BEGIN WITH A BANG

THE FUNCTION OF AN INTRODUCTION

Your introduction has to do more than just get your audience's attention without busting out their eardrums. Every intro should aim to do three things—but don't worry, at least one of them is super easy if you've done your prep work. (The other two are…well, harder.)

Your intro must:

• gain the audience's attention and interest.

• gain the audience's goodwill.

• state the purpose of the speech.

Let's look at all three of these in more detail—and with some handy (and familiar) examples.

Gain Their Attention, Interest, and Goodwill

A speaker gains the attention of her audience first through the way she presents herself—hopefully, as someone with authority and confidence. Someone who seems worth listening to. (But we'll dig into body language and gestures and all that stuff later.)

A speakers gains—and keeps—her audience's attention with a good introduction. But what gets (and keeps) people's attention? Some pretty safe bets include:

• Humor.

• A story.

• A surprising claim.

• A startling statistic.

• A well-put, relevant quotation.

• A compelling rhetorical question.

• A reference to a recent or historical event that's familiar to the audience.
  (Source)

But what also gets people's attention is when the speaker does a good job of developing her ethos—the credibility of her character—by identifying with the group and establishing herself as what Jay Heinrichs has called "the epitome of us." This is also how a speaker gains an audience's goodwill.

Let's take a look at the introductions to a few of the speeches you've already read, with a focus on how each speaker gained the audience's attention and goodwill.

Excellent Intros

First, the introduction to Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address:

"Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure."

This is probably one of the most well known introductions in American history, despite the fact that nobody knows what "fourscore" even means anymore.

So: what makes this introduction 100% compelling?

Lincoln starts by referencing both a well-known historical event and a current event that mirrors it. By saying "we are engaged" he identified everyone in the audience as part of the struggle. He drew them in by acknowledging what they all had in common—a tactic you should recognize from Thank You For Arguing.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech also begins with a reference to history followed by a reference to current events:

"I am happy to join with you today in what will go down in history as the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation.

Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of their captivity.

But one hundred years later, the Negro still is not free."

By referencing Abraham Lincoln and using the same language he used in the Gettysburg Address ("five score"), King is making the same point as Lincoln did—that the work begun long ago is still not done.

King deliberately doesn't say Lincoln's name, though. By referring to the man, he's acknowledging that everyone in his audience already knows who he's talking about. After all, King gave this speech in front of the Lincoln Memorial. Everyone there could share in a collective understanding of who King was talking about—the man whose statue they were facing even as he spoke.

Here's the thing—we don't recommend you start any speech you give by referencing the Gettysburg Address or "I Have a Dream." But if there's a historical or current event that you know your audience will know and appreciate, then by all means, reference away.

Another great introduction tactic that we've seen before in this course is the story. Stories immediately draw people in. The story can be sad, powerful, funny—whatever suits your purpose and the mood you're going for.

Let's take another look at the introduction from a TED Talk that you've encountered already in this course: Susan Cain's "The power of introverts".

The story Cain tells goes on longer than a typical introduction, so let's just look at the first paragraph:

"When I was nine years old, I went off to summer camp for the first time. And my mother packed me a suitcase full of books, which to me seemed like a perfectly natural thing to do. Because in my family, reading was the primary group activity. And this might sound antisocial to you, but for us it was really just a different way of being social. You have the animal warmth of your family sitting right next to you, but you are also free to go roaming around the adventureland inside your own mind. And I had this idea that camp was going to be just like this, but better."

If you look at the transcript of this speech, you see that what follows this introductory paragraph is laughter from the audience. Cain has hooked them with her story, and she's also given them a little reward for paying attention. Why is the audience laughing? Because they all know that the nine-year-old Cain in the story is about to be sorely disappointed.

Cain has combined humor and storytelling to gain her audience's interest, but she's also brought them together through a common bond—laughing at the last sentence of that paragraph identifies everyone in her audience as being "in" on the joke.

State the Purpose of the Speech

After gaining your audience's attention, interest, and goodwill, you want to be sure that your introduction states the main idea, or purpose, of your speech.

You get no points for being subtle about your main idea. In fact, the more attention you can draw to it, the better. Go ahead and just say "If you leave today remembering nothing else, I want it to be this…" and then state that short, easy-to-understand, definite main idea. If that's too on-the-nose for you, adjust the language accordingly, but just make sure you're making it impossible to miss.

INTRODUCING SALLY

Let's go back to Sally, who's working on a killer introduction for her anti-speaker speech.

She's already added a few code words to her speech to boost her credibility with her audience, but she knows she's going to have to do more. Her introduction has to work double-time to gain her audience's goodwill and gain her some much-needed credibility.

So Sally decides to start with a reference to a historical event that's not only relevant to the speaker situation, but that everyone in Summerfield's familiar with. Telling the well-known story will gain her audience's attention (everyone loves hearing it), it will mark her as one of the gang (she knows the story, so she's one of us), and will establish a common bond.

Sally only has five minutes, so she can't go into detail or tell the whole story. Luckily, she's confident everyone in her audience already knows the story, so she can quickly refer to it, and then connect it to a current event—the speaker situation.

Here's Sally's introduction:

We all know the story by heart by now, don't we? The year old Joe Kincaid plowed up a bunch of his corn and planted a soccer field. He was so sure it would be a big success. That people from all over the county would come to watch the games.

And we all know how that turned out, don't we? Nobody came, and it was two years before old Joe conceded defeat and turned his soccer field back into a corn field. And it was another three years before he made a profit on that parcel of land, too.

I'm here today to sound the warning: this speaker idea will end up just like old Joe's soccer field. Installing speakers on Main Street is a bad idea that will cause more problems than it will solve.

If you think the situation Sally describes sounds a lot like the plot of the movie Field of Dreams, you are wrong. This is totally different, because that movie was about a farmer who builds a baseball field, not a soccer field. Also, in that movie, when he built it, they did come.

Totally different.