Improving your oral communication skills
If you ignore responses to my puns, one of the most frequent questions I’ve been asked on twitter is how students can improve their oral communication skills prior to starting the Bar Course. Often I’m asked to recommend books to help develop these skills. The short answer is that while there are books on general communication skills and others relating specifically to advocacy, neither are what I’d recommend whether you want to improve your oral communication skills pre Bar Course or indeed for any other purpose. If you can start the Bar Course with a some control over your voice, that will be a good grounding for layering on specific advocacy training.
Is any of this new? No. Will it revolutionise your communication skills? Also no. But will it provide a solid grounding for whatever comes next, be it the Bar Course or other training? Yes. Much like a good tomato sauce can be used to make a delicious pizza, a hearty Bolognese or a simple pasta sauce. (Does this analogy work? Probably not).
Background
Whether you want to be a courtroom advocate, a communicator in industry, a public speaker or someone who is just more effective at communicating in everyday life, all of these require a solid base of knowing how to use your voice. When you type a document there are ways of formatting the text so that you can highlight differences to the reader. Font size, spacing, paragraph marks, bold, italic, underline, numbered lists and highlighting all serve a purpose to help the reader break up what would otherwise be one long stream of characters. Your voice has the same. You can use tone, pitch, pace, cadence, pauses and silence to do exactly the same for someone listening to you.
Find your voice
Tempting as it may be, don’t try to sound like someone else. There are people with voices you could listen to all day. I recently tweeted about the late Dick Ferguson QC of whom a legal directory said ‘You’d listen to him read out the phonebook’ and yes I would have done. By all means listen to impressive speakers (read on, it’s what I’m about to suggest you do) but what you are looking to copy is technique not ape them entirely.
Accents were a frequent point of discussion in my advocacy classes. Not started by me, but by students. Your accent is not a bar to being an effective communicator. Neither, should I add, is having the all too familiar generic south-east received pronunciation accent an automatic way of being effective. Effective communicators are those who have control of their voice no matter where its from.
I’m not aloof to the point that some voices are more pleasing than others, but that is horribly subjective and something you can’t account for. If you have control of how you use your voice then even if the receiver isn’t a fan of your accent they will still likely listen.
‘Advocates are born not taught’
I’m afraid I disagree. I also disagree that ‘advocacy is an art not a science’. I consider it to be a healthy mix of the two. I’m not blind to the fact that some people are inherently better speakers than others but almost everyone has room for improvement and importantly, while there are of course some for whom public speaking is almost impossible, most people can be taught to do so, to a reasonable degree.
While I have taught a handful of students who started the Bar Course needing little or no polish to meet the standard of that course, it really was just a handful and there were more who thought they needed no tuition. Confidence and ability can be as dangerous as lacking both. An over confident student will be slower to accept that while they might have been the best speaker in their previous cohort, they might be somewhere closer to the middle at the next standard up.
Method
My method is a three-step process that you can repeat as often as you wish.
Read the criteria and assess your own voice. Note where you think you need to improve.
Watch the speakers and note both the similarities (there will be some) and differences.
Re-assess your own voice in light of what you have heard
Below you will find some assessment criteria and a suggestion of speakers to watch.
Step 1: Self-assessment
Record three 60 second clips of yourself talking:
Your hobby or interest. It can be anything. The idea is to record 60 seconds on a topic where you need to do no research whatsoever. Something you can speak about with ease, enthusiasm and most importantly without notes.
Select a topic that you know a little bit about but struggle with. If you are a law student this might be the rule against hearsay, promissory estoppel or indeed any aspect of Trust Law. Using no more than a side of A4 of notes, deliver 60 seconds to camera explaining a point.
Read from a book. Any book. Read 60 seconds to camera.
You now have three clips to watch and assess. Yes, you do have to watch yourself. Yes, it can be awkward. Yes, it helps.
Pace
Slow down. Really, slow down. Someone has to listen to this and take it all in. Two things to tend to make people speed up when they speak; confidence in what they are saying and reading. If you are reading something you know it can sound like you are in a hurry to catch a train. I suspect of your three clips, the only one at this stage that has a reasonable pace to it, is the one where you speak about a topic you don’t know well. Speed kills. In this context it kills the ability for the listener to take in what you are saying. You could be making absolutely brilliant points but if only half of them land, then only half of them have got any chance of being persuasive. Slowing down will allow the listener time to take in your points, digest them a little (or possibly fully) and then move onto the next one. If you have an issue with pace then assume someone in the room doesn’t speak English and has a person standing next to them translating as you speak. Pretend you are speaking to the translator. You know they are listening, translating and speaking almost simultaneously. They can’t do that if you are speaking quickly.
Once you have got some control of your overall speed, consider how you can vary it for effect. Slowing right down where the point is complex and perhaps allowing yourself to be a bit quicker where the material and/or what you are saying is familiar to all.
Fillers
We all use fillers from time to time. Be they any of the following words: ‘er’, ‘um’, ‘basically’, ‘specifically’, ‘technically’, ‘like’, ‘you know’ or one of the many cliches, business or otherwise that have crept into everyday speech. It’s your mouth filling a space when your brain hasn’t caught up. The odd filler isn’t going to overly distract from what you are saying but if it’s ever third word or the bookends of every sentence it will grate. Slowing down (see above) will make a positive difference to the number of fillers you use. There’s an extent to which you actively need to think about not using them but I appreciate that alone might not make a difference. Next time you feel the urge to use a filler, do something else. I used to wiggle my toes. Why? Nobody else could see it but me. Over time the toe wiggle went and with it, the fillers.
Cadence
Vocal cadence, or the rhythm of your speech, will likely vary across the three clips you watch. Effective communicators vary their vocal cadence because the opposite is falling into the same cadence for every sentence. The same cadence for every sentence is problematic in two ways: first it can become what the listener hears instead of your words, listening to the music not the lyrics. Second, it’s unlikely that the words and phrases you want to stress in every sentence are all in the same place. My former students will have heard me refer to ‘Radio 4 cadence’ which goes something like this
De-dum de-dum de-dum, de-dum, DE-DUM.
The stress is on the last three words. They can quickly become the only three words that you listen to. How can you vary your cadence? Well, it means considering your use of tone, pitch, pause and silence.
Tone, pitch, pause and silence
These are bold, italic, underline and highlighter in your vocal toolbox. Used alongside pace, they allow you to bring your voice to life. Examine your clips. Watching them back, did you highlight what needed highlighting? Some of it? All of it? Was it a little random? Pausing and silence take confidence which leads me to my final point, notes.
Notes
Some people can speak without any notes. Others need a script or they are lost. There are plainly advantages and disadvantages to both methods. One of the reasons for asking you to record yourself reading from a book was to demonstrate that almost everyone reads out loud quickly when they speak without notes. For some, speaking off the top of your head does the same. Having no notes gets more difficult the more you have to try to remember.
There is a happy medium and that’s notes that are detailed enough to remind you of everything you want to say but not so scripted that you fail to listen when not speaking, fail to engage because you are reading at speed and not so small that if you lose your place it takes an age to find where you are. My preference when I use notes is to have a landscape piece of blank (ie without lines) A4 paper and to draw the flow of the point I’m trying to make. One point per piece of paper. Sure, I know it will make Al Gore cry but it means that I can find my place quickly and I can re-order my points with ease. Writing your notes in font size 12, single spaced and then reading a print out or off a screen makes finding where you are incredibly difficult every time you look down at the screen or paper.
If there is something you need to say word for word, write that down because in the heat of the moment you are unlikely to remember it perfectly. As you get more confident your notes will adapt to remind rather than read. Prompt rather than script.
Language
"I'm anaspeptic, frasmotic, even compunctuous to have caused you such pericombobulation."
- E.Blackadder
The older I get, the more I try to simplify my language. Select your words carefully to match the audience. There is no guarantee that they will understand every word you say and if they are able to interact in the arena you are speaking in, they can say so, but if they can’t, an unfamiliar word will cause them to either misunderstand your point or stop listening temporarily as they try to think what it means. Keep it simple.
Step 2: Watch others
Here is a list of speakers that I recommend you watch. I’ve selected them for the way they communicate. Please don’t assume that I agree or am endorsing any or all of the words that they say. Remember too, this is a list of who I find to be effective. It’s my subjective judgement and I have no doubt others will disagree either that they know better people or that I include names in the first place. Add others you find effective.
Think of others who you’ve watched and found compelling. Remember, the idea is not to copy them but instead listen to how they use all of the criteria you used in step 1 to assess yourself. They won’t be perfect, but they will give you an idea of what effective looks like.
A note on watching advocates in court either live or streamed. Sometimes the content of what they say or the tribunal they appear in will get in the way of the criteria above. I’d recommend seeking some guidance from advocates on who they recommend you watch and why.
Here’s my list then in no particular order:
Sheryl Sandberg
President Barack Obama
Oprah Winfrey
Steve Jobs
Margaret Thatcher
Dr Martin Luther King Jr
Julia Gillard
Sir Winston Churchill
Michelle Obama
President John F. Kennedy
I can’t stress this enough, it’s my list and it probably needs updating because I haven’t watched many Ted talks recently. The other note of caution is to place each of these speakers in context. The language from some is perhaps not what you would use now or ever. Speech evolves over time but good communicators retain similar attributes.
Step 3: Re-visit your clips
What have you learned from the speakers you watched? What was effective? What was not? Have a go at some or all of your clips again but this time making an effort to add in what you have learned.
Thanks as always for reading.
Photo by Kane Reinholdtsen on Unsplash