Public Speaking Course:

Exaggeration

A fun way to add humor to your speech is to exaggerate certain parts of your presentation. You will practice this technique during your public speaking course. When using exaggeration in your presentation you are basically doing a caricature of words. By using these words you "paint" a picture to the audience that helps them focus on what you are presenting to them.

I did a speaking engagement once for Secretaries Day at a large insurance company. I was making a point about how busy it always was for the secretaries. It went like this,

"You're answering the telephone, the fax machine is ringing, you're making copies, and you're filing every policy clear back to 1910." The secretaries could relate to each item I said, because they obviously did lots of filing, but certainly NOT as far back as 1910. Exaggerating this date was funny to them and definitely made the point that they always had lots of work piled up.

The way to use exaggeration is to inflate or deflate whatever you are talking about so much that it is obviously an exaggeration. In the last example you wouldn't want to use the year 1999 if you were doing the talk in 2000 because it is very likely that an insurance company would really be working on a file for a year or more. That wouldn't be funny.

Of course, who am I to tell you what is funny. I spent two terms in the third grade . . . Truman's and Eisenhower's. hahahahahahaa

Remember during your public speaking course you will learn to use exaggeration to make your point and presentation memorable.