Engage the Audience: Writing an Interesting Hook

**Note: these are a few methods that you can use to help you get started with
your speech.


Methods for starting a
speech
Example from Famous speech Possible hook for The Hunger Games

Use an anecdote
or story
(ask your audience to
imagine a story,
visualize a particular
scene)
Four score and seven years ago our
fathers brought forth on this continent, a
new nation, conceived in Liberty, and
dedicated to the proposition that all men
are created equal. Now we are engaged in
a great civil war, testing whether that
nation, or any nation so conceived and so
dedicated, can long endure. We are met
on a great battle-field of that war.
Abraham Lincoln.


Use a rhetorical
question
(to get your audience
thinking about a
particular idea)

Can we forge against these enemies
a grand and global alliance, North and
South, East and West, that can assure
a more fruitful life for all mankind? Will
you join in that historic effort?

JFK, Inauguration address, January
20, 1961.


Make a bold
statement
(say something to shock
your audience, get their
attention, make them
wonder where your
speech is headed)


I have a dream. Martin Luther
King Jr.