<p>I am planning on running for a position in the National Honors Society. Please kindly give me some advice on convincing others to vote for me. Any tips on how to give a good speech will also be greatly appreciated. Thanks a lot.</p>
<p>One thing that I’ve noticed in these speeches that some kids tend to do is that they come across as rather condescending. I know this is obvious, but I think it’s worth saying: don’t talk down to the people you need to vote for you</p>
<p>Give a humorous speech, though meaningful.</p>
<p>^^elaborate on condescending tones. it may be easy to do that inadvertently especially when talking about how you’re the best candidate</p>
<p>Address your voters. You should try to answer “Why should voters pick me?” and not “Why I’m qualified for this position”. Yes, there is a difference. Chances are, your peers don’t care about choosing the most qualified candidate per se; they will choose the candidate who appeals the most to them.</p>
<p>Here’s the speech I helped my friend write (one of my fellow co-founders of Native American Club and another cross country runner). He was elected president of NHS after giving it, over the valedictorian of our class and another girl who’s student body president.</p>
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<p>Essentially, know your audience. They likely won’t care how many clubs you’re in, how many leadership positions you have, etc. In high school politics, the victor is usually the candidate with the most charisma and the most entertaining speech. My friend’s competitors used generic “I’m qualified because I do this and this and this and I promise to perform my duties as president because I’m a good student” speeches.</p>
<p>im copying that lol…i have permission?</p>
<p>I don’t think you could, unless you too founded a Native American Club at your school ;). But yes, you could certainly use the general idea of that speech.</p>
<p>I’m not sure what a National Honors Society is, but every year, after class speeches in English, the ones that we have to go to the school speech finals are the funniest ones. Probably because the class votes for the speeches that goes to the finals but unless the humour is extremely insulting/vulgar the teachers gave the amusing ones good grades too. If the audience is your fellow classmates, don’t be boring be humorous, though try to find out what kind of humour suits you most.</p>
<p>Thank you all for these great responses! Any additional comments would always be welcomed. It would be hilarious if yearsofwisdom and I were in the same school and we ended up giving the same speech…</p>
<p>Yup, funny is definitely a winner. And while you shouldn’t ONLY focus on being funny, you should try very hard to incorporate it. I’m in NHS as well, and we had several people running for different positions, and so I’ll assume the same for your school. Most of these people are going to be very straightforward, talk-about-only-my-qualifications stuff, along with the whole “I believe we should have fun and work hard; I am a very hardworking and responsible person;I’ll be the best ___________ if you vote for me!” spiel. Originality and appeal are extremely valuable in situations like this, so without a doubt make your audience laugh. A lot.</p>
<p>From watching about 20 speeches given for NHS:</p>
<p>1) Don’t pull a “So I sat down to write a speech and couldn’t think of anything, then I had a revelation that NHS was my thing and I should write a speech about writing the speech since that’s my thing, yo.”</p>
<p>2) Give them a reason to vote for you. If you could give the speech script to someone else to read from and everything would apply to them, it is not unique enough. Tell them about YOUR strengths, not the strengths that you and five other candidates share.</p>