character. Here are the basic rules for proper communication with people from professional actors:
- Keep your distance. It’s a rare person who feels delighted by familiarity, so don’t rush to switch to “you”, it will always be done in time. In addition, each person has a personal space (within a radius of half a meter), which can only be violated by close people.
- Smile. A smile is the surest sign of goodwill and good intentions. When you first meet, a person unconsciously evaluates you for possible danger. This assessment will directly influence his expectations. If you want him to calm down and relax in your company, smile at him.
- Maintain eye contact. Direct eye to eye contact means openness and a desire to make contact. Any communication begins with visual contact, do not neglect it.
- Watch your speech and gestures. Be neutral in everything: do not speak too loudly or too much, and avoid excessive gesticulation.
The listed criteria for proper constructive communication can help you out in any situation, even if the dialogue doesn’t go well initially.
Exercises that will teach you how to communicate with people
In situations where the need for communication arises, many fall into a kind of stupor. In order not to think for a long time about how to learn to communicate with people and be interesting, we will look at exercises. After a week of practice, even a modest and reserved person will turn into a talkative interlocutor. We are not talking about classes that improve speech, but about complex exercises. They make you think while communicating and have an exciting conversation.
Continue your interlocutor's thought
Goal : Learn to find unusual solutions, make thinking more flexible.
Execution : Turn on any TV show or video on the Internet. Listen to the speaker for half a minute. Turn off the sound and develop the thought further on your own.
How much to do : From 5 to 10 minutes a day.
Retell
Goal : Learn to think correctly and talk interestingly at the same time. Exercise helps strengthen the connection between thought and speech.
Execution : Visit a blog you like. Select an article and take a few paragraphs from it. Read and retell them out loud. Then do the same with the following paragraphs until the entire article has been read and retold.
How much to do : Depending on the volume of material. It is recommended to retell one article per day.
Give a lecture on any topic
Goal : Memory training by extracting unused information from it. Improved thinking flexibility.
Execution : A partner is required to carry out the exercise. Choose a subject that you will talk about with your interlocutor. What should be talked about is its appearance, methods of use in a given room, its importance for the individual and humanity as a whole. If you practice regularly, you will soon be able to easily rant for an hour about a pencil, a teapot, or a table leg.
How long to do : 5 minutes is enough to start.
Learn to highlight the main thing
People like to listen to speakers whose presentation is informative. A speech with a minimum amount of important information, unnecessary details that do not affect the listeners in any way, will not have the desired effect, even if a person has learned to express his thoughts well.
If it is necessary to convey any amount of information in a speech, it is better to use one of the following techniques: exclusion, generalization or replacement. You can practice them on texts of any subject. The main thing is to do the work regularly.
To speak beautifully means to speak meaningfully, correctly placing semantic accents. It is necessary to find a middle ground that will not allow the speech to become dry, devoid of emotionality, or overly lengthy. Start your speech with an aphorism, a short parable that will become an epigraph to your message, and then move on to a logical presentation of your thoughts, accompanying them with 1-2 short examples.
When delivering a report, it is necessary to constantly monitor the public's reaction. If people do not show interest, it is necessary to enliven the speech with some vivid comparisons.
Avoid tautology
A tautology is a figure of speech in which words that have the same root are used in the same phrase. The best characteristic of the tautology is oil. Awareness will help improve speech; a person must thoughtfully construct each phrase, checking whether it contains speech errors.
You can improve your speech by pre-recording it in a text editor or on a voice recorder. After different periods of time, it must be read or listened to several times, then speech deficiencies will be visible. You can get rid of tautology and say the same idea beautifully only by expanding your vocabulary and selecting synonyms.
Talk with your mouth full
Let’s make a reservation right away: the exercise only indirectly helps you become an interesting conversationalist, clearly express your thoughts and always find topics for conversation. The essence of the lesson is to improve diction, which, in turn, makes speech impeccable and increases the confidence of the speaker.
Goal : Quickly improve your diction before an interview or speech, recording audio for a blog, etc.
How to perform : The exercise can be performed in several ways, the essence will not change. You can place a spoon on your tongue. Alternatively, insert a few nuts into your cheeks and try to speak as clearly as possible. Experienced speakers warm up their mouths by holding a pencil between their front teeth and pronouncing each word. Great advice, try it too.
How long to do : From 7 to 10 minutes.
Get rid of parasitic words
Parasitic words (“like”, “as if”, “well”, “this” and others) minimize not only the literacy of speech, but also its persuasiveness.
Getting rid of verbal garbage is not easy; you need to constantly monitor your speech. To do this, you need to slow down the pace as much as possible, and as soon as an unnecessary word wants to roll off your tongue, stop. Such work requires strong will and is difficult. The results will also not appear immediately. However, perseverance will help you overcome this deficiency and subsequently gain the ability to speak correctly.
Talk to the mirror
Goal : See yourself from the outside, learn to express thoughts correctly, and communicate with yourself.
Execution : The task is to, looking at your reflection, come up with a theme and develop it out loud. Go to the mirror and start talking about your thoughts. Make a smooth transition from one topic to another by connecting them together. After some time, you will learn to sincerely talk about everything that is in your head.
How much to do : 10 minutes twice a week.
The Lewis-Carroll Mystery
Goal : Get rid of stereotypes, the habit of thinking in stereotyped ways.
Execution : The exercise is based on a riddle invented by Lewis-Carroll - “How is a raven like a table?” It’s better to start doing it in pairs so as not to choose simple things for yourself. One person must say one word, and the second person must say another. After which you will reflect on the similarity of these objects. It will come out something like: “How is an iron similar to a hamster?” Get into the conversation and pick interesting options.
How much to do : To begin with, it is enough to discuss 10 pairs of objects at a time.
Nurturing Confidence
When there is no confidence, it is impossible to learn to speak beautifully. Fear tightens the muscles, the voice begins to tremble treacherously.
To get rid of the overwhelming feeling of anxiety, try to seek advice from a specialist or read literature on psychology. They will reveal the true reason and remove the clamps. The Internet is filled with manuals and training exercises that are simple and clear.
Low self-esteem provokes a reluctance to overcome feelings of fear. Such deliverance seems impossible to a person and the impregnable barrier increases. Love everything you do. You need to learn to work on yourself. Let go of the past, live here and now. Start life's story with a blank page.
Each voice is beautiful and unique. Don't be shy about it, no matter what it is. Be able to fascinate with the right presentation. The listener will accept any unusual timbre when the topic is accessible and interesting. Experiment. Say the simple sentence “I want to speak beautifully” in different ranges: high, low, medium. After varying, you will notice a special refinement and will be happy to note that your voice is the best.
