3 Chapter 3: Introduction Speeches
Introduction speeches not only introduce the topic, they set the tone for the entire event. In giving an introduction you want to make sure that your audience is paying attention. Setting this tone of attention should then play out across the entire event. This is done in a very short speech and often when the audience is distracted by getting settled in their seats, making coffee, looking to see who else is at an event. In an introduction speech, you need to cut through this noise and call attention to yourself, the event, and the reasons why they should listen to you. In this chapter we will cover the basic elements of this speech and how to use speeches of introduction to set up an excellent day, event, and career.
There are four basic functions of an introduction:
- Attention and interest for the subject which is at hand
- Good Will – make the audience willing to listen to the speech
- Give the purpose of the speech and / or event.
- Provide a roadmap for the speech
Gaining Attention
Let’s start off by thinking about the first gaining attention from the audience. There are many ways in which you might do this. You might:
- Tell a story,
- Speak about the occasion that the speech is given at,
- Mention recent or current events,
- Think about your own personal interests,
- Surprise the audience with a statistic or interesting fact,
- Give an analogy that the audience cares about,
- Ask a question which causes the audience to think about this speech,
- Tell a joke although be careful that your joke is in good taste.
Regardless of the method of gaining attention that you choose, you want the audience to feel as though the speech is relevant to them. Some speakers will do this by outlining each and every way in which the speech is important to the audience. Other speakers will indicate that the best way to make the audience care is to let them fill in that gap. Think back to Chapter 2: Making Good Arguments – arguments can either layout all of our premises and the conclusion or we can give one premise and not the conclusion (this is called a syllogism). In the second option we let the audience fill in the conclusion and we know that when they fill in the conclusion for themselves they frequently fill in the reason that is most compelling to each and every member of the audience.
Telling a Story
Let’s think about the ways in which these types of attention getting mechanisms work within a professional setting. Within a professional setting, you might find an individual who tells a story about how they came to a corporation as young intern and moved up to a management position. The speaker might emphasize how the person who they are introducing served as a wonderful mentor. They might describe how they looked up to the subject of the speech and how that person personally impacted their career. This is a great way to give an introductory speech because not only does it make the audience see a famous person in a new light, it also allows the speaker to humbly brag a little bit about themselves about how they came in to this fantastic career.
Focus on the Event
Sometimes, however, you’ll be introducing an individual who you don’t know anything about. You still must introduce them and might do so by emphasizing how the event itself is important. For example, imagine you are the first speech at a large business meeting. People have come in from all over the country and they’re expected to attend several different trainings. Corporate events, networking, and a few meals are included in the schedule, and throughout the day it is critical that they continuously return to various department leads. When you are introducing those department leads you might not care who the individual leads are. But you do care that those individuals are the guides for the day’s events. Therefore, you need to introduce those individuals not because they individually are important but because they are important to the event’s success. In this type of introduction, you do not need a long narrative. It can be enough to say:
“And now I’ll introduce the team leads. The first is Allison, in the right corner. You can see she’s the one in a red sweater. Allison comes to us from Baruch. The second lead is Taylor from Johns Hopkins, you can see him in the left corner in the orange polo.”
The minimal background for these introductions is enough to put a face to a name and a quick note of affiliation. Any more than that short intro will distract the audience from your speech’s intent of getting all attendees to the correct team leads.
Using Humor
Amongst the many different ways that you can gain the audience’s attention, humor frequently makes the list of speaking guides preparation materials textbooks. However, in a professional setting we highly suggest that you be exceptionally cautious. When using humor in your introduction, remember that humor does not translate well cross culturally. It does not translate well when translating between different languages. And it does not carry over well historically. You can probably think of many historical examples when speakers have jokes and wished that their speech had not been filmed and distributed via social media. A joke that might land well in a small audience might be understood in a very different way by a large audience. If you really want to use humor, be sure to try it out first with a colleague or an event organize to make sure that what you think is funny is actually funny. There are so many other ways in which you can introduce a speech that we strongly suggest that you keep humorous introductions to those events where you know the audience well and your professional career is not hanging in the balance.
Creating Good Will
After you’ve gained the audience’s attention, it is very important that you make them feel positively towards the speech. This is called “creating good will.” When creating good will, you want to make sure that the audience is interested in your speech and that they are willing to receive your speech. Think of the ways in which you might watch speeches or activities on social media. You might watch some things which are enraging, you might watch some things which are funny, and you might watch some things which are informative. Those topics that you feel good about and you are willing to share with people have already established goodwill with you. When you share the video with someone else, you are extending that goodwill. Contrast those videos to the speech given by someone standing on the street corner and yelling about politics. Even if you are also interested in the topic, you are unlikely to stop and listen. More likely you will quickly try to cross the street, avoid eye contact, or otherwise not engage. No goodwill is established by the person standing on the street and yelling. When making your own speeches, you want to be in the first category of speeches – those that people are excited to listen to. Try your best not to be in the second, those which everyone attempts to avoid.
How can you, as a speaker, develop goodwill with the audience? Communication scholars focus on the persuasive triad. The triad consists of the fundamental tools of persuasion by Aristotle in the Rhetoric. These have been used for centuries and are still commonly referred to by communication experts. As you may guess by the title the triad has three critical parts: ethos pathos and logos.
Ethos is credibility or the ethical characteristics of the speaker. It is important to quickly develop your ethos because this is the way in which the audience trusts both you and the message which you are giving. This judgement might be based on your reputation, your authority, or your moral standing. We would hope that individuals would wait and judge us after they get to know us a little bit. But when we think about how we judge someone, we might admit that we judge them far before they start speaking. Think about the professional setting of a classroom. It is the first day of classes and you sit at your desk eagerly anticipating the arrival of your professor. In stumbles someone that looks like they just woke up. Their hair is disheveled, their clothes don’t quite look clean, and their shoes don’t match. There’s a strange odor coming from them, and they keep scratching their head in a very disturbing sort of way. This professor might be brilliant, but you probably have already prejudged them before they begin speaking. You are already considering their ethos. Perhaps they are not as professional as you would have hoped?
When giving a speech of introduction, we know that we will be judged by the audience as we walk onto the stage. And when we are in the audience we are making judgements based on how a speaker looks, acts, walks, and finally speaks. Their appropriateness for the event is subjective. An organizer has already deemed the speaker to be appropriate but often times the audience members feel that they are also qualified to make that determination.
Once the speaker begins, the audience is also judging them based on their accent, their punctuation, their use of slang, the ways in which they gesture, and any images that they use. When we are audience members, we should try hard to not prejudge an individual based on indicators about their race, class, ethnicity, gender, religion, or many of the other factors which we can tell by looking at a person, or which we think we can tell by looking at a person. Unfortunately, sometimes we when we are preparing a speech, we need to critically assess ourselves. What will our audience know about us before we start speaking? What might they think that they know, or can presume about us? And how might we overcome those presumptions or address them so that our audience might be encouraged to pay attention to our speech? This does not mean that we need to mask a disability. Or that we need a new accent to give a speech. Rather, we need to continue to be our authentic selves while making an effort to reach out to the audience.
When we are presenting online, this effort includes considering what appears in the background of our screens. Be sure that the background of your screen is informative to the speech or the event. At minimum, it should not be distracting from the speech. This means making sure that the room is clean behind you (even if you are using the ‘blur’ background as sometimes a quick head movement lets everyone glimpse the room behind you. Be sure that if an organization is shown in the background that it is the correct one. And if you are using a false background that it is appropriate to the event. As fun as it might be to appear that you are on the beach or floating in space, a flat color, corporate logo, or model office may be more appropriate if you do not know your audience well. Additionally, using the logo of the organization which you are introducing someone can be a fantastic way to quickly establish your own ethos to establish as well as your authority to speak on behalf of the organization.
Pathos
The second part of the Aristotelian triad is pathos. Pathos refers to the ways in which we appeal to the audiences’ emotions. This might mean that we encourage them to feel joyous, to feel sympathy, to be surprised, to be fearful, to be sad, or sometimes to be angry. We want to always ensure that we are being ethical in the demonstration of these various types of emotions. Sometimes feeling sad is important and necessary. For example, if you are giving an introduction before someone gives a eulogy at a funeral it is completely acceptable to invoke emotions of sadness and sympathy. It would feel very strange and probably inappropriate if you were joyful about someone’s passing.
If you are speaking at a professional conference, you can use joy and anticipation to excite the audience for both the speaker and the day’s events. For example, you may want to highlight the various ways in which this speaker has helped you at past events and has encouraged you to think about new topics in new ways. You might tell the audience that they will gain something by listening to the speaker, or that a surprise is coming at the end of their speech. This will set up an interested audience which is eager to learn from the subject of your speech. This approach
is very different than introducing a speaker by telling the audience that “it costs so much for this greedy speaker to come. And because we spent all that money, the snacks have been cut. Don’t expect that the coffee break will be any good, and the quality of the lunch is not nearly as good as last year’s.” Even though the audience already know why the speaker costs so much, making such a direct comparison between the speaker fee and the audience’s lunch will result in anger from the audience towards the speaker (and potentially you too as the messenger). In giving this introduction, you would be using pathos to establish anger. This anger might be strongest if it comes as a surprise to the audience which had otherwise anticipated a joyful or at least interesting introduction.
Logos
The last part of the Aristotelian triad is logos. Similar to logic, logos, is the way in which we support our argument and our speeches. This might be through the use of references, data, case studies, research, analogies, analytics and statistics. In a speech of introduction, you don’t have a lot of time to give detailed references. Long block quotes usually don’t have a space in this kind of speech. But you might provide a few statistics, a short quote, or a little bit of data that causes the audience to be interested and willing to participate in the speech. You might tell them that in the last training 4 out of 5 audience members received better annual evaluations after they completed the training course. Based on this statistic, your audience members will be eager to pay attention and receive the information given by the speaker.
Give the Purpose
Giving a direct and obvious purpose during an introduction speech might feel unnecessary. You might think it should be obvious you are on stage to introduce something or someone. However, there was a reason that event organizers decided that you should filling time and make an introduction. Put another way, they could have just started off with the primary speaker. They didn’t do that, and that means you need to let the audience know why you are there.
This doesn’t mean that you need to shame the organizers. If you are speaking because the main speaker is late, you don’t need to tell anyone that. Instead, you need to spend time focusing on the organization, the event, or events that have occurred earlier in the day. You should never let the audience know that the speaker is late unless you’ve been asked to do so. Instead, focus on the positive things that are about to occur in the speech and the day’s events.
For example, think about an event in which you are introducing a well-known author in your field. You may want to speak about their book’s importance, how because everyone has most likely already read the book the author can delve deep into the details and engage in a lively set of questions. Or maybe you are expecting to hear about their reflection after visiting your city, offices, or events? Put another way, why is it important that the person is speaking today? Why is it important that they’re participating in the event? And why is it important that any of you are at this event? Answering any of these questions is a great ways to give a purpose for a speech.
Preview
After you’ve told the audience why they need to listen, and how they should listen, and give them a quick preview the speech’s contents. Frequently speech writers refer to this part of the speech as the road map. The analogy works because this part of the speech is like looking at GPS on your phone. You might say “this is where I am now, this is where I will be at the end of the day, and how is it that I will get there.” Similarly in a speech, you might say “First I will tell you a little bit about myself, then I will introduce our next speaker, and finally we will learn about the ways in which that speaker will improve our training.” The road map does not need to be long, just one or two sentences will do. But without a roadmap your audience will be lost, they may think that you are rambling, and sometimes they might not even know if your speech is actually done. Clearly telling them what your introduction, body, and conclusion contain lets the audience know how best to listen to your speech.
Conclusion
Getting off the stage and letting the person who you have introduced come to the stage is an incredibly important part of the speech of introduction. How do you gracefully exit the stage and invite the speaker to come up? Sometimes you might want to do this with a round of applause. Other times you might want to tell the audience “And now I give you our important speaker…” However you choose to make this transition, make sure that the person you are introducing is ready to come up onto the stage, or they are ready to take the place on the zoom screen. Additionally be sure to signaled to them that you are about to make the transition. This signal need not be a secret. You can say “as I come to the end of my speech I know that we are all eager to listen to the professor.” Or you might say, “Now I would like to welcome the professor to the stage.” And as you finish speaking you might applaud and slowly back away from a podium. Make sure that if you choose to use this method you are speaking into the microphone throughout your entire sentence. Then, make space for the speaker to come up and to be given their own speech.
Key Concepts
- There are four basic functions of an introduction:
- Attention and interest for the subject which is at hand
- Good Will – make the audience willing to listen to the speech
- Give the purpose of the speech and / or event.
- Provide a roadmap for the speech.
- Use humor sparingly, if at all.
- Aristotle’s triad, Pathos, Ethos, and Logos, is the framework by which all speakers connect to and are evaluated by audiences.
