Practice your talk
Unless you’re an unusually gifted speaker, you’ll need to
rehearse your talk in front of your classmates, colleagues, spouse
or friends. It is not enough to think through your remarks,
because you won’t be able to duplicate the stress you’ll feel in
front of a real audience. And unless you actually speak aloud,
you won’t discover the difficult transitions, the hard-to-verbalize
ideas or the convoluted lines of reasoning that may trip you up
later on. With a bit of practice you’ll usually find that your
delivery smoothes out and that you’ll be able to expand your talk
more than initially seemed possible. However, you must resist
the temptation to speak too quickly just because your words
have become familiar to you.