“Sound Bite”….

….is a self-contained sentence or phrase that captures the essence of what you have just been talking about or explained in your speech.

Sound Bites wake up the audience to the key headlines of your speech.

“Wake up.” More important in public speaking than reading. Audiences have more stimuli to react to and be influenced by, and more reasons to zone out during live listening. Hence a self-contained, well thought-through summary sentence can add immense value.

“Key headlines.” A principle of formal presenting, brought over to speaking. Our society is getting more and more wired to processing information in key, well-packaged tidbits.

Sound Bites can summarize a prior paragraph or two, or can be a summary sentence for the entire speech.

From the last lesson on Speed of Speech, if a Head of State speaks for 2 minutes, he or she would likely speak 150+ words. What’s going to make it on national TV news at the end of the day, are just a few key sentences or phrases. You cannot cut and patch words from separate sentences here. Hence, it is important to think about sound bites beforehand as editable, replayable pieces too.

Good speeches have a good number of of Sound Bites. We see powerful sound bites in virtually every “Minutes of Magic” speech.

Sound Bites are even more important when you are writing to be heard, vs writing to be read. For the latter, you have more creative liberties, and the reader can return back to a section. In a live speech, that is not possible. And even in a video recording, people are generally not inclined to rewind if they have missed something.

Start to identify and jot key sound bites in various speeches in this collection of speeches.