Abstract—As giving English speeches becomes an indispen-sable part of many people’s lives, it is essential to seek for approaches to avoid the “nice-to-be-here” platitude in the prologue. Although many researches have been done in this field, few of them have connected quantitative data with the specific strategies. How to summarize the most influential strategies of making a prologue in English speeches was re-garded as the problem to be solved in this paper. Taking 20 TED speeches as data, this paper would analyze the most useful and important strategies of opening a speech with the help of American psychologist Lochin’ Primacy Effect theory. After the investigation, four kinds of strategies of making a prologue were listed out together with their use frequency and times of receiving positive reactions. In conclu-sion,“Humor and wit” prologue turned out to be the most popular strategy while the story-telling one being the most-used strategy, and asking questions may fail to bring positive effect sometimes.
Index Terms—TED speeches, primacy effect theory, strat-egies of making prologues.
Xinyuan Jia is with Language and Culture University, China (e-mail: jiaxinyuanhaha@126.com).
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Cite: Xinyuan Jia, "Strategies of Opening A Speech: An Analysis of 20 TED Speeches," International Journal of Languages, Literature and Linguistics vol. 4, no. 3, pp. 183-187, 2018.