The March 2010 edition of the Toastmaster, the monthly magazine of Toastmasters International, published an article titled “The Better You Write It, the Better You Say It.” Toastmasters International is a worldwide club dedicated to helping people improve their speaking and presentation skills. It has over 270,000 members in more than 100 countries. The article makes a couple of crucial points. Excluding pure entertainment, the objective of most speeches is to convey information, or to promote or defend a point of view. Certain tools, such as vocal variety and body language, can aid this process. But by their very nature they can communicate only emphasis or emotion.If your words are incapable of getting your message across, then no amount of gestures or vocal variety will do it for you. Thus, when preparing a speech, your first objective must always be to carefully structure your information and look for the best words or phrases to express what you want to say . . . But if writing your speech is the key to success, how should you go about it?” In line with this analysis, the first purpose of this book is to lay down a few simple ground rules for writing a good speech. Once you have produced a credible, coherent speech, the second objective is to lay down a few equally simple ground rules for delivering it in the most congenial, forceful, persuasive manner possible.The “theoretical” part of the book takes up only about one-third the total text. It is so short because the fundamental principles of effective public speaking are few and, when explained, are almost self-evident. It is divided into three interrelated sections.•The Essentials of Good Writing (how to compose a good speech)•The Essentials of Good Public Speaking (how to effectively deliver a good speech)•The Essentials of Effective Visual Aids (how to effectively support a good speech) The “practical” part of the book (two-thirds of the total text) consists of 10 carefully crafted appendices that explore certain key principles and techniques in greater detail, as well as providing some exercises to help you practice them. For example:•Steve Jobs: Lessons from a Presentation Icon •The Day I Lost My Fear of Public Speaking•How to Untie Your Tongue•Laugh Your Way to Persuasive CommunicationPublic Speaking: The Essential Ten Percent is part of the expanding “The Essential Ten Percent” series. The series was launched in 2011 on the premise that many self-instructional books fail to distinguish between:•Casual Users — those who need to understand and apply only the very basics of a subject.•Intensive Users — those who need to understand and apply virtually everything. As a result, most such books tend to make fundamentally simple ideas appear to be unnecessarily complex. And more complex ideas hopelessly impenetrable.Books in “The Essential Ten Percent Series” rigorously focus on the casual user to ensure that simple ideas remain simple and more complex ideas can be decomposed into simpler ones."Don’t write merely to be understood. Write so that you cannot possibly be misunderstood." — Robert Louis Stevenson