Becoming a purrfect speaker - lessons from a cat

Back in August 1963 the Canadian Medical Association Journal published a two-page letter to the editor by D. J. Currie and A. Smialowski titled The Purrfect Speaker which was illustrated by seven hilarious feline images captioned as follows:

“The purrfect speaker is relaxed, faces the audience, uses all his charm, and adds a touch of humour. Instead of being upset, the audience will be spellbound rather than ....zzzzz.”

It’s amazing what can be found over at PubMed Central. LOL.

What to leave in, what to leave out

Two years ago I blogged about how Speechwriting always needs editing. Sometimes a speech or presentation can be improved more by deleting material than by adding, as was discussed on November 6th by Gavin McMahon in a blog post titled The Art of Leaving Things Out. Other times what’s there isn’t quite right, but can be fixed after you take another critical look.

Ken Burns is responsible for Learn the Address, a web site about the Abraham Lincoln’s famous Gettysburg Address. If you look alphabetically in the video gallery of people reciting it, you will find Bill O’Reilly right before Barack Obama. Mr. O’Reilly reads the standard version that is on the Lincoln Memorial. When you compare his reading with that text, you will find that he made two mistakes. A Google search did not find that anyone had complained about those flubs.

Contrast that with outraged comments from conservatives (for example at Breitbart.com) that President Obama had omitted the phrase “under God”. Mr. Burns eventually explained that he had asked the President to read the first draft (Nicolay Version), which you can find here at the Library of Congress. The President read that version perfectly.  

The last paragraph in the Nicolay (draft) copy reads:

“It is rather for us, the living, we here be dedicated to the great task remaining before us —that, from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they here, gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve these dead shall not have died in vain; that the nation, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people by the people for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

The corresponding version on the Lincoln Memorial instead says: 

“It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.”

(Mr. O’Reilly added an extra here to this paragraph). I found it amusing that Ken Burns managed to get us to think about how Lincoln went from his draft to the actual speech he gave. 

Last month I saw another example from pop songwriting. My friendly local public library had the three-CD expanded version for the 1977 Fleetwood Mac album Rumours. It had some demos and early versions for songs.




One was Lindsey Buckingham’s romantic breakup lament, Go Your Own Way, which was redone as is shown above on the TV show Glee. The finished chorus says that:

“You can go your own way
Go your own way
You can call it
Another lonely day
You can go your own way
Go your own way”

That’s not what is in the early take, which instead has:

“You can go your own way
You can roll like thunder, yeah yeah
You can go your own way
Go your own way”

Roll like thunder? That line doesn’t even rhyme.

The title for this post is a line from Bob Seger’s 1980 song Against the Wind.

150th Anniversary of the Gettysburg Address

Tomorrow is the anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s famous brief speech given at the dedication of the Soldier’s National Cemetery. The following YouTube video with Sam Waterston reading it is from The Civil War, a film by Ken Burns.



I’ve previously commented that if we’d had a Twitter backchannel back then, there probably would have been caustic comments like:

DrummerBoy61: 4score n7? Y not 87? LOL

CopperHead62: 3 minutes iz 2 short 4 an address. WTF!

How many Americans are scared of networking situations? An infographic showing both fears and phobias for meeting new people and talking with strangers

The infographic shown above is based on two recent and very serious magazine articles reporting on large surveys of U.S. adults and adolescents. (Click on it to see a larger, clearer view). Both surveys asked two questions related to networking - about meeting new people and talking with strangers.

For adults, meeting new people was feared by 16.8%, and talking with strangers was feared by 13.1%. For the more serious phobias, meeting new people freaked out 9.7%, and talking with strangers freaked out 8.1%. For adolescents, meeting new people was feared by 23.6%, and talking with strangers was feared by 22.2%.

The first article by A. M. Ruscio et al. is titled Social Fears and Social Phobia in the United States: Results from the National Comorbidity Survey Replication. You can read the full text here. I blogged about it back in October 2011 in a post titled What’s the Difference Between A Fear and A Phobia? That post also contains a bar chart for all the fears and phobias shown by Ruscio et al. in their Table 1. 

The second article by J. G. Green et al. is titled Validation of the Diagnoses of Panic Disorder and Phobic Disorders in the US National Comorbidity Survey Replication Adolescent (NCS-A) Supplement. You can read the full text here. I blogged about it back in June 2012 in a post titled What Social Situations Scare American Adolescents, and What Are Their Top 20 Fears? That post also contains a bar chart for all the fears shown by Green et al. in their Table 4. 

For adults, meeting new people was feared by 16.8%, and talking with strangers was feared by 13.1%. Where do these fears rank compared with other social situations? Meeting new people was ranked third, and talking to strangers was seventh. Public speaking/performance was first (21.2%), followed by speaking up in a meeting/ class (19.5%). Talking to people in authority (14.7%) was fourth, an important exam/interview (14.0%) was fifth, and going to parties (13.4%) was sixth.

How many U.S. adults fear meeting new people? According to the 2010 Census, the total population was 305,745,538 people, but only 234,564,071 were 18 years and older. Multiplying that by 0.168, there are about 39.4 million people with that fear. 

For adolescents, meeting new people was feared by 23.6%, and talking with strangers  was feared by 22.2%. Where do these fears rank compared with other social situations? Meeting new people was ranked fourth, and talking to strangers was fifth. Performing for an audience was first (35.8%), followed by speaking in class (24.9%), and a situation that could be embarrassed (24.6%).  

How do these survey results for adults compare with some statistics cited in books by networking experts? Back in 2005 Debra Fine published The Fine Art of Small Talk. On page 19 of that book she said:

“Do you know the biggest social fear in America? It’s public speaking. And do you know the second? It’s fear of starting a conversation with a stranger. So remember when you walk into a luncheon or a cocktail party, most people there are scared to death to talk to you.”

I’m not sure where she got that ranking, but second is a lot higher than seventh (for talking with strangers). In an article about her book in the Houston Chronicle on December 1, 2005 she was quoted as saying that five out of eight of us (62.5%) are afraid to talk to strangers. The 13.1% shown above in the infographic is about 4.8 times smaller than her statistic. 

In 2010 Frances Kay published Successful Networking. On page 43 of her book (and page 22 of her 2004 book Brilliant Business Connections) she said:

“Don’t worry if you have butterflies; research shows that over 90 per cent of people feel fear about walking into a room full of strangers.”

This year Signe A. Dayhoff published her How to Speak Without Fear Small Talk Course, in which she said:

“However, a survey done in the 1980s showed that up to 95 percent of the U.S. population reported that it was truly uncomfortable talking with strangers.”

These percentages are almost ludicrously high compared with those reported by Ruscio et al. The last column of Table 1 in that article reports percentages of fear for people with a diagnosis of social anxiety disorder, which were 80.5% for meeting new people and 66.7% for talking with strangers.

In space teardrops don’t stream from your eyes

When you are writing a speech it’s easy to assume incorrectly that things are universal for any audience. Everything always will work the same way as it did back home.

Last week I saw the 3D version of the space disaster movie Gravity. At one point Sandra Bullock cries, and her teardrops move out toward the audience. The computer generated imagery is very impressive, but I had a nagging suspicion that it wasn’t right.


When I got home I found the YouTube video shot on the International Spece Station by Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield (shown above) with what actually would happen. 


Chris also has another video about what happens when you try to wring out a soaking wet washcloth. It’s very different from down here on earth. You get a tube of water stuck to both hands. 

The row of teardrops were Photoshopped from this image.

How scary is public speaking or performance? A better infographic showing both fears and phobias

Back on March 11th Miami Public Speakers posted a web page containing a Fear of Public Speaking Infographic (shown above). It’s very pretty, and has been reposted elsewhere many times. However, it was based on bogus statistics (which I have crossed out in yellow) so it is not very meaningful. Also it uses the silly pseudo-technical term glossophobia. 

A bar chart in my better infographic shown above is more useful since it is based on two recent and very serious magazine articles. (Click on it to see a larger, clearer view). For adults, they show the percentages for both fear and phobia of public speaking/performance in the United States, nine developed countries (Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, New Zealand, Spain, and the United States) and eleven developing countries (Brazil, Bulgaria, China, Colombia, India, Lebanon, Mexico, Nigeria, Romania, South Africa, Ukraine). For U.S. adults, 21.2% have a fear and only 10.7% have a phobia, both of which are drastically lower than the 74% shown in the Miami Public Speakers infographic.

The first article by A. M. Ruscio et al. is titled Social Fears and Social Phobia in the United States: Results from the National Comorbidity Survey Replication. You can read the full text here. I blogged about it back in October 2011 in a post titled What’s the Difference Between A Fear and A Phobia? That post contains a bar chart for all the fears shown by Ruscio et al. in their Table 1. 

The second article by D. J. Stein et al. is titled Subtyping Social Anxiety in Developed and Developing Countries. You can read the full text here. I blogged about it back in August 2012 in a post titled Surveys show that public speaking isn’t feared by the majority of adults in nine developed and eleven developing countries. That post contains a pair of bar charts for all the fears shown by Stein et al. in their Table 2. 

Verbal communication skill is one of the top five abilities desired by employers from new college graduates

In late summer and early fall of every year the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) surveys employers about new college graduates. Their 2014 Job Outlook Survey will be published this month. But a press release on October 2nd titled
The Candidate Skills/Qualities Employers Want presented an important result.

One of their questions asked employers to rate the importance of candidate abilities and skills on a scale from 1 to 5 where:

5 is extremely important
4 is very important
3 is somewhat important
2 is not very important
1 is not at all important

Results for the top ten abilities or skills are shown above in a bar chart. (Click on it to see a larger, clearer version). The top five were ability to work in a team structure (4.55), ability to make decisions and solve problems (4.50), a tie for third (4.48) between ability to plan, organize, and prioritize work, and ability to verbally communicate with persons inside and outside the organization, and ability to obtain and process information (4.37).

Ability to create or edit written reports (3.62) was ninth in the top ten  and was rated 0.86 lower than ability to verbally communicate.

Another bar chart shows the results from the last survey, which I blogged about back in February in a post titled Verbal communication skill is the top ability desired by employers from new college graduate candidates in the NACE 2013 Job Outlook Survey. The same top five appeared there, but in a different order, and they were followed by the ability to analyze quantitative data.

Playing with Words - More About Glassophobia

Last Monday I blogged about how glassophobia was mostly a spelling error for the silly pseudo-technical term glossophobia. It’s also been used recently as a term for the fear of the new Google Glass product. But, how far back does that fear word go, and who else has used it?

Glassophobia showed up way back in 1901 in a short story called The Glass Dog, which appeared in L. Frank Baum’s book, American Fairy Tales:

” ‘Call off your dog,’ he shouted, in terror.

‘I can’t, sir,’ answered the butler. ‘My young lady has ordered the glass dog to bark whenever you call here. You’d better look out, sir,’ he added, ‘for if it bites you, you may have glassophobia!’ ”

In 2007 glassophobia showed up as the fear of public speaking in an Ezine Article by Joann Grant titled Glassophobia - When Fear is A Disability!

There are at least two other possible fear-related meanings for glassophobia. One would be a fear of heights triggered when standing on a glass floor (like on a deck at the CN tower in Toronto) and looking down. Way back in 1960 Gibson and Walk studied babies placed next to a visual cliff, and found they could perceive depth and recognize that cliff was to be avoided (see this video).

The other possible meaning is fear of bumping into a metaphorical glass ceiling that prevents women or minorities from being promoted at work.

The half full glass and CN Tower floor view both came from Wikimedia Commons.