A client and friend asked me the other day about impromptu speeches. His question, basically, was, to give consistently good impromptu speeches, do you memorize something (or a few pieces of something) and then trot those out at the key moment? Or, if you actually make them up in the moment, how do you think about that?

My reaction was to tell him that he shouldn’t memorize but he should prepare – and prepare two speech structures.

The first structure works well for very short comments – five minutes or less. Perhaps you’ve been asked to say a few words to a visiting group, or some new recruits, or on some occasion such as a retirement – or an introduction. Unlike Bill Clinton’s notoriously endless nominating speech for Michael Dukakis in 1988, you want to keep your remarks at five minutes or less.

The format is very simple, yet effective. Start out with a headline, one that clearly states your point of view and frames your subject: Howler monkeys are an underrated species.

Then give three supporting points, expanding on them for thirty seconds to a minute. Howlers are more intelligent that many humans. One recent study pitted these beautiful animals against participants in Mardi Gras who had had more than three drinks. Without much trouble, the howlers outperformed the humans on several simple tests of intelligence. And so on.

Finally, as your five minutes draws to a close, repeat the headline, in similar words. So that’s why I want each of you to think more highly of howler monkeys than you have in the past. Thank you.

Armed with this straightforward framework, short impromptu speeches should hold no terrors for you, and you should be able to restrain yourself from running long, the bane of all impromptu speakers – and their audiences.

What about longer speeches? For speeches of twenty minutes or less, I suggest a different way to think about the structure you need. For speeches of more than twenty minutes, only a very rude person would ask for impromptu remarks, and only a fool would accept.

It’s an unreasonable request. But twenty minutes or less is this side of a hate crime, and so you need to be prepared. Here’s how to think about it.

Start with a story. You want the story to be brief, about three minutes, and to frame up your talk. Use it to make your general point of view clear, but don’t give away the meat of the talk. It’s an orientation for your audience to the way you think about the issue, whatever it is.

Pick a story you know, that is personal, so that you can tell it spontaneously from memory.

It can also be the first half of a thrilling story that leaves the audience hanging until the end of the talk, when you complete it.

Either way, after you’ve introduced the topic, then launch into describing the problem that the audience has for which your expertise or your passion are the solution.

You want to spend a good five minutes in the problem. That’s not a long time, but it means saying more than one sentence about it. If you’re really stuck, you can get the audience to help you. What issues do you see with the new XL-400?

Once you’ve spent five minutes exploring the problem, perhaps with the audience, then launch into your solution. This section should also occupy about five minutes of your allotted time.

Finally, then, you’re going to wrap things up with a few minutes on what the audience should think about doing next – an action step. The action step can be rhetorical: I urge you to write your congressmen and women about the many failings of the XL-400. Or it can be actual: Please join with me now in calling down the five curses on the makers of the XL-400. Curse #1 (say it with me): may your hair grow ever thinner and your midriff ever thicker. And so on. The other four curses are much too severe for this g-rated blog, so I’ll leave them out.

Framing story, problem, solution, action – roughly five minutes each, with a little less time devoted to the first and last sections. That should bring you in at around eighteen minutes, plenty if you’ve been asked for twenty.

Thinking about impromptu speaking in this way will allow you to prepare, and to deliver an intelligible speech, without memorizing, which tends to bring out the worst in all but a few especially talented speakers. Most either forget, or put so much stress on themselves not to forget that their delivery lacks energy and life.

Better to keep some of the impromptu in impromptu speaking.