
I’m going to talk to you today about soccer” already sounds boring and has not tried to engage the individuals in the audience who don’t care about soccer. Sometime these are called “grabbers.” The first words out of your mouth should be something that will perk up the audience’s ears.

That’s why every speech should start with an attention getter, or some sort of statement or question that piques the audience’s interest in what you have to say at the very start of a speech. If you do not get the audience’s attention at the outset, it will only become more difficult to do so as you continue speaking. Let’s face it-we’ve all tuned someone out at some point because we weren’t interested in what they had to say. While many audiences may be polite and not talk while you’re speaking, actually getting them to listen to what you are saying is a completely different challenge. The first major purpose of an introduction is to gain your audience’s attention and make them interested in what you have to say. Unless you have a specific reason to do otherwise, it is probably a pretty good order for you to use.

And while you have some leeway to structure your introduction in a way that best fits with your speech and you wouldn’t necessarily do all of these in the order below, the following order of these five elements is fairly standard. With that in mind, there are five basic elements that you will want to incorporate into your introduction. There may not be any one “best” way to start a speech, but we can provide some helpful guidelines that will make starting a speech much easier. This is a problem most speakers have, since the first words you say, in many ways, set the tone for the rest of your speech. Construct introductions and conclusions.Ī common concern many students have as the date of their first major speech approaches is “I don’t know how I should start my speech.” What they are really saying is they aren’t sure what words will be memorable, attention-capturing, and clever enough to get their audience interested or, on a more basic level, sound good.

