How to start a speech: 10 openings that hold a room

Start a speech with a sentence about your audience or your subject, never about the microphone, your nerves or how honored you are. Use one device (a short story, a bold claim, a real question, one concrete number, a scene to imagine, or a plain statement of why everyone is here), then say what the speech is about and why it matters to this room. Keep the whole opening to 10 to 15 percent of your time, and know its first two sentences cold.

What the first minute has to do

A 2017 article in Toastmasters International's magazine gives a speaker about ten seconds to win attention before listeners decide whether to stay with them. That is the hook. The rest of the opening has a longer list. Public speaking textbooks, Stephen Lucas's The Art of Public Speaking among them, give the introduction four jobs:

• Get attention. The hook.
• Reveal the topic. What the speech is about, in one plain sentence.
• Earn credibility and goodwill. Why you are the one speaking, and that you are on the audience's side: ethos, in the three classical appeals.
• Preview the route. For anything over five minutes, where you are going, so people can follow.

Occasion speeches compress the list: a best man earns credibility in a clause ("I've known Sam since we were seven") and previews nothing. A class speech or a conference talk needs all four.

How long the opening should be

Communication textbooks commonly keep the introduction to 10 to 15 percent of the speech. At a prepared-speech pace of about 130 to 150 words a minute, that works out to:

Ten ways to open a speech

So the differences are easy to hear, every example below opens the same invented speech: a parent's five-minute talk to a city transportation committee, asking for a crosswalk at a corner children cross on the way to school.

1. Start a story in the middle

The Toastmasters article calls a story the most effective opening: people often remember it after they forget your main points. Begin in medias res, with a time, a place and a person already in motion, and keep it under a minute. "So, a few years ago, I was…" spends the first ten seconds on setup.

2. Make a claim people want to argue with

A bold claim is your argument in one sentence, stated before you have earned it. It works best when the room half-disagrees, because now they are listening for your evidence. Say it, stop, and make sure the rest of the speech can prove it.

3. Ask a question you want answered

"Have you ever wondered…?" barely counts as a question, because everyone answers it silently with "not really." A question works when you ask for a real response, such as a show of hands, and wait for it.

Then say what the room just did ("Most of those hands came down"), so the people who kept still get the point too.

4. Give one number, made concrete

A statistic opens well when there is only one, it surprises, and people can picture it. A number you counted yourself beats one you found online: you can say exactly how you got it. For anything else, name the source in a few spoken words and round it. "Nearly one in three" lands. "31.4 percent" does not.

5. Put the audience in the scene

"Imagine" hands the audience some of the work. Use "you" and the present tense, give two or three physical details, then cut to your point. Keep it to three or four sentences. Long guided imagery makes people feel managed.

6. Name the moment

The plainest opening is often the strongest: say why everyone is here today and what is at stake. It suits councils, boards and team meetings, and solemn occasions where cleverness would jar.

It only works with a specific ask. "I'm here to talk about traffic safety" is a topic, not an opening.

7. Set up a contrast

Put what people assume next to what is true, and the gap becomes the question your speech answers. It is juxtaposition at the scale of two sentences. The assumption has to be one this audience actually holds. A straw man is easy to spot.

8. Quote someone inside the story

Famous quotations are the most borrowed openings and among the least memorable, because the audience has heard them before. Quote a person inside your subject instead: a student, a customer, a nurse on the night shift, your grandmother.

If you do use a famous line, check the attribution, since misattributed quotes are everywhere, and tie it to your point in the next sentence.

9. Hold up an object

A prop gives people something to look at while you are still a stranger. Make sure it is visible from the back row, put it down once it has done its job, and don't pass it around.

10. Get a laugh from the room

The Toastmasters article cites Zig Ziglar's advice to get a laugh in the first ten seconds, and warns that a joke that works for one speaker can sink another. The safe kind is observational: about the room, the occasion or yourself. Jokes copied from a search page fail because the audience can tell they aren't yours.

If it doesn't land, keep going. A joke that misses is forgotten in seconds. An apology for it is not.

How famous speeches open

Many of the best-known openings in American speeches are plainer than their reputations. Five from the public record:

• Patrick Henry, Richmond, 1775. In the text his biographer William Wirt reconstructed decades later, Henry praises "the very worthy gentlemen who have just addressed the House," then disagrees with all of them. Respect first buys the right to argue.
• Frederick Douglass, Rochester, July 5, 1852. He opens by admitting fear: "He who could address this audience without a quailing sensation, has stronger nerves than I have." It breaks the rule about nerves, and works because it is brief and sets up the force of what follows.
• Susan B. Anthony, 1873. "I stand before you tonight under indictment for the alleged crime of having voted." Her own situation, stated flatly, is the bold claim.
• Franklin D. Roosevelt, December 8, 1941. "Yesterday, December 7, 1941 – a date which will live in infamy –" names the moment. In his first typed draft, now held at the FDR Library, the date would live "in world history." He changed it to "infamy" while revising.
• Ronald Reagan, January 28, 1986. Hours after the space shuttle Challenger broke apart, he began by telling the country he had planned to report on the state of the Union, "but the events of earlier today have led me to change those plans." The change of plans is the opening.

Match the opening to the occasion

A wedding guest expects warmth. A board expects the ask. Start from the table, and see the full guides for a best man speech, a eulogy or a graduation speech.

If protocol requires acknowledgments first ("Madam Chair, members of the committee"), keep them to one sentence and put the hook straight after. Otherwise, open with the hook and thank the host at the end of your first paragraph, when the room is already listening.

First lines to cut

Almost every first draft starts with a warm-up sentence. These are the usual suspects:

Write your opening in five steps

1. Write the body first

   You cannot introduce a speech you have not written. Draft the middle, then write down the one sentence you want people to leave with. The opening leads there. The speech outline template gives the hook its own line and its own share of the clock.

2. Collect raw material

   List what you could open with: a moment with a time and place, a number you can source, something a person said, an object, the reason the room has gathered. The most specific usually wins.

3. Draft three openings

   Use three different devices from the list above. Write each in full, through the sentence that states your point, because the bridge from hook to point is where openings most often fail.

4. Read them aloud with a timer

   Read each out loud with a timer running, ideally to one other person. Keep the one you can say naturally that reaches the point fastest.

5. Memorize the first two sentences

   The opening is the part to know word for word, pauses included. Walk up, set down your notes, look at the room, wait one beat, then speak. The guide to memorizing a speech covers the rest.

Put together, the crosswalk speech opens like this, in about 110 words:

A last line that returns to the girl in the yellow raincoat would close it. See how to end a speech for callbacks, and rhetorical devices for the repetition and contrast that carry the middle.

Drafting openings in Strokes

In Strokes, keep the alternatives in the document itself: a heading called Openings with three drafts under it. Select one and press ⌘K to ask for a shorter version, or the same idea as a question. The AI Assistant beside the page can read the whole speech and tell you whether the opening leads to your point. Give it your specifics, or you will get "Imagine a world where…" back. Version history keeps every draft, so cutting a story you later want back costs nothing.