Two very useful articles in the August 2025 issue of Toastmaster magazine on Five Tips for Depicting Data and Making Your Data Presentations Come to Life

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The August 2025 issue of Toastmaster magazine has two very useful articles. One by Florian Bay on pages 20 to 23 is titled 5 Tips for Depicting Data and subtitled How to use numbers and graphs to create a compelling story. His five headings are:

 

Be Clear on Your Purpose

Select the Right Visual

Remove the Clutter

Engage with Colors but Don’t Create Rainbows

Use Text to Guide Your Viewers

 

The first two line and column bar charts, at the bottom of Page 20 are missing a label for the vertical axis, which should be Number of UNESCO Sites. As shown above, I have added it in red.

 

Regarding pie charts, he says:

 

“Visualizing proportions? Then use a pie chart, but only if you’ve got two or three slices to share; any more than that and the proportions get hard to interpret. Stacked bar charts can also be useful.”

 

I don’t think pie charts ever are useful, as I discussed in a blog post on September 16, 2008 titled Pie charts do not speak clearly; they just mumble and one on July 29, 2022 titled Is there any excuse for using a pie chart?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And his example with Yearly Passengers in London Heathrow Airport 2005-2024 (shown above) has the numbers of years shown vertically rather than horizontally. My Excel version omits the bullseyes around the pandemic data and just shows numbers for all those data points. (On July 4, 2017 I blogged about Why is your audience tilting their heads sideways?)

 

The second article by Charlene Phua following on pages 24 and 25 is titled Make Your Data Presentations Come to Life and subtitled Avoid these 4 missteps to ensure your audience stays engaged. Her four headings are:

 

Including data that isn’t relevant to topic or audience

Having an inaccurate gauge of your audience’s understanding

Providing data with no context or comparison

Neglecting other aspects of your performance

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

For the third she uses the example of annual global carbon dioxide emissions. She didn’t mention a number, but in 2022 they are 38,521,997,860 tons. We can ask What’s in it for me? The global Population is  8,021,407,192 people so it is 4.802 tons per capita, or 9605 pounds. Per day it is 26.3 pounds, and converting that to a cube of dry ice, it is one 7.75 inches on a side, as shown above.

 

On December 23, 2024 I blogged about How should we present a huge number like the two billion dollars earned by the Taylor Swift Eras tour? And on July 12, 2016 I blogged about How to make statistics understandable. Also, on August 17, 2011 I posted on How to make a large number incomprehensible or comprehensible and on July 15, 2011 I blogged on What can we say about a really big hole in the ground?

 

 

A new double-fingers-crossed hand gesture

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There is an F Minus comic by Tony Carrillo on July 28, 2025 showing the driver of a car and captioned:

 

“It’s a new hand gesture I just came up with, and if you knew what it meant, you’d be so mad right now!”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Likely it means the opposite of the Vulcan Salute from Star Trek (shown above being done by Leonard Nimoy) which means to “Live long and prosper.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Another new gesture is shown above. I don’t know what it means, but it might be used in a coffee shop or a pizza parlor.

 

 

 

A visit from the mythical Bar Chart Police could have improved the 2025 book Speak, Memorably: the art of captivating an audience

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I have been reading a 2025 book by Bill McGowan and Juliana Silva which is titled Speak, Memorably: the art of captivating an audience. It’s not awful, but it’s not great either. There is no index. On August 2, 2025 I posted about A bogus car story from the 2025 book Speak, Memorably.

 

On page 10 of that book they state that:

 

“….in the chapters that follow, we commissioned a survey by the Clarity Media Group of over one hundred people. The respondent pool was comprised of full and part-time employees between the ages of twenty-five and sixty-five.”

 

There are 31 horizontal bar charts shown in this book on pages 11, 15,21, 27, 36, 38, 55, 58,60, 71, 113, 114, 135, 139, 153, 155, 168, 183, two on 185, 194, 197, 199, 204, 214, 215, 226, 228, 229, 243, and 244. They are shown in monochrome, and only are 3.3” wide by 1.5” high. The percent is labeled at the center of the bar, and the description of the question is to the right of the bar.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My slightly different Excel version of the chart on page 11 for Do You Consider Your Public Speaking Skills at Work Important? is shown above. But those bars are not presented in what should be their order, with the most significant and largest percentage placed at the top. My revised version also is shown above.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Another example from page 168 about How Do You Determine What Your Audience Wants to Know? and a corrected version are shown above.

 

18 of 31 charts have this incorrect order, those on pages 11, 21, 27, 36, 113, 139, 153, 155, 168, 183, 185 bottom, 194, 199, 204, 214, 215, 228, and 229.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And as shown above, the chart on page 21 for How Often Do You Know with Certainty the First and Last Sentence of Each Slide? has silly labels from top to bottom of: Never, Rarely, Sometimes, and Frequently. That is opposite to what should be: Frequently, Sometimes Rarely, Never. They used the same sequence on pages 27, 113, 139, 155, 199, and 215. Also the chart on page 194 has Never, Seldom, Occasionally, Frequently.

 

Back on September 6, 2022 I blogged that we should Beware of surveys with small sample sizes, which have large margins of error. There is a Wikipedia page about Margin of error. For a typical national survey with a sample size of 1,000 the margin of error is 3.1%. For a sample size of 100 the margin of error instead  is 9.8% (as is shown above in my revised version for page 11).

 

Is the difference between the largest percentage and the second largest percentage twice the margin of error (or 20%)? That only is true for ten charts, those on pages 36, 55, 58, 71, 135, 139, 168, 183, 185 top, and 215. Not the other 21 charts!

 

I first mentioned the mythical Bar Chart Police (and showed a version of their badge) in a post on November 3, 2023 titled Five of six British age groups are more confident about public speaking after COVID.

 

A bogus car story from the 2025 book Speak, Memorably

 

 

 

 

 

There are lots of recent books about public speaking.  Currently I am reading one from 2025 by Bill McGowan and Juliana Silva titled Speak, Memorably: the art of captivating an audience. It is not awful, but it is not great either. At the bottom of page 87 and top of page 88, in a section mistitled The Cadillac of Analogies, they tell the following bogus story about the Cadillac Cimmaron (shown above) and the similar Chevrolet Cavalier (also shown):

 

“In 1982 Cadillac wanted to capture the middle-class car buyer who aspired to own a Cadillac. The model they built was called the Cadillac Cimmaron. On paper it sounded like a good idea, but it turned into a debacle that damaged one of Detroit’s most iconic luxury brands. What they should have done was build a new car from scratch. But they thought they could take a shortcut and merely add some quasi-luxury touches to the down-market Chevy Nova and pass it off as a Cadillac. It was a colossal failure. The consumer, whom they clearly underestimated, saw right through it. The historic blunder, however, did lead to something spectacular. Acknowledging the value of creating something genuinely new, GM created not just a new model, but a whole new category: luxury SUVs. The Cadillac Escalade was the phoenix that rose out of the ashes of the Cimmaron. It was a mega success, undoing the damage done by the Cimmaron and then some.”

 

Their story was superficially researched and wrong in two different ways.They referred to the Chevy version as the Nova. But Chevy built a Nova from 1962 to 1979 and then revived that name from 1985 to 1988 for a NUMMI version of a Toyota Corolla.

 

The real reason that the Cimmaron failed is that there was a series of five very similar looking J-Cars, one from each GM division: the Chevrolet Cavalier, Pontiac J2000, Oldsmobile Firenza, second generation Buick Skyhawk, and Cadillac Cimmaron.

 

Second, GM and the Cadillac Escalade (first produced in August 1998) did not create the luxury SUV category – it was preceded by Ford’s Lincoln Navigator (first produced in May 1997).

 

I know about the J-Cars because in 1985 I looked at the Chevy, Pontiac, and Buick versions. Instead I bought a 1984 Toyota Corolla from Avis used car sales, and drove it till I got a 1993 Saturn SL2 sedan.   

 

Images of a 1983 Cimmaron and a 1984 Cavalier were adapted from Wikimedia Commons.  

  

Can you spot a fake photograph?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There is a twelve and a half minute TED Talk by Hany Farid that was given in Vancouver on April 10, 2025 and posted at YouTube on July 18, 2025. It is titled How to Spot Fake AI Photos | Hany Farid | TED. He discusses using vanishing points and shadows:

 

“If you image parallel lines in the physical world they will converge to a single point, what’s called the vanishing point.”

 

“Surprisingly shadows have a lot in common with vanishing points. Here what I’ve done is I’ve annotated a point on the shadow with the corresponding part on the bottom of the rail that is casting that shadow, and I’ve extended those lines outward. And they intersect, not at a vanishing point, but at the light that is casting that shadow.”    

 

There also is a ten-page article by Hany Farid at PNAS Nexus on July 29, 2025 titled Mitigating the harms of manipulated media: Confronting deepfakes and digital deception. Reference #35 from that article is a 13-page pdf preprint titled Perspective (In)Consistency of Paint by Text which discusses vanishing points, shadows, and reflections.

 

A multiple-exposure spirit photograph from 1901 by S. W. Fallis with a portrait of John K. Hallowell and super-imposed faces of fifteen deceased people including George Washington and Queen Victoria came from Wikimedia Commons.

 

 

Editing as Excavating

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

Editing may involve serious digging. There is a useful article by Yi Shun Lai in The Writer magazine on September 20, 2024 titled The editor, the excavator and subtitled Sometimes it takes another set of eyes to see what your story is REALLY about. She begins:

 

“The essay begins nicely. It’s fabulously written, ostensibly about the way a young man feels having his life chronicled each week in his mother’s newspaper column.

 

About three-quarters of the way through, the writer recounts an event that makes my ears prick up, something so significant that it gives the words and events in the pages before a new angle. And then he kind of just drops it. I can feel him physically dragging the essay back to what it was about before, trying to give due diligence to the narrative plan he’s laid out for himself.

 

The essay holds my attention all the way through, but by the end of it, I’m feeling hungover, literally, because hangovers are accompanied by the sense that you know you did something last night; you just can’t place exactly what it is. I read the writer’s cover letter, thinking there might be some hint as to whether or not I’ve misread the essay, but it doesn’t elucidate the issue for me, so I ping the writer an email asking for a phone conference.

Long story short, we published the writer, but what went into our literary magazine was a reasonably far cry from the submission I received. The lead-in had changed. The event that had gripped my attention was given more clout, and was recounted all the way through. The final touch was a new title for the piece, since the essay was no longer about what it used to be about.”

 

 

 

 

 

Dropping an event is known as Chekhov’s gun, which I blogged about on July 12, 2019 in a post titled Chekhov’s Gun – speechwriting advice from a cartoon. Both Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations and the Yale Book of Quotations state it as:

 

“One must not put a loaded rifle on the stage if no one is thinking of firing it.”

 

An image of a Caterpillar 330 Excavator came from Wikimedia Commons, and a Winchester rifle came from OpenClipArt.

 

 

Disinformation from the Gem State Patriot News

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There is a post from Bob ‘Nugie’ Neugebauer at the Gem State Patriot News blog on July 27, 2025 simply titled Disinformation. The third sentence in his last paragraph says that:

 

“You will not find any disinformation in our newsletter and if you ever should we ask that you please let us know where we have gone wrong.”

 

But I already tried to do that, and was rejected. In a previous post on June 22,2025 titled Idaho Faces Growth and Ideological Challenges the fourth paragraph began by claiming that:

 

“Our nation’s welfare system represents a catastrophic failure that has entrenched poverty rather than eliminating it. Since Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs, poverty rates have remained frozen around 15% instead of continuing their post-World War II decline.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I discussed that claim in a post on June 25, 2025 titled The U.S. poverty rate has not been ‘Frozen around 15%’ since the Great Society. As shown above, from 1990 to 2023 it had moved up to 15.1% and down to 10.5%.  And I sent Mr. Neugebauer the following comment:

 

“Bob:

 

You are quite wrong about the rate for poverty. The only time the poverty rate was ‘frozen’ at around 15% was between 2010 and 2014. It was ‘frozen’ at 12.6% from 2003 to 2005 and at 11.5% from 2020 to 2022. In 2019 (under Trump) the poverty rate had fallen to 10.5%, which is 4.5% lower than the 15% you cited. Clearly you don’t know what you are talking about. For details see a post at my Joyful Public Speaking blog on June 25 titled The U.S. poverty rate has not been ‘Frozen around 15%’ since the Great Society.”

 

He rejected it and never posted that comment on his blog.