Leo+DadMade for Leo
Writing Your Spoken-word Piece
Rung 2 of 4 · The method

Four Moves: Hook, Build, Turn, Landing

A spoken-word piece isn't a blob of paragraphs. It's a shape — four moves in order — and once you can feel the shape, the writing gets a lot easier.

NESA EN4-ECA-01 Builds on: where it comes from

Play Drag the four parts into order, drop a sample line into each, then read the shape back.
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Audio WalkthroughDad & Leo, Two Minutes — Coming Soon
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You've got your seed. Now it needs a structure that carries an audience from "go on then" to "I'm with you". Almost every strong short piece — a slam poem, a TED opener, a captain's speech — runs the same four moves, in this order.

The Four Moves

Hook — the opening that earns the next ten seconds. Drop the crowd straight into a moment, a sharp question, or a line that makes them lean in. No "Today I'm going to talk about". Start inside the thing.

Build — the middle that stacks it up. Here your evidence, your images and your devices do their work — an appeal here, a device there. Each line should add weight, not just fill time.

Turn — the pivot where it gets bigger or flips. The moment the piece stops being about you and becomes about us — or the small thing reveals the big thing. A good turn makes the audience sit up: "oh, this was never just about the netball court."

Landing — the last line that stays in the room after you stop. Short. Punchy. Often it echoes the hook, so the piece closes a loop. You want the kind of ending people repeat in the car park.

Say it plainly: Hook gets them in. Build stacks it up. Turn makes it bigger. Landing makes it stick. Same four moves, every time.

Why the Order Is Locked

The moves only work in sequence. A turn before you've built anything has nothing to pivot off. A landing without a turn just stops. Drag the parts in the toy and you'll feel it — out of order, the piece stumbles; in order, it climbs. That climb is the structure. Get the four moves down and you've got a draft skeleton you can hang any seed on.

Us, Thinking Out Loud

Think of a song you love — where's its turn, the bit that flips or lifts?

Which move feels hardest to write: the hook or the landing? Why that one?