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7 Techniques to Be Better at Speaking off the Cuff

Rochelle Silva
5 min readSep 8, 2020

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Being able to speak off the cuff effectively is an important life skill. As a student, you may have to face Q&A sessions to defend your work. As an employer/employee, you may have to face interviews and numerous team meetings. Leaving aside these formal situations, speaking clearly can even get you through the scrapes of everyday life.

A few weeks ago, I shared an article containing a list of impromptu speech topics. My friend Tuhan Sapumanage commented, “If you could also add how the thought process goes in one’s mind when interpreting, understanding and finally coming up with things to say for table topics that would be really helpful.”

To follow up with this valuable comment, let me share some techniques which I have picked up along the way. Some of those tips come from participating in table topics contests and meetings as a Gavelier and a Toastmaster. Some come from workshops conducted by champions like DTM Ng Kin Foong.

I will be briefly elaborating seven techniques and example topics for each one.

1. Tell a story

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Rochelle Silva
Rochelle Silva

Written by Rochelle Silva

Researcher @ NTU 🇸🇬| Logophile | Artist | Coffee Lover | Sri Lankan | https://linktr.ee/rochellesilva | Buy me a ☕https://bit.ly/399XKRX

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