Structure of a good communication

Public speaking, like any other discipline, has a structure and general rules that are based on pre-established and time-tested scientific foundations. Many of the great speakers are capable of skipping and adapting these rules to their own disruptive style. This requires a superior ability and a certain innate art to know the audience and direct it towards a distinctive style that recreates a personal brand in the speaker. Starting from scratch in public speaking will require a lot of discipline and effort to stick to a logical structure that allows you to generate your own style and personal brand.

To have an adequate communicative structure, we must know about the narrative threads, the language to use and the communicative hooks that will allow you to maintain coherence while retaining the audience's attention. During the development of this session, we will be addressing in greater depth the elements mentioned above, so that you will find them useful as tools to use when structuring your presentation.

Narrative thread: The narrative thread is nothing more than the logical structure that you will maintain during your presentation. As a general rule, this narrative thread is divided into: introduction, development and conclusion. During the first stage, the aim is to present to the audience some of the basic ideas that the presentation will deal with. Without going into the essence of the talk, we will review in a logical order which points will be addressed progressively. We can note why these points are important and what you hope to achieve by developing them.

The introduction is the most important stage in capturing the attention of your listeners. You must work to make it as striking as possible and generate expectations or curiosity strong enough to lead the captured attention towards the development of the presentation.

In the development, the essence of the talk is addressed and you work to satisfy the expectations generated in the first phase. You must bear in mind that, although the introduction is a very important stage, those who have come to listen to you are strongly interested in the development of your speech, because it is the one that encompasses the specific information you wish to transmit.

Once the conclusion is reached, the concepts and elements addressed during the presentation are reviewed. The idea is to close the talk in an orderly manner and ensure that listeners can effectively retain most of the information you have communicated.

Communicative hooks: Although we have stated that the appropriate structure for a logical and coherent communication is the introduction, development and conclusion, there are a series of resources, also known as "communicative hooks" that will be useful to embellish the presentation and keep the attention of your listeners. A communicative hook is to generate a call of attention in the listener, awakening their curiosity about what they will hear next. These hooks can be used at any time during your presentation, although as a general rule, it is recommended to use them during the introduction.

If your talk is about finances, for example, you can start with a sentence such as: most of you will have the opportunity to reorder your finances at the end of this conference, however, very few of you will actually put the knowledge you have acquired into practice.

A sentence as simple as this, awakens the feeling of wanting to know what is so important that you are going to tell them that will allow them to reorganize their finances once and for all. In the same way, you are going to appeal to the need bias, where the person does not want to neglect their attention in order to be one of those few who will put the acquired knowledge into practice. Try to structure your presentations in a logical way, introducing communicative hooks in the moments where the attention of your audience can be diverted.