Are you looking for a sure-fire way to test your speech for its effectiveness?

Conduct a movie test. Here’s how.

1. Record your speech into an audio device.
2. Play back the audio.
3. Write down every image that comes to mind as if you were a movie director blocking out scene after scene from a movie.
4. After you are through listening to the speech, look at your paper. If you don’t have pages and pages of notes filled with images for scenes, you are in big trouble.

The number one problem all speakers have (after data-dumping) is that their speeches are too abstract and general. The problem with abstraction is not that audiences won’t understand you. The difficulty is that people don’t remember abstract ideas from speakers. The answer is to make your abstract messages concrete by giving examples, case studies, anecdotes and stories. When you provide these, your audience can provide the images to the movie in their own brain as you give your speech.

The best speakers are like movie directors who are at pitch meetings asking for millions of dollars from producers to fund their movies. They paint pictures with words that create images in the minds of their audiences.

Can your speech pass the movie test? Or would you be staring at a blank piece of paper?