Using Stage Movements and Gestures as a Foundation of Persuasion (Part 1)

Do you know how important stage movements and gestures are? Your words must have emotion, and the best way to demonstrate that is through your stage movements and hand gestures. That’s why in this article, LearningLeaders will share with you why stage movements and gestures are important, and how they can help you memorize your performance. Additionally, LearningLeaders will also share three types of movement you can use in your own speeches to better convey your message and make them memorable.

Stage movements are as simple as they sound, purposeful movements on stage during a speech. They add energy, emotion, and variation to your speeches and show confidence. Stage movements can also work as transitions: move to a different place on stage to show that you’re moving on to a different point in your speech. But, they must be purposeful. This means you must plan them in order to avoid movements that don't have a purpose, like repetitive movements you don’t realize you’re doing, often because you’re nervous. For example, swaying from side to side or wandering around. This can disrupt the flow of your speech and be distracting to the audience.

In addition to stage movement, you can use hand movements, also called gestures. This means using your hands, and sometimes your head, to help give meaning to what you say. Gestures happen instinctively, but sometimes they need to be planned out. Your gestures must be smooth, and relevant to the words you’re saying.

Stage movements and gestures keep your audience engaged throughout the entire speech. But they’re also important when you memorize a speech. This is because movement gives your brain physical “markers” that will help you remember your next line or which words to emphasize.

Let’s take a look at an example speech. Pay attention to the gestures and stage movement. Are they purposeful? Are they varied? Do they add energy and feeling? Do they show confidence? Also, take note of how stage movements are used to transition between different parts of the speech.

Most items that we buy can often serve many different purposes. Once you’ve eaten every bit of peanut butter from the jar, you can use the jar as a candle holder, or a container for other products; this is the act of reusing. And when the jar starts cracking, you can send it to a recycling plant that reuses glass to make new glass products. Voila, you just reused, recycled, and made a positive impact on the environment. Recycling is one of the best ways to change the world. The amount of trash we create ends up in landfills, harming other animals, and contaminating our ecosystem. By choosing to recycle, we consider both environmental importance and the importance to people.

Firstly, the lack of recycling can heavily impact our living planet. When rubbish is placed in landfills, it is treated with harmful chemicals that release greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. These gases lead to air pollution and climate change. Recycling allows us to avoid landfills. Then, the more we reduce the need for more raw materials, the less need there is to create more materials. This ultimately reduces harms like deforestation, since materials like paper and wood can be reused.

But next, why should you really care about recycling? Well, with the increased number and size of landfills, we’re losing environmental spaces and animal habitats. We literally have no space for our waste. Landfill sites are filling up fast. Furthermore, when we recycle, this will help our economy. The cost of constantly producing raw materials is much higher than creating products from recycled items. Why are we still producing new non-biodegradable plastic bags, when we can produce bags made from recycled plastic? With this method, we reduce the number of items that end up in landfills and we reuse what we have already created.

To conclude, recycling is a simple act with a big impact. We should care because it affects not only the future generations but also our own health and standard of living. We can avoid adding to air pollution and greenhouse gases while helping to reduce harmful processes like deforestation. We only get one planet and one chance to save it. What can you do today? Join the fight and reduce, reuse, and recycle.

You might have heard speeches on this topic before, but it’s important to realize people are not just persuaded by ideas, but by the emotions behind the ideas and the way they are presented. This is why memorizing delivery with an urgency and passion behind your words can make a speech that much more convincing.

Let’s head over to part two of this article and you’ll learn three types of stage movements and gestures to help you do this.