How can prose make your public speaking perfectly rosy? “Poetry is an exercise in communicating the most while talking the least,” says veteran public relations executive Rosemary Ravinal.
“Think about it this way: Poetry is like having a powerful live voice in a small package.”
By Rosemary Ravinal
National Poetry Month celebrates the work of professional and novice poets everywhere. During the month of April, you can explore a large variety of poetry and connect verse with voice while enhancing your public speaking skills.
Why? The reason is that poetry is concise but packed with emotion. Poetry is an exercise in communicating the most while talking the least. Think about it this way: Poetry is like having a powerful live voice in a small package. A poem conveys complex feelings, meaning, context, and nuance with relatively few words.
Like music, it has a unique ability to fill a reader’s or listener’s mind with images. It elevates and moves hearts.
Consider how you communicate in business. How your speech patterns are often rote, sterile, trite, repetitive, and riddled with meaningless words. Imagine if there was room to introduce more intention and feeling to your business speaking, to persuade and inform with impact.
Reciting poetry can enhance your speaking skills. It helps make your speech more fluent and improves your pacing, pitch, intonation, and articulation. It can energize the way you speak and make you more interesting to listen to.
Poetry can enrich your vocabulary, too, as you adopt new words, phrases, and metaphors to color your own speaking. Some poems spoken out loud are wonderful for articulation, accent reduction and curbing stuttering as well.
Here are some fun facts about poetry:
1. The haiku originated in Japan and is the shortest poem containing only 17 syllables.
2. Rap is considered a form of poetry comprising a series of synchronized verses.
3. During early times when few people could read, written language was considered poetry and was recited and sung to help people remember the laws of the land and news of the day.
You can get inspired by checking out the poem-a-day series in honor of National Poetry Month, with selections chosen by U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limon.
Do you want to practice your delivery of a speech or presentation? Office hours with Rosemary Ravinal are available this month. “I will help enhance your natural abilities to speak with impact in English and Spanish. Schedule a quick call with me and get started.”
