What are some of the top rules you should never break when giving a speech or presentation. One rule, never read a speech, the hardest thing you could ever do is read a speech without completely boring people to death. Unless you are a trained actor, and a really good trained actor, if you try to read a speech, it destroys your eye contact. It makes your voice flat, boring monotone and too consistent in speed and pitch and volume. So whatever you do, don't try to read speed. The next thing Don't try to read PowerPoint slides turning your back to the audience.

They see the back your head and you reading a bunch of slot. horrible thing to do. People hate it, and they're simply going to ignore you. Next thing. Don't ever apologize for your speech. Oh, I'm sorry.

I wish I had more time to prepare. I'm sorry. I didn't have the right stuff. Done. apologize about your speech, simply give the best speech you can. Next don't go on too long.

Now, it's not true that you have to speak three minutes, or that shorter is always better. But if you're budgeted a half an hour, and you're still talking at 50 minutes, that's a big problem for everybody, even if you have interesting content, so don't violate the amount of time you have allocated for your presentation. The final thing is, don't just do a data dump. Don't try to cram as many facts and figures and numbers into your speech because you are guaranteed not to communicate. People are going to tune you out, they will not remember anything. So there are a lot of do's and don'ts you can avoid and still be successful.

But you've got to avoid the biggest blunders common in many many speaking disasters.