22 topics
Public speaking, broken into mechanics you can drill
Nervous speakers do not talk badly. They talk fast — around 180 words a minute against a comfortable listening rate closer to 130, which is why a talk that felt fine in your head lands on the room as a blur. Almost everything that reads as confidence at a lectern is a mechanical habit that can be drilled separately: where you breathe, how long you hold a full stop, where your eyes go between sentences, what your hands are doing when they are not doing anything.
Where students get stuck
I fill every silence with um and like
Fillers are not a vocabulary problem, so no amount of deciding to stop them works. They appear because your mouth reaches the end of a clause before the next thought is ready, and an open mouth with no sound in it feels like failure, so you bridge the gap with noise. The fix is to make the silence deliberate rather than trying to remove it. At every full stop, close your lips and count one full beat before starting the next sentence. A closed mouth cannot say um. The beat feels endless from the inside and reads as composure from the outside, and after a page of practice it stops needing to be counted.
I have no idea where to look
Scanning the room continuously is the thing that actually reads as nervous, because the eyes move faster than the speech and the audience registers it as searching. Use whole sentences instead. Pick one person, deliver an entire sentence to them, then move at the full stop — never mid-clause. In a classroom, three anchor points is enough: left, centre, right. Each person you land on feels addressed, everyone near them feels included, and your head stops moving while you are actually speaking, which is what makes the delivery look settled.
My hands do not know what to do
Hands look wrong when they have no home position to return to. Give them one: loosely at your sides, or resting on the lectern, and let gestures leave from there and come back. Keep the gestures inside a box roughly between your shoulders and your waist — below that they disappear behind furniture, above that they read as frantic. The useful rule is that a gesture should land on the noun it belongs to, not float over the whole sentence. Feet get the same treatment. Plant them shoulder-width apart, and if you want to move, move deliberately between sections rather than drifting the whole time.
I know my material but I lose my place halfway
That is what memorising word for word does. A verbatim script is a recall chain, and dropping one link takes the rest with it, which is why the blank always arrives mid-paragraph rather than at a natural gap. Learn the shape instead: five to seven landmarks in order, each one a noun you could write on a cue card, and speak the connecting sentences fresh each time. The two exceptions worth memorising exactly are your first two sentences and your last one, because the opening is where nerves peak and the ending is where people trail off.
I always run over time
Overruns are decided at the writing stage, not on the day, and almost everybody speaks slower in front of an audience than in rehearsal. Time yourself out loud once, then cut ten per cent before you go anywhere near the room. The material to cut is the second example of anything: most talks make a point, prove it, and then prove it again out of nervousness. Also cut the throat-clearing at the front. If your first thirty seconds is a greeting, an apology and an agenda, you have spent your most attentive moment on nothing.
What's covered
Public Speaking topics you can work through with a tutor, generate practice on, or turn into flashcards and a study plan.
Structuring a talk
- Opening with the point rather than an agenda
- The three-part body and why audiences track it
- Signposting and verbal transitions
- Callback endings and the final sentence
Delivery mechanics
- Pace, and the gap between speaking and listening rates
- Pausing at full stops and after key lines
- Volume, projection and speaking to the back row
- Eliminating filler words
- Eye contact by whole sentences
- Gesture range and home position
Reading the room
- Adjusting when the audience looks lost
- Handling interruptions and side conversations
- Taking questions without losing the thread
- Speaking with a microphone versus without
Preparation and rehearsal
- Landmark notes instead of a full script
- Cue cards that work under pressure
- Timed run-throughs and the ten per cent cut
- Rehearsing standing up and out loud
Common formats
- Introductions and thank-yous
- Short talks under five minutes
- Panel and seminar contributions
- Speaking from notes at a meeting
Public Speaking questions
How do I practise if I have nobody to practise in front of?
You talk to CANtutor AI out loud, the way you would in a call. It listens to the whole run-through and then tells you what it heard: where you sped up, where a transition went missing, which section ran long. Practising in your head does not work for speaking, because the parts that fail — pace, pausing, running out of breath mid-sentence — only fail when there is actual sound.
Does it score my delivery or measure my voice?
No. There is no meter, no score out of ten and no acoustic analysis of your voice. What exists is a live voice conversation: it hears you speak and responds in words, the same as a person sitting across from you would. Any tool claiming to grade your delivery with a number is measuring something easier than the thing that matters.
Will it just write the speech so I only have to read it?
It will not hand you a finished speech to perform as your own. It will work through the structure with you on the whiteboard, argue with your ordering, and give rubric-based feedback on a draft you have written. That is a deliberate limit: a speech in someone else's sentences is the single most common reason a delivery sounds flat, because you are reciting rather than saying something.
I am fine one-to-one and useless in front of a group. Why?
Because a group triggers an adrenaline response that a conversation does not, and that response narrows working memory at exactly the moment you need it. The practical consequence is that skills you have in conversation are not available by default on stage, so they have to be rehearsed in conditions closer to the real thing — standing, out loud, timed, without stopping to restart.
Stuck on public speaking right now?
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