When you make speeches. whats a good attention grabbing sentence.....?

Question

for a speech about moving from a city to a small town.... PLZ help. thanks

Answer 1

I like to start with jokes or shocking statistics. Jokes seem more appropriate here.. maybe some 'You know you're in a small town when...'

"The closest McDonald's is 45 miles away.

So is the closest mall.

It is normal to see an old man riding through town on a riding lawn mower."

http://www.blogthings.com/Small-Town.html

there are a lot, some are pretty funny

Answer 2

There's a big difference in how your opening "hook" will affect your audience, depending on the overall tone of the speech. Here, it just seems like you may be presenting to a class in a light tone, so go with comedy. It's always best to keep it simple and short, rather than drawing it out into something long-winded like "I knew that the biggest turn of my life would come when I moved to the small town of _____ and left my life behind, because..." Blah, blah, blah. Audiences like punchlines, so say something that would get their attention FAST like, "I thought I would keel over when I learned I was moving to a tiny town," or, "I never thought that moving to a small town would be so unnerving... do I seem nervous, still?" A lot of the time, it helps to add some form of pantomime or facial expression that could get your point across better, though if it's formal, stay uniform and stand up straight. Remember, comedy and brevity.

Answer 3

You want a sentence to really capture your audience's attention. What about:
"I'll suffocate to death! There won't be any room to move around! That's what I thought when I was about to move from the city to a small town."

If you "shout" the first two sentences, do you think that would make your audience sit up and take notice? Good luck!

Answer 4

Well, if you're pro for moving to small towns, point out the negatives in big cities. ie, "Can you picture the haze of smog and smell the horrible stench of car exhaust?" And then work towards the positive of small towns, like how they're clean, friendly, etc.

There's also the possibility of quotes, and there are two kinds:

Short, yet hard-hitting quotes, like "To look at the cross-section of any plan of a big city is to look at something like the section of a fibrous tumor."( Frank Lloyd Wright) or "Cities are the abyss of the human species." (Jean Jacques Rousseau)

And long, deeply thought out quotes. "The tumultuous populace of large cities are ever to be dreaded. Their indiscriminate violence prostrates for the time all public authority, and its consequences are sometimes extensive and terrible." (George Washington)

And in case you don't like either of those: [ http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=quotes+%2B+big+cities&fr=yfp-t-501&toggle=1&cop=mss&ei=UTF-8 ]

So in a speech, there are a few dynamics that you can use to spice things up later on in your essay, beginning, middle, or end:

Rhetorical questions: a question meant to be answered by the audience, to get them really thinking. (like the example opening I typed earlier about smog and car exhaust)

Parallelism: repetition of sentence structure; emphasizes ideas and adds a rhythm. (If you continued using the rhetorical question example opening, and had a few more sentences following it beginning with "Can you picture..." and yet even more examples of big-city negatives. )

Loaded Language/Connotation: words that have either a strongly negative or strongly positive sound (like "abyss" instead of "hole.") Use a thesaurus to help you out there, like [ http://thesaurus.reference.com/ ]

And there's your crash-course on speeches.
Good luck :D