What Makes a good Speaker/Speech?

What makes a public speaker effective to me is how clearly they understand the topic and how they leave the audience feeling after they speak. They are an effective speaker if they provide the audience with a new perspective or with new insights, leaving the audience to ponder the subject. What makes a speech or presentation effective is the same thing, it depends how the audience leaves after, if they have learned or gained a deeper understanding. For example, from either the most boring or the most controversial topic can have the audience leave with a different mindset. If the topic is relatively boring, like rocks, the audience can still be enthralled by a riveting speech if the speaker is passionate, engaging, and offers new insight.

Myself 

As a a speaker, I believe I have drastically improved in regards to confidence. My confidence is rarely genuine, but I learned how to fake it over the past year. I hope to eventually gain real confidence someday and not be self-conscious of my delivery or message I present. One of my main weaknesses as a speaker is elaborating or adding input off the top of my head without a script. Other than that, I could improve by learning to maintain more open body language. In my past, I have gained most of my experience as a president of a club and a speaker for Model United Nations. The most difficult was MUN because I had to act as a delegate of a foreign nation. I had to pretend to represent an entire culture and population and speak on their behalf. Yet, this is how I learned to fake confidence through finding a connection with a subject, even if it is an obscure one, and connecting with it to have passion when speaking about it.