Yesterday at the Forbes Communication Council there was an article by marketer Ahmad Daher titled Public Speaking Tips You Need to Know. Most of it is useful and more than decent, except for this overblown opening paragraph:
“Every year, numerous lists of peoples’s biggest fears are
published, and without fail, public speaking consistently sits near the top. In
order to thrive, and stand out in today’s content-heavy and video-saturated
world, we need to demystify and alleviate the fears around public speaking.”
The claim that fear of public speaking consistently sits near the top is belied by results from the last four annual Chapman Surveys of American Fears, as stated in their blog posts. For 2015 it ranked #26 of 88, for 2016 it ranked #33 of 79, for 2017 it ranked #52 of 80, and for 2018 it ranked #59 of 94. Another way to express these ranks is in terms of the percentage measured going up from the bottom of the list, as shown above in a graph. That percentage wasn’t in the top 25%, and for 2017 and 2018 it wasn’t even in the top 50%. When you make an overblown claim ‘without fail’, just one example can shoot you down – but I have four.
On September 29, 2019 I blogged about those results in
a post titled Stop playing – do serious digging before you come up with an
opening statement. And back on October 19, 2018 I also blogged about how You
probably won’t hear public speaking coaches discuss the 2018 Chapman Survey of
American Fears. Usually the Chapman survey comes out before Halloween, but the
2019 one has not appeared yet.
The mystifying image was adapted from an October 6, 1897
Puck magazine at the Library of Congress.
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