Extemporaneous speaking is one of the most natural methods for delivering a prepared speech.

You
can use an extemporaneous speech to achieve a more natural tone, flow and style with the
audience.
This speech involves the speaker's use of notes and some embellishment to deliver a speech. To
clear this up, a speaker who uses this method would have note cards or prompts that guide him from
point to point, but he uses his own words as he goes along. What makes this different than an
impromptu speech is that he has a loose guideline for his speech. He did not memorize anything; he
just used cues to know where to go next.
There are advantages and disadvantages to this type of speech. For one, the audience will think you
are a genius. You used few notes and appeared to know everything about the topic. But this is not
something that can be done quickly. The same fact finding and research used for other types of
speeches must be used here. The speaker also must rehearse this speech for timing, rhythm and
flow. Now, if shooting from the hip is not your style, you may want to consider reading your speech.

What are the characteristics of an extemporaneous speech?

A good extemporaneous (extemp) speech must tread the balance between being spontaneous and
being prepared but without being too informal or canned.

Usually with an extemporaneous speech you are synthesizing facts from outside articles / sources,
your own intuition, and your own personality to effectively answer the question or prompt that you
are addressing, and to not bore the audience.
1. A strong introduction
The intro of an extemp speech is the most critical portion of the speech and can be broken
down further into other parts. The intro is where you hook your audience, introduce the topic
you will be addressing, and providing your thesis / umbrella answer.
This can make or break your speech and when judging an extemp speech usually by the end
of the intro I'll know if the speaker is a novice, or whether they constructed a well formed
thesis.

 Attention Getting Device (AGD)

This is where you introduce your topic or use a short anecdote or humor to hook the
audience in. These can be relatively canned, or bringing in a unique fact or startling
statistic to reel the audience in.
Suppose you are answering a question about whether Blockchain is a threat to traditional
central banking, a good AGD would be to bring up a case of a Fat Finger mistake when
somebody accidentally traded millions of Bitcoins instead of $10,000.

 Link
The link is where you provide context from your attention getter into the gist of what
you’re talking about.
A lot of speakers forget the link and which results in an awkward transition from a corny
joke to jumping straight into the question.
 Going back to the Bitcoin example, the link would be that while Blockchain currencies
have been growing, they still are plagued by issues that prevent them from being a full
replacement to traditional central banking

 Background

A good extemporaneous speech must be informative and persuasive, and your audience
may not know as much about the topic as you- this is where the background comes in
and you state briefly some additional facts behind your topic.
With our example, we would maybe touch on what Bitcoin / Blockchain are, the Market
cap of Bitcoin, or other relevant info to our audience.

 Significance
Much like the Link, the Significance provides CONTEXT to WHY we should care / be
listening to your speech, and why this issue is important RIGHT NOW.
With many traders flocking to crypto currencies as a new investment, and many
institutions considering using blockchain as a technology for other purposes, this begs
the question-
Is Blockchain is a threat to traditional central banking?

 Question
This is relatively straight forward- state the question or prompt given to you EXACTLY.
Not what you think it was, but word for word.
A lot of speakers will paraphrase, but this should be one of the few things you have
memorized when preparing your speech.

 Overarching answer / preview of your argument

Some questions will be a Yes/No, some questions will be WHY or HOW questions. Your
answer must be a thesis much like in an essay or paper which also introduces the 2 or 3
main topics that you will be considering.
Using an umbrella answer is helpful because then all of your points link back to a central
thesis without being redundant, and you can address the argument from different
directions / view points
For example, Is Blockchain is a threat to traditional central banking?
An Answer would be:

“Yes, Blockchain is a threat to central banking because using a decentralized system

changes the structure and process of how our financial institutions work, and have
implications to other avenues as well.”
2. Mutually exclusive points / arguments supporting your answer
Notice how I spent the bulk of my Quora post talking about the intro- this is because your
intro sets up the meat of what you’ll be talking about in the rest of the speech.
 My Debate Coach used to always say that in an Extemp Speech you “Tell ‘em. You tell ’em
why, and then you tell ’em again”.
Within your answer you can now address each point with a Claim, Warrant, and Impact,
bring in additional information to support your argument, and explain why this ties back to
your original thesis.
There are different Frameworks you can apply to organizing your points such as “Cause and
Effect”, “Problem, Cause, Solution”, “Common Claim / Counterclaim”, and others that let you
dive into specific situations depending on your question.

Claim- this is the assertion that you’re making- “The Cryptocurrency market is growing and
becoming more efficient every year”
Warrant- the logic / facts that support why your assertion is true. “There are over 20 types of
crytpocurrencies, and the total blockchain size ranges in terabytes. The liquidity of cryptos
has improved to where there are Bitcoin ATM’s, you can buy Bitcoins with a credit card”
Impact- what is the context of your point and what does this mean qualitatively or
quantitatively?
This is what I also call the “Body Count” because in international relations speeches it often
comes down to impacts of How many Lives are being saved or lost (or for Policy Debaters
they’ll start talking about Nuclear War or a Malthusian dystopia and how we’re all going to die
or become overpopulated)

Using this framework allows you to craft your logic within your point. Without all 3 key parts,
your point is an assertion and not an argument.

3. An effective conclusion

Many speakers will use the conclusion to rehash their intro, or will just cop out and say “well
if we look back to the question, this is the answer”- but try to think from the perspective of the
audience, they just heard you talk for 6 minutes, try to leave them with a positive note!
In your conclusion you’ll want to 1) Rephrase your Attention Getter (I always liked doing this
at the end to leave the audience with some laughs or an insightful thought), 2) rephrase the
question and your answers, and 3) have a strong Last Sentence to provide closure to your
speech.
A bad conclusion will fall flat, or will not provide closure. A good conclusion will tie up the
speech into a neat little package.
While all of these pieces seem complicated, the key is to practice and try to answer as many
different types of questions as you can so that you can start thinking in frameworks and
using your knowledge and logic to do the rest of the work.

Using this process will make you a better speaker, a better presenter, and also help with
essay writing as well.