Joyful Public Speaking (from fear to joy)

Is public speaking the greatest fear for US teens?

2012-01-29T11:05:00.000-08:00

Last week I read a news story with the usual comical “statistic” from Jerry Seinfeld:

“On Saturday, hundreds of students from across eastern Montana turned out to Rocky Mountain College in Billings for the Class "A" Eastern Divisional Speech, Drama and Debate Tournament.

‘The two greatest fears are death and public speaking,’ said Billings Central Catholic High School head coach Mark Elison. ‘And death is second’.”

Does that claim really apply to teens?

On March 29, 2005 Gallup reported the results (shown above, click to enlarge) for their poll about What frightens America’s youth? They asked a sample of 1028 teenagers (ages 13 to 17) between January 17th and February 6th of 2005. Teens were asked what they were most afraid of, in an open-ended format. Terrorist attacks were the top fear, followed by ties for spiders and death, and then being a failure, war and heights. Note that public speaking isn’t anywhere on this top ten list.

These results reminded me of a Sherlock Holmes story, Silver Blaze, in which Holmes tried to draw the inspector’s interest to what he called the curious incident of the dog in the night-time. The inspector replied that the dog did nothing, which Holmes then said was very curious (since it would have barked if a stranger was approaching).

The sleeping dog image is from Wikimedia Commons.

Hype cycles revisited

2012-01-27T13:26:00.000-08:00

This morning Seth Godin blogged about Reconsidering Gartner’s Cycle of Hype. Those hype cycles supposedly describe how a new technology spreads. They propose a complicated curve shape (the red line) rather than a simple one like the blue dotted one, or perhaps an S-curve like a sigmoid function. Seth said hype cycles ignore being ignored so that:

.”..most of the things we now take for granted (cell phones, tweeting, insulated windows, email) didn't follow this curve at all.”

He’s right. If you look in a sample of books via the Google Ngram viewer for the three phrases of cell phones, insulated windows, and email (or electronic mail) you don’t see the hype cycle shape. For cell phones and email there is a smooth rise, and for insulated windows there's more complex behavior. I blogged about this topic last May, and showed seven other examples.

Six decades ago the famous physicist, Enrico Fermi, commented skeptically about theories including adjustable parameters. He said that:

“I remember my friend Johnny von Neumann used to say, with four parameters I can fit an elephant, and with five I can make him wiggle his trunk.”

Tired old phrases to use nevermore

2012-01-24T05:12:00.000-08:00

Almost a century ago, on page 546 of his 1915 book Kleiser’s Complete Guide to Public Speaking, Grenville Kleiser presented the following list of of 46 redundant (and thus undesirable) phrases:

“I rise with diffidence
Unaccustomed as I am to public speaking,
By a happy stroke of fate,
It becomes my painful duty
I am encouraged to go on
I point with pride
On the other hand (with gesture) I hold
The vox populi
Be that as it may,
I shall not detain you
As the hour is growing late,
Believe me,
We view with alarm
As I was about to tell you,
The happiest day of my life
It falls to my lot
I can say no more
In the fluff and bloom
I can only hint
I can say nothing
I cannot find words
The fact is
To my mind
I can not sufficiently do justice
I fear
All I can say is
I shall not inflict a speech on you
Far be it from me
It behooves me
Rise Phoenix-like from his ashes
But alas!
What more can I say?
At this late period of the evening
It is hardly necessary to say
I cannot allow the opportunity to pass
For, mark you
I have already taken up too much time
I might talk to you for hours
Looking back upon my childhood
We can imagine the scene
I haven’t the time nor ability
Ah no, dear friends!
One word more and I have done
I will now conclude
I really must stop
I have done.”

They were tired way back then, but many are still around. I’ve never heard “in the fluff and bloom” though. Please avoid them all.

Politicians are fond of both of pointing with pride (at the past) and viewing (the present) with alarm. Their speeches fit an outline used as an article title in 2008 by David B. Nash:

“Point with pride, view with alarm, end with hope.”

The image, based on Edgar Allan Poe’s poem The Raven, was adapted from a 1900 Puck magazine cover.

101-word stories and 50-second elevator speeches

2012-01-23T07:47:00.000-08:00

On January 4th Boise Weekly published ten winners and judge’s picks from their 10th annual Fiction 101 contest. Those ten writers each managed to tell a unique story using only 101 words.

Coincidentally, on January 5th, Fred Miller blogged about non-fiction elevator speeches. If you speak at a reasonable rate of 120 words per minute, that 101-word limit corresponds to a 50-second speech. Fred described an extremely useful floor-by-floor approach that can work within 50 seconds, or longer as appropriate.

Two years ago I blogged about elevator speeches, which I described as covering What do you do that can help me? You can find a much more detailed discussion in Terri L. Sjodin’s 2011 book, Small Message, Big Impact - How to Put the Power of the Elevator Speech Effect to Work for You. An excerpt is here on her blog.

A 50-second elevator speech is at one end of a class of very useful, brief presentation formats - which also include 100-second presentations, 200-second Presto presentations, 300-second Ignite presentations, and 400-second Pecha Kucha presentations.

18 Wheels of Love: A quirky country-rock love story

2012-01-21T14:50:00.000-08:00

Drive-By Truckers - 18 Wheels Of Love from juldes on Vimeo.

Back in 1998 a relatively unknown noir alternative country-rock band called the Drive-By Truckers recorded a song called 18 Wheels of Love for their debut CD, Gangstabilly. It had somewhat forgettable lyrics. For live performances they added a long, profane spoken introduction. Finally, a decade later on the Austin City Limits TV program, they told that story via the extended version shown above. An audio-only version is here.

Watch and listen for all the gestures and specific details Patterson Hood crams into telling his story - including mama, divorce, vodka, Elvis, tabloids, tattoos, Vietnam, Dollywood, and heart disease. Those details make a presentation compelling, rather than generic. Other country songs about truck drivers like Phantom 309 or Eighteen Wheels and a Dozen Roses pale in comparison.

By the way, Chester lived for a couple more years.

Developing a sure-fire speech topic

2012-01-19T05:40:00.000-08:00

Page 34 of the January-February issue of Speaker magazine (from the National Speakers Association) has an excellent two-page article by Jeff Davidson on how to Develop a Sure-Fire Topic. He suggests exploring by:

1. Talking to your local librarian

2. Tapping the industry influentials

3. Reading trend-identifying publications

3. Conversing with meeting planners

4. Expanding on the subtopics within your existing topics

5. Rereading your interviews

5. Filling a void

Jeff also discusses checking a topic to see if it really fits you.

Being on a list of Fifty Best Blogs

2012-01-18T14:14:00.000-08:00

Every month or so I Google the name of this blog. A few days ago I was pleasantly surprised to find it on a list (from last week) of 50 Best Blogs for Communications Majors. I’m number 48, just after Jay Heinrich’s Figures of Speech Served Fresh and Tom Antion’s Great Public Speaking.

In reply I assembled a list of ten of my posts about surveys that communication majors may find particularly interesting:

1. York College professionalism survey shows students don’t realize how important employers think communications skills are.

2. Employers consider verbal communication and many other skills important, but are only somewhat satisfied by their newly hired college graduates.

3. What’s the difference between a fear and a phobia?

4. How to get beyond just using a worn out cliche.

5. 20 fears for a new millennium - replacing the 1977 Book of Lists.

6. Lists where the fear of public speaking isn’t anywhere near the top - The Epidemiologic Catchment Area Survey

7. What do US college students fear most? Is it snakes, spiders, or public speaking?

8. Public speaking is the worst social fear for both Swedish and Indian college students.

9. Social fears in learning situations: a survey of students at the University of the West of England.

10. Social and specific fears in young Israeli soldiers.

The cartoon came from here on Wikimedia Commons.

Quotes for the day from a wall in Boise

2012-01-16T19:53:00.000-08:00

That wall is at the Idaho Human Rights Anne Frank Memorial. It is downtown between the Boise River and the Boise Public Library.

Watching the comedians #5: Louis C. K.

2012-01-14T07:21:00.000-08:00

Chris Salierno’s blog post about 5 Comedians That Will Make You A Better Public Speaker discussed Louis C. K. (Skeley). Louis writes, directs, and stars in the FX cable TV comedy series Louie. Here are three of his routines, and a tribute to George Carlin, all of which include profanity:

Just because you can do something, like use Twitter, doesn’t mean that you should.

What kind of secrets could a five year old child have? Great gestures, but the black tee shirt doesn't work well on a black background.

What are the differences between boys and girls?

How George Carlin inspired him to go past using his stale old material.

Watching the comedians #4: Paul F. Tompkins

2012-01-13T07:48:00.000-08:00

Chris Salierno’s blog post about 5 Comedians That Will Make You A Better Public Speaker discussed Paul F. Tompkins, an actor and comedian. Here are a brief interview and two of his routines:

In this interview Paul talks about his experience of feeling nervous as if you don’t belong in a situation where you really do.

There is common terminology that you would be foolish not to learn and use. Also note how his opening was made different by skipping “...and gentlemen.”

Paul appeared in a comical great debate on whether it’s the end of the world (or not). Watch him demonstrate two different gestures for a telephone.

Watching the comedians #3: Patton Oswalt

2012-01-12T07:32:00.000-08:00

Chris Salierno’s blog post about 5 Comedians That Will Make You A Better Public Speaker discussed Patton Oswalt. Patton is both a comedian and a voice-over artist. Children know him from his 2007 role as the voice of Remy, the rat in the animated film Ratatouille. Here are three of his routines, which include profanity:

Audiences differ. The cynicism he routinely used while speaking to adults was inappropriate for speaking to children.

I think he saved his cynicism for this adult routine about the KFC Famous Bowls.

What should you not do when arrangements get confused? Please don’t behave like this angry magician Patton describes.

Watching the comedians #2: Maria Bamford

2012-01-11T11:51:00.000-08:00

Maria Bamford was included in Chris Salierno’s blog post, about 5 Comedians That Will Make You A Better Public Speaker. Maria grew up in Duluth, Minnsesota and moved to Los Angeles. She is both a comediene and a voice-over artist. Maria turns everday situations into surreal ones.

Watch her portray a troubled teen trying to sell her parents on becoming a roadie for a rock and roll band.

Here she outlines a generic political campaign speech, with a vague plan to eradicate sadness.

Maria has appeared on the syndicated Bob and Tom morning radio show. Here she describes working in an office as a temporary employee.

Watch her face as she discusses the Delilah evening radio show and internet dating.

Watching the comedians #1: Mike Birbiglia

2012-01-10T14:01:00.000-08:00

Back on July 22nd of 2011 I read a post by Chris Salierno on his blog, The Curious Dentist, about 5 Comedians That Will Make You A Better Public Speaker. They were: Louis C.K., Mike Birbiglia, Paul F. Tompkins, Maria Bamford, and Patton Oswalt. I wasn’t familiar with them, but eventually I began looking at YouTube videos of them all to collect some examples that might help speakers learn.

In Comedy: A Means to an End you can see how Mike Birbiglia uses gestures and both variations in volume and rate to tell his stories. He also mentions how different oral storytelling and books are.

Watch him tell a profane story regarding a big mistake he made during a speech at the baseball MVP awards. The simultaneous translation for the deaf gets very curious after about two minutes.

Back in 2008 Mike also did an eight-minute routine on the Conan O’Brien show. He describes being examined and operated on for a bladder tumor when he was just nineteen. Mike turns a very serious topic into comedy, with some profanity. Watch how he describe a cystoscope by using the microphone stand as a prop.

Don’t give a killer motivational speech

2012-01-08T11:01:00.000-08:00

When I read the December 14th blog post by Ben and Kelly Decker on The Top Ten Best (and Worst Communicators of 2011 there was one name glaringly missing from their worst list. That was James Arthur Ray, who also wasn’t listed for either 2009 or 2010.

Mr. Ray is a well-known motivational speaker, author, and proponent of the Law of Attraction. A 2008 article in Fortune called him “The man who would be Robbins, Covey, and Chopra.”

On October 8, 2009, as part of a “Spiritual Warrior” program he led a “sweat lodge” program in a mostly enclosed sauna-like space heated by pouring water over hot rocks. Before it began he reportedly told participants that although they might feel like they were going to die they would not. But, three people did die - Kirby Brown, Liz Neuman, and James Shore. Mr. Ray literally gave a killer motivational speech.

James Arthur Ray eventually was tried in Yavapai County, Arizona. On June 22, 2011 he was found guilty on three counts of negligent homicide. Those events are discussed here. Finally, on November 18th, he was sentenced to two years in prison. His attorneys, whose fees already have cost him $5.6 million, are appealing that verdict.

Mr. Ray displayed an amazing combination of arrogance and ignorance. The hazards resulting from combinations of heat and humidity are well-known and thus preventable. For another example, see this simple chart. This August OSHA even released a free heat safety App. Yet, reportedly Ray didn’t even have a thermometer in the so-called sweat lodge he was running (and also, of course, no way of measuring humidity).

Using a metaphor to explain technology

2012-01-06T07:37:00.000-08:00

Someone recently asked me about a backup solar power generator system they saw advertised for less than $2000. The large print emphasized that it had an 1800 watt inverter, along with 90 watt solar cells and a battery pack. They asked me what that all meant, and whether the system was worth buying for their rural home. I explained the system with the familiar metaphor of a bathtub and its piping.

The storage battery is like a bathtub full of energy. In the example shown above, it has a capacity of 900 watt-hours (a 12 volt, 75 amp-hour battery pack). The system includes an AC charger for the battery, so when the power goes off the tub is full.

While the AC power to our house is off, we can drain power from the battery (empty the tub) at some rate, and turn it into 120-volt AC power via the inverter. At night, if we kept 75 watts of lighting (five 15W compact fluorescents) plugged in for six hours we’d have drained off half of the battery capacity. After 12 hours in the dark, we’d have completely emptied the battery. (At the rated inverter power of 1800 watts, it only would take 1/2 hour for us to empty it).

The 90 watt solar cell panel is like a faucet for slowly refilling the tub during the day. That solar panel could keep up with any load of 90 watts or less, so if we started with a full battery it would stay charged until darkness fell. (With no load it would take 10 hours to recharge an empty battery).

This bathtub metaphor lets us think simply about how the battery capacity (tub size), solar panel size (faucet) and load (drain) determine system behavior. Whether this backup system makes sense for a home depends on the loads it will see over an entire day. We need to start from a careful load analysis.

Even an efficient full-size refrigerator could consume more than 1000 watt-hours per day. So, we probably would need either a smaller refrigerator, or a bigger generator system. But, for the first day of an outage the refrigerator might stay fairly cold even without being plugged in.

When we compare that backup system with a serious 1000 watt system for continuous use off-grid as shown above, we can see why the ad for that backup system emphasized the inverter size. That inverter really is the least expensive part of the system. An off-grid system could cost about $16,000 including an engine generator for use on cloudy days.

For continuous use, the solar panels have to be able to supply the average power being drained. That is why a realistic system is specified based on their output (1000 watts) rather than the inverter capacity (2500 watts). Also, note how much larger the battery is (15,000 watt-hours versus just 900 watt-hours).

The bathtub metaphor is useful for thinking about how a backup power system works. Reality is more complicated. Solar panels typically don’t produce their rated output, and there are energy losses both in charging the battery, and converting the output to AC. You can read lots more details in Home Power magazine, or on their web site.

That’s not the switch for the conference room lights!

2012-01-04T11:23:00.000-08:00

Computerworld magazine has a featured blog called Shark Tank with stories about what really happens in the world of tech support. Six years ago they published a tale that can be told by dividing what happened into good news and bad news.

The bad news was that a secretary put in a frantic call lamenting how her computer display had gone blank - right as she was in the middle of typing a document her supervisor said he needed ASAP.

The good news was that the problem was fairly obvious. When the support person asked if the power light on her personal computer (down on the floor) also was off, she said yes. When did it go off? The same time that ALL the room lights went off.

The bad news was that the support person couldn’t get in touch with maintenance by phone.

The good news was that maintenance already was busy responding.

The bad news was that one of the company administrators had been giving a presentation in the conference room. He couldn’t find the light switch when he was ready to start projecting his PowerPoint. So, he stormed into the nearby custodial closet and decisively flipped a switch - which turned out to be the main circuit breaker for that entire floor.

The good news was that he couldn’t blame his secretary for being late because he’d caused the problem. Also, the maintenance man managed to keep from laughing while he showed the administrator where the light switch really was.

APPENDIX

The bad news was that turning off more than just the lights can have very unpleasant side effects. When you turn a water pump off, you can generate a large transient pressure in pipes or tubing - known as water hammer. I know of an incident where water hammer blew a rubber hose for chilled water off of a tapered push-on fitting on a piece of equipment. Naturally this happened in a room with a sunken floor. The pond already was a few inches deep before someone spotted the flooding, shut the water off, and got out a wet/dry shop vacuum cleaner.

The good news was that equipment had been idling so it didn’t overheat, and there were no other electronics down near the floor to get dunked and ruined.

Preparation is vital before you use a quotation

2012-01-03T11:05:00.000-08:00

The right quotation can wow your speech audience with borrowed brilliance. The wrong one can make you feel like a monkey, and wish you hadn’t used it.

In a December 29th post on her Pivotal Public Speaking blog, titled Preparation - Vital, Bronwyn Ritchie quoted Pennsylvania State University head football coach Joe Paterno as saying that:

“The will to win is important. But the will to prepare is vital.”

I got a different message about preparation than she intended. Since November 9th, when he got fired over a child abuse scandal before he could retire, the coach had gone from famous to infamous. But, Bronywn is down in the Brisbane, Australia area and obviously hadn’t yet gotten the news. (She was horrified when I commented on her post). Even a quick look on Wikipedia before she used the quote again would have shown her that things had changed drastically.

She isn’t the only one to have used that quote recently. Scott MacDonald in Calgary, Alberta tweeted it on December 19th. Also, District 86 Toastmasters printed it on page 5 of the program for their Fall 2011 meeting held in London, Ontario on November 25 - 27, 2011. (They may have printed their program before the scandal was news).

Loyola University Chicago had placed the quote on the wall of their new Norville Center for Intercollegiate Athletics, which only opened on March 3, 2011. By mid-December they had covered it up with a poster while deciding how to permanently remove it.

The speak-no-evil image borrowed from that of the famous three monkeys came from Wikimedia Commons.

Resolve to anticipate “shoelace failures” and plan around them

2012-01-01T08:05:00.000-08:00

Every component or product has a normal way of wearing out and failing. For a shoelace, the failure location is at the top eyelet. That’s because most of the sliding motion during tightening occurs there, and the knot also is pulled tightest there. We aren’t at all surprised when a shoelace breaks at that location. If it failed at another location we would suspect something unusual had happened - like a knitting problem, or that cigarette ash had been dropped there and burned it.

Batteries in a presenter remote or a laser pointer will wear out and need to be replaced eventually. We can plan ahead to anticipate that normal problem. Carry a spare set of fresh batteries to keep that component from causing us a problem during a PowerPoint presentation.

At the end of a post last February about checklists, I mentioned three other simple things I also carry along with an extension cord. One is a three-way adapter for my laptop and projector, and a second is a two-prong adapter (for ungrounded outlets sometimes found in historical buildings). A third a wooden block for tilting my projector upwards. (Long ago I usually could find an ashtray in the room, but not anymore).

Donald J. Wulpi’s book on Understanding How Components Fail used the example of a shoelace in his first chapter. You can see a preview at Google Books.

How can you easily draw dotted chalk lines on a blackboard?

2011-12-29T08:32:00.000-08:00

On Monday I discussed the hour-long video celebrating Professor Walter Lewin’s book For the Love of Physics. During the question and answer period (at 52:30), one of his former students comments:

“So, I sat in on your lectures here, I think about twenty years ago, and I’d forgotten one thing that I learned from you was how to draw dotted lines on chalkboards - which I actually used myself when I was a professor (at Northwestern) for some number of years , so very useful skill.”

Then he asks how did your lectures evolve over time? Professor Lewin replies:

“I think I was always eccentric. It’s true, and so from day one my lectures were always different from the mean. But, of course, they evolved in a way that grew substantially, and that is not because of the dotting of the line - because I could already do that in high school.

....But, it is amazing that many physics professors want to know how I make those dotted lines. There is a two-minute videotape which someone made. Someone looked at all the dotted lines I ever drew in 8.01, and put that in one videotape. It’s a riot!”

Here is that video:

Can you see how he makes those dotted lines? I had to look carefully before I saw what he does differently. When you pull the chalk along behind your hand. you get a normal solid line. Look carefully at 0:50 on that video, as shown in the following still photo:

When you instead push the chalk ahead of your hand you can get a dotted line. In a comment on another video by Walter Lewin someone said:

“I know chalk boards are hard to find nowadays. but it's easy to do: hold the chalk loosely in your hand and hold it at an angle so that it's ahead of your hand. Push it in the direction of your line and it skips making a dotted line. Too easy.”

Is it easy to explain in detail though? No! Look at this University of Bristol web page. (Benjamin Hall did both a web site and report about it). There also is a 28-page paper (Hall's Ref. [10]) on Periodic Motion and Bifurcations Induced by the Painlevé Paradox about all the math involved in this and similar situations.

Added January 4, 2012

Another place this trick would be useful is in laying out chalk art.

Does your use of jargon need tweaking?

2011-12-27T06:13:00.000-08:00

One common definition for the word tweak is to make small changes in order to improve something. Back in 2008 Peggy Jordan blogged about Why Clarity Counts and mentioned an unfortunate specialized use of an acronym. An expert on short term disability insurance got into the bad habit of using the acronym STD - which most people would interpret as instead referring to a sexually transmitted disease. Another example of confusing jargon is death and dismemberment insurance, which really covers either situation rather than requiring both (like in the movie Fargo).

Tweaking has another meaning in the drug subculture:

“Methamphetamine use that goes on for day after day is called tweaking, and you really get into a very strange state. You might just sit there quietly and with all kinds of crazy ideas going through your brain. Nobody knows what’s going on. You have to deal with someone like that very carefully. They can go through repetitive activities. One of the favorite ones for people is to take things apart - take the TV apart - take the cell phone apart - but not in any way be able to put it back together.”

On December 15th I heard an early-morning radio interview of Erik Makrush, an education policy analyst (polite euphemism for lobbyist) at the Idaho Freedom Foundation. While discussing reform in the state he commented that:

“There’s going to be some tweaking by the legislature.”

I doubt Erik was thinking about that other meaning for tweaking, but I had a good laugh imagining those legislators. His word choice probably was influenced by one or two article headlines from the preceding day.

The image of a recording control board being tweaked came from Wikimedia Commons.

Finding and communicating wonder in physics

2011-12-26T09:44:00.000-08:00

Back in junior year of high school my first physics teacher, Mr. Rankin, proclaimed that:

“Physics is fun, ‘cause you get to play.”

On the new books shelf in the Boise public library I just found Professor Walter Lewin’s recent book, For the Love of Physics. As the promo video shows, he communicated his sense of wonder to university students at MIT. A hundred of his lectures have been posted on YouTube, written about in the New York Times, and currently are being viewed by about 6000 people per day from around the world. There is a marvelous one-hour video showing him discussing several topics.

One is the above equation describing the period of a pendulum. Professor Lewin shows his audience a long pendulum, like a cannon ball suspended from the ceiling of the lecture hall. First he demonstrates that the period doesn’t change when you swing the pendulum five or ten degrees from vertical. Then he shows that it also doesn’t depend on the mass of the pendulum - becoming part of the experiment by riding that cannon ball. He also uses that pendulum to discuss the conservation of energy, and the topic of demolishing buildings with wrecking balls.

In my senior year of high school, I recall checking that same equation by hanging a fifty-foot pendulum in a four-story tall stairwell. Back in our Advanced Placement physics classroom, we also proclaimed that physics works.

During the answers to questions at the 57-minute mark in the longer video, Professor Lewin reveals that it took him forty to sixty hours to prepare for each lecture. He did three full-length rehearsals (or dry runs) - one two weeks before, one a week before, and one at 5:30 AM the morning before doing those 10 AM and 11 AM lectures. However, for the book signing lecture he did six full rehearsals!

Would you rather be heard, or be able to read your notes?

2011-12-23T06:18:00.000-08:00

That’s not a pleasant choice! Please check out the whole room setup before you speak - including both sound and lights.

If the light on that lectern needs to be on for your speech, then check to see it doesn’t generate a buzz that interferes with the microphone. Things might have been fine until when the incandescent lamp burned out, and it got replaced by a compact fluorescent bulb, as was discussed by a 2007 article in EDN magazine.

Images from the History of Medicine showed Margo Heygood speaking at the 1976 NIH Conference on DNA.

Three recent proposals for improving presentations at conferences

2011-12-21T21:07:00.000-08:00

Communications of the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) is one of the most venerable computer science magazines. In the September 2011 issue their editor-in-chief, Moshe Y. Vardi, proposed three ways to improve presentations:

“Conferences should, in my opinion, take active measures to improve presentation quality. A radical proposal would be to require authors to submit not only papers but also video recordings of their talks. The quality of those presentations would be considered in making program decisions.

Less radical a move is to require authors to send draft presentations before the conference, and receive feedback from their session chairs.

It should also be relatively easy to augment conference-management systems with feedback pages where conference participants can give speakers anonymous feedback on their presentations. (That would give attendees something constructive to do during poor presentations!)”

You can download the full text of his article, "Are you talking to me?" here (click on PDF).

I like his radical proposal of requiring a video recording. But, when Togrstent Grust approved of that he got comments with the expected objection that this would make it significantly more time consuming to submit a paper. Well, of course. Improved quality isn’t free. Back in March 2010 I blogged about how the quality of presentations at the annual conference of the American Society of Colon and Rectal Surgeons had improved. A possible explanation was requiring submission of a written manuscript. I suspect also requiring a video would have a similar effect.

The image of a conference audience is from Wikimedia Commons.

Twenty useful blogs on presentations

2011-12-19T05:45:00.000-08:00

In a December 13th post on his All About Presentations blog Vivek Singh asked for a short list (10 to 15) of useful blogs about presentation. I easily thought of ten just from the United States. However, I read many more and thought it would be more useful to include another ten from the rest of the world. My list of twenty follows.

UNITED STATES
Nancy Duarte: Duarte blog

James Feudo: Overnight Sensation

Ellen Finkelstein: PowerPoint Tips Blog

Tom Fishburne: (Marketoonist)

Denise Graveline: The Eloquent Woman

Rich Hopkins: Speak and Deliver

Nick Morgan: Public Words

Scott Schwertly: Ethos3

Jon Thomas: Presentation Advisors

Jerry Weissman: Power Presentations

CANADA
Andrew Dlugan: Six Minutes

Dave Paradi: Dave Paradi’s PowerPoint Blog

INDIA
Vivek Singh: All About Presentations

ISRAEL
Jan Schultink: Idea Transplant

JAPAN
R. L. Howser: Presentation Dynamics

Garr Reynolds: Presentation Zen

NEW ZEALAND
Olivia Mitchell: Speaking About Presenting

SPAIN
Conor Neill: The Rhetorical Journey

SWITZERLAND
John Zimmer: Manner of Speaking

UNITED KINGDOM
Max Atkinson: Max Atkinson’s Blog

Lessons on humor from the December issues of the Canadian Medical Association Journal

2011-12-18T12:08:00.000-08:00

This morning National Public Radio had a three-minute Weekend Edition segment about how the December issues of that normally serious magazine poke fun at medicine.

In 2006 they explained how we are able to overeat at holiday dinners: Room for dessert: an expanded anatomy of the stomach.

Some articles parody dense jargon, like the 2010 one on: The anemic maternal proxy and the seven resident stakeholders (Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs), and a 2001 Case report: microcardia secondary to chronic adrenocortical insufficiency (Dr. Seuss’s Grinch).

Other stories for children were scrutinized generally in 2003: Head injuries in nursery rhymes: evidence of a dangerous subtext in children’s literature. Winnie the Pooh was analyzed both a decade ago: Pathology in the Hundred Acre Wood: a neurodevelopmental perspective on A. A. Milne, and more concisely last year: Pooh has an addiction issue.

Last year I blogged about their 2005 article analyzing: Incidence of and risk factors for nodding off at scientific sessions. In 2005 they also described using a Super Soaker to dislodge ear wax: A novel method for the removal of ear cerumen. (Don’t try this at home - a direct hit will puncture the eardrum).

Finally, back in 2004 they considered many occupational hazards that Santa encounters during his annual circumnavigation: Referral request for S. Claus.

Can homeopathic gelsemium reduce anxiety about public speaking?

2011-12-15T12:56:00.000-08:00

Gelsemium sempervirens (yellow jessamine or jasmine) is a homeopathic remedy recommended for fear of public speaking, and many other ailments (like flu). Very small amounts of the root are used to prepare remedies, because the plant contains three toxic strychnine-related alkaloids: gelsemine, gelseminine, and sempervirine. (Just because something is completely natural doesn’t mean that it is either harmless or safe).

In The Complete Homeopathy Handbook by Miranda Castro (St. Martin’s Press, New York, 1990) on page 91 she says that:

“Gelsemium is also one of the favorite remedies for people who become paralysed with fear prior to giving a talk or before an exam. This is not the active fear of Argentum Nitricum or Lycopodium; it is an acute anxiety which causes a person to seize up both mentally and physically.”

Similarly, in Easy Homeopathy: the 7 essential remedies you need for common illnesses and first aid by Edward Shalts (McGraw-Hill, New York, 2005) on page 139 he says that:

“Gelsemium is an excellent remedy for stage fright and test anxiety. People who need this remedy to perform better under various circumstances literally feel paralyzed, weak and dizzy. Their limbs become heavy. This is not a good bouquet of symptoms to have during performances or exams.”
For test anxiety he recommends taking three pellets of Gelsemium 30 C on the morning of the exam. He also suggests using what he calls the plussing method; dissolving three pellets of 30C in a small bottle of spring water and then sipping from it as needed.

On Amazon.com you can find tubes of pellets from Boiron with potencies of 6C, 12C, 30C, or even 200C.

Is Gelsemium effective for relieving anticipatory anxiety? Apparently not. This year A. Paris et al. published the results of a detailed clinical study in a magazine called Fundamental and Clinical Pharmacology. You can read the abstract here. They compared the effects of Gelsemium at potencies of 5CH and 15CH with a placebo. The study began with 180 people split evenly among those three groups, but a few dropped out. Most of the co-authors are in Grenoble, France but two are with the Boiron laboratories in St Foy-le`s-Lyon (who also provided the remedies).

What does the potency ‘5CH’ mean? (It’s the same as 10X). The material has been diluted by a factor of 1:100 five times, so the final concentration is 1 part in 10,000,000,000. Similarly, ‘15CH’ means diluted by a factor of 1:100 fifteen times, so the final concentration is 1 part in 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.

There also are some very preliminary (and curious) results from Verona, Italy with positive results for gelsemium on anxiety-related responses in mice. You can read the full texts on PubMed Central here and here. I’m not sure what to make of these, but did note that the reported response did not increase consistently with potency as was long ago hypothesized to occur for homeopathy.

The plant image is from Wikimedia.

Avoid impending doom when opening your speech

2011-12-14T19:27:00.000-08:00

On December 8th Doug Savage posted the fifth of his hilarious and thoughtful Savage Chickens cartoons about public speaking.

What should you do when opening your speech? Be prepared so you don't chicken out. If you’re nervous, then write out the first few sentences on a note card, so you don’t go blank.

What should you avoid when opening your speech? Don’t drink alcohol beforehand. Don’t imagine the audience naked. Don’t grip the lectern like you are driving a bus, or bang your fists on it (like Dwight did in The Office).

Will homeopathic lycopodium reduce your anxiety about public speaking?

2011-12-12T12:15:00.000-08:00

Lycopodium clavatum (commonly known as club moss and pronounced like-o-podium) is a homeopathic remedy recommended for fear of public speaking (and many other ailments). In summer, spikes from the plant are collected and the very small spores are shaken out to produce a yellow powder (pollen dust) as shown above.

For example, in The Complete Guide to Homeopathy by Dr. Andrew Lockie and Dr. Nicola Geddes (Dorling Kindersley, London, 1995), under Emotional Problems in the tables on pages 190 and 191 they describe:

AILMENT:
Anxiety with a loss of confidence

SYMPTOMS:
Apprehension about performing in public
Inability to sleep at night with continual reviewing of what happened during the day
Appetite is disturbed
A craving for sweet foods may accompany insomnia

CAUSE & ONSET:
A forthcoming event or performance
Most likely to occur in the very ambitious who have high standards

YOU FEEL BETTER:
In cool surroundings
From hot food and drinks
After midnight
With movement

YOU FEEL WORSE:
In stuffy rooms
After overeating
Between 4 PM and 8 PM

REMEDY & DOSAGE:
Lycopodium - take 6C every 2 hours for up to 10 doses

You can find pellets of 6C lycopodium clavatum online. For example, Amazon shows Boiron has packages with tubes containing 80 pellets for less than $8.

What does the potency or dilution ‘6C’ mean? (It’s the same as 12X). The material has been diluted by a factor of 1:100 six times, so the final concentration is 1 part in 1,000,000,000,000.

Is lycopodium effective? In 2006 Karen Pilkington and her colleagues published a long article in Homeopathy magazine titled Homeopathy for Anxiety and Anxiety Disorders: A Systematic Review of the Research. You can read the abstract and conclusion here at PubMed. They found no clear and compelling evidence that homeopathy was effective for treating anxiety. Lycopodium only was mentioned near the beginning of the article, where they referred to it being mentioned by Dr. Lockie in another more recent book, the Encyclopedia of Homeopathy (2001).

Does lycopodium have undesirable side effects? A web article by Susan Kaye noted that:

“The book Synoptic Materia Medica I points out that Lycopodium may cause lack of self-confidence, feelings of inferiority and insecurity, and the possibility of a person developing bullying behavior which acts like a cover-up for these feelings of being ‘lesser-than.’ A person may be bossy, dominating and downright nasty to those who know him best, like family, yet act meek and fearful in public. The remedy may cause a fear of public speaking and even the inability to stand up for oneself in a conflict.”

I have not read that rather obscure book, so I’m not sure if this is a problem only with this remedy, or an example of a general problem with homeopathic remedies noted on the Dr. Lockie web site:

“The homeopathic equivalent of an overdose is when a remedy is ‘proved’ or begins to cause the symptoms that it is intended to cure. This can happen when a remedy is taken for very prolonged periods, so don’t continue with a remedy once it has worked in order to prevent a relapse, it’s quite unnecessary and actually counter-productive.”

Images of the plant and powder are both from Wikimedia.

‘Tis the season for Christmas Camouflage in graphics

2011-12-08T11:28:00.000-08:00

For most people the festive Christmas color combination of red and green shown above has excellent contrast. Unfortunately, for a mostly male minority (up to ~10%) with red-green color blindness, it has almost no contrast. In a February 2009 blog post I called that Christmas Camouflage. An online tool called Vischeck lets us see a simulation of how someone with red-green blindness (a deuteranope) would see it. Now both Santa and his elves look like they’ve joined the army and have been issued identical olive drab uniforms.

Unless you ask them, you won’t know if someone is color blind. People with that problem usually adapt by having others help them color coordinate their clothes. In a cafeteria line they will be careful to ask for the soup by name, because otherwise they might get served split pea soup (green) instead of cream of tomato (orange).

The Santa Claus icon (recolored to make the elves) came from Mizunoryu on Wikimedia Commons.

Bridging the Uncanny Valley

2011-12-07T11:24:00.000-08:00

On November 19th R. L. Howser blogged about how painful it was to watch a speaker use carefully prepared gestures that failed to connect with the audience. He titled it The Uncanny Valley, which is a term from robotics.

When we watch a robot behave, initially the more human-like it looks the more familiar it seems. But, at some point (when it looks like a human but still acts like a robot) our reaction reverses to it seeming unfamiliar and downright creepy.

C.S. Lewis had Mr. Beaver say something similar in The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe (my italics):

“But in general, take my advice,
when you meet anything that’s going to be human and isn’t yet, or used to be human once and isn’t now,
or ought to be human and isn’t,
you keep your eyes on it and feel for your hatchet.”

The following YouTube Video with James May’s reaction to a Gemenoid robot illustrates the problem.

What makes a human speaker seem inhuman? How can we bridge over the Uncanny Valley? In a November 2008 article in the Harvard Business Review on How to Become an Authentic Speaker, Nick Morgan revealed that trying to make our gestures conscious gets the timing wrong. The solution is to practice making them unconscious. That idea is described in detail in his 2009 book: Trust Me four steps to authenticity and charisma. Nick did a series of podcasts about the book, which I blogged about in August.

Human reactions to robots (and robot reactions to humans) are a running gag in the alternative universe envisioned by J. Jacques in his online comic strip Questionable Content (QC). He refers to them as AnthroPCs or AIs. A recent series, #1994 to #2010, chronicled Momo-tan going to the local Idoru dealer at a mall to get a new chassis. Two very curious signs on their wall read:

AJos 4.0.
The all-new artificial intelligence paradigm.
Guaranteed not to go insane
and kill your loved ones.

and

Make Your Robot Happy.
That isn’t a euphemism.

A more recent comic claimed that humans sometimes acted creepier than robots.

Should you put haikus in your handouts?

2011-12-05T06:23:00.000-08:00

On Saturday morning I heard a story on National Public Radio about a dozen new traffic warning signs in New York City that were written as haiku poems. That’s an interesting approach to a typically dull subject. My versions for two of them are shown above.

Haiku might be used as headlines or titles for graphic slides. Better still, they could be used in handouts. I Googled the combination of public speaking and haiku, and found the following excellent one in an August 2009 blog post by Angela DeFinis.

What’s the story on valerian and anxiety?

2011-12-04T11:56:00.000-08:00

On November 28th Joe and Teresa Graedon’s People’s Pharmacy had a brief article titled Public Speaking Phobia Dissolves with Herbs. Someone wrote them about how taking a valerian capsule had reduced her anxiety, which let her speak at her retirement party. If it worked for her, will it work for you?

People’s Pharmacy articles also appears as newspaper features. Sometimes the articles get different titles. The Durham, North Carolina Herald-Sun and the Athens (Ohio) Banner-Herald both used the same title. The Houston Chronicle said that Valerian takes the edge off public speaking, while the Jackson, Mississippi Clarion-Ledger just said Capsule may relieve anxiety. Which title is closest to the truth?

When we look up valerian at the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, we find their summary web page says that:

“* Research suggests that valerian may be helpful for insomnia, but there is not enough evidence from well-designed studies to confirm this.

* There is not enough scientific evidence to determine whether valerian works for other conditions, such as anxiety or depression.”

In September 2009 I blogged about herbal remedies for anxiety, and mentioned two review articles about valerian - one by Ernst and a Cochrane review. Both concluded there was no clear evidence for it reducing anxiety.

Ten years earlier Carolyn Mar and Stephen Bent published An evidence based review of the 10 most commonly used herbs. They also said the evidence for valerian being effective then was inconclusive. (See the summary table in the full .pdf file version. It was printed too light to show in a scan for the single page.) In 2008 Stephen Bent took a look at the current top ten herbs in Herbal Medicine in the United States: Review of Efficacy, Safety, and Regulation, but valerian wasn’t on that list.

What can we learn from this? Just because something is popular doesn’t mean that it is effective (or completely safe). Do your own homework. Don’t uncritically believe someone else’s story, even if it got whispered right in your ear.

The image came from here at the Library of Congress.

Detailed advice on how to overcome the fear of public speaking

2011-12-01T06:36:00.000-08:00

If you are among the 1 in 5 of us with a fear of public speaking, then you should read an excellent book by a clinical psychologist, Peter Desberg, PhD. Speaking Scared Sounding Good: Public Speaking for the Private Person was published in 2007. You can look inside it at Amazon.com. This book contains lots of exercises, stories, and even jokes. Each of the 14 chapters begins with a brief paragraph describing the big idea. They are:

PART ONE: Understanding Your Fear of Public Speaking

1. WHAT REALLY CAUSES STAGE FRIGHT?: Your emotions are a direct result of what’s on your mind. If you think you will give a bad speech, you will be afraid to give that speech. Just thinking about it negatively weeks before the scheduled date can make you tremble. This is because your negative thoughts cause your fear.

2. IDENTIFYING YOUR FEAR-PROVOKING THOUGHTS: The thoughts that lead to your feelings are not always easy to identify. But once you are able to identify them, they will become the foundation of your plan to control your fear.

3. EVALUATING YOUR FEAR-PROVOKING THOUGHTS: Your fear-provoking thoughts might be based on real-life experiences and may actually be reasonable. On the other hand, they might be the result of exaggeration and/or shaky logic. Identify the thinking process that fuels your fear-provoking thoughts.

4. CONTROLLING YOUR FEAR-PROVOKING THOUGHTS: Reality-testing strategies and positive self-statements can give you a firm handle on your fear-provoking thoughts and can help you get them under control.

PART TWO: Tools for Reducing Your Fear-Provoking Thoughts

5. SETTING GOALS: Set goals that are completely under your control and identify ways to measure how effectively you have met them.

6. LEARNING TO RELAX: Relaxation exercises can help you combat anxiety - your internal response to danger - by lowering it to more manageable levels while making you more alert.

7. DEALING WITH AVOIDANCE AND PROCRASTINATION: Avoidance can lead to missed opportunities in your career and personal life, and procrastination reduces your chances of adequately preparing for a presentation or speech.

8. IMPROVING YOUR MEMORY: Organized information is much easier to remember, especially when the information is personally meaningful to you - and your audience.

9. PRACTICING FOR OPTIMAL PERFORMANCE: After you have thoroughly learned your material, practice under performance conditions. Try to simulate every detail - the minor ones as well as the main ones.

PART THREE: Broadening Your Presentation Skills

10. USING THE PUBLIC SPEAKER’S TOOLBOX: Organize your presentation for maximum effectiveness. State a clear intention for your talk, establish your credentials, and make use of your presentation skills.

11. CREATING THE RIGHT IMPRESSION: Certain strategies can help you be more effective with your audience. Analyzing your audience provides a great deal of information that can improve their impression of you and your presentation.

12. USING HUMOR IN PUBLIC SPEAKING: When used correctly, humor can help you gain the audience’s acceptance and increase the likelihood you’ll be remembered in a good light. Used poorly, it can wreck your presentation. And when used inappropriately, it can even threaten your standing or your job.

13. INTERVIEWING SUCCESSFULLY: The keys to interviewing successfully for a new position are research, preparation, and practice. Take all three very seriously.

14. OVERCOMING SHYNESS: By practicing basic social skills and preparing for social interactions, you can manage the effects of shyness and learn to “sound good” in social situations.

Dr. Desberg is an emeritus professor at California Sate University in Dominguez Hills. Speaking Scared Sounding Good is his third book about stage fright. The other two were Controlling Stagefright : Presenting Yourself to Audiences from One to One Thousand (1988) and No More Butterflies : Overcoming Stagefright, Shyness, Interview Anxiety, & Fear of Public Speaking (1996). His latest funny book is Show Me the Funny.

Be your own Santa Claus - get these free holiday gifts right now

2011-11-29T05:43:00.000-08:00

Here are some zero-cost holiday gift suggestions.

Some of the downloadable manifestoes at the ChangeThis web site are about public speaking and presentations. Five examples to make us think are:

1. 15-1/2 Ideas to Make Your Presentation Go from Boring to Bravo by Kristin Arnold

2. Before You Open Your Mouth: The Keys to Great Public Speaking by Nick Morgan

3. Presenting to Small Audiences: Turn Off the Projector! by Andrew Abela

4. Being a Gifted Speaker Isn’t a Gift by Frances Cole Jones

5. Presentation Revolution: Changing the Way the World Does Presentations by Scott Schwertly

Last year Ivan Hernandez discussed 10 Remarkable ChangeThis Manifestoes You Should Read.

Via the Web we already have free “virtual subscriptions” to two magazines: Speaker from the National Speakers Association) and Toastmaster (from Toastmasters international). We can either view individual issues online or download .pdf files of them without being a member of either organization. The archive for Speaker goes back three years, while the archive for Toastmaster goes back to 2007 (but the new digital edition with keyword search only began in January 2011).

Finally, for a free textbook on public speaking, check out the ACA Open Knowledge Online Guide. I posted a description of it beginning with a phony ad in 2009.

This blog post was inspired by Andrew Dlugan’s November 21st post with his list of holiday gift ideas. Initially I was upset that he’d started on Christmas before the Thanksgiving holiday even was over (here in the US). Then I realized that from his Canadian perspective Thanksgiving was back on the second Monday of October, rather than the fourth Thursday of November.

The image is a Puck magazine cover from 1913.

Use a simple diagram to clasp an idea

2011-11-27T08:23:00.000-08:00

On November 27th Seth Godin blogged about what he called The Confusion of Logistics and Strategy Problem. He said that problem was so widespread that it even deserved a new acronym of CLASP, and defined it by claiming:

“You have a clasp when people criticize your new strategy because they don’t know how to execute it.”

A diagram instantly shows the difference between a strategy (big picture) and a tactic (logistics) used to make it happen.

I think that a five letter acronym including an A for And is appalling. What do you think?

Lessons on stage performance from singer-songwriter Livingston Taylor

2011-11-23T10:47:00.000-08:00

Earlier this year Livingston Taylor released the revised edition of his book on Stage Performance, which came from a class he teaches at the Berklee College of Music in Boston. You can look inside it at Amazon.com. He discusses how we should have a conversation with our audience. The July 29th issue of the Vineyard Gazette has an article which describes how he practices the Gentle Art of Audience Seduction.

In the first meeting of class (page 15 of the book) he teaches how to introduce yourself, and says you should:

"1. Walk onstage.
2. Face the crowd.
3. Find a spot where you’re comfortable and well lit.
4. Be still and see your audience.
5. Say your name. (This is the performance).
6. Be still and look at your audience. Make sure they received what you gave out.
7. Bow slightly.
8. Accept applause, if appropriate.
9. Leave the stage."

Livingston is a compelling speaker. Watch here to see how he interacts with some students.

There are more YouTube video clips from his summer lectures in 2005, 2006, and 2007, and a 2011 faculty interview.

I found the first edition of his book from 2000 (indexed under the subject of public speaking) at my public library, and read it from cover to cover.

One story about professionalism that impressed me appears on page 56 of the revised edition. He discussed arriving at a small theater in Sarasota, Florida before headlining a show. The glass front doors were smudged, so he started washed them. Two hours before the show the opening act walked right past him, without saying hello. Their image of a professional didn’t include a window washer. (On page 52 he also mentioned once cleaning the bathroom of a club, since he didn’t want his audience putting up with the dirt).

Using props as pointers

2011-11-22T19:34:00.000-08:00

Yesterday on her Eloquent Woman blog Denise Graveline ended a list of The all-in-one on gestures for public speaking: 12 great tips by asking:

“12. Who needs that pointer, when you brought two perfectly good ones into the room with you? Use your arms and hands instead.”

That’s true, but, as Nick Morgan said a couple years ago, the most important rule for success in public speaking is to have fun. Laser pointers are boring! Using appropriate props as pointers can be lots of fun.

For example, if you are a sports fan you may have a large foam hand with a giant finger as shown above.

There are lots of telescoping cylindrical objects that can be used. A traditional spyglass is one.

Before there were laser pointers there were pocket pointers. When we look closely at one, we can see that it just is the FM antenna from a portable radio.

If you are a photographer you can bring along a monopod (like a leg from a tripod). Similarly, you are a hiker, you can bring a trekking pole. In ether case, be careful not to poke a hole through the screen with that sharp tip.

If you are a police or security officer, just flip open your expandable baton. No one will try to heckle you! However, when you ask for questions don’t be surprised if there is no response.

The pointing finger and spyglass came from the Library of Congress. The Grady Sizemore foam hand and monopod came from Wikimedia Commons.

Thanksgiving and other after-dinner speeches

2011-11-20T12:54:00.000-08:00

You may already have been asked to speak after this holiday dinner. If so, now is the time to think and prepare. An after-dinner speech should both entertain and inform. It helps to have a memorable story about where or how the holiday was spent.

In 2005 my sister and brother-in law had Thanksgiving somewhere unusual. Ellen and Tony spent their holiday at the South Pole. They had a turkey dinner in the restaurant at the end of the world. She sent me a ball cap as a souvenir.

Another type of story teaches that we should be thankful for what we have, because things always could have been worse.

In 1972 I spent Thanksgiving in Wichita Falls, Texas. I was being trained as a medic at Sheppard Air Force Base. That morning I had a fever and was feeling really lousy, so I went to sick call. The medic who examined me said that I had finally gotten a disease that usually came in childhood. It might have been rubella (German measles). He gave me some Tylenol for my fever, and said, look, we don’t have tech school classes tomorrow, so go back to to your bunk and rest. You’ll be fine by Monday. I was, although I didn’t get to travel as I had planned.

How could things have been worse? A month earlier our whole squadron (and the one next to us) went through a day and a half long outbreak of food poisoning. Symptoms were nausea and vomiting.

For more ideas on after dinner speeches, look at this recent blog post by Carma Spence, and listen to this Communication Steroids podcast.

Images are covers from the Thanksgiving issues of Puck Magazine from 1905 and 1902.

How presenters waste your time with confusing graphics

2011-11-19T09:05:00.000-08:00

The Excel bar chart shown above plots some data from an October 26th Presentation Agency blog post from Sales Graphics titled survey data reveals how presenters spend their time. (Click on the chart for a larger, clearer version). We can easily see how the six categories rank, because they are listed in descending order.

Contrast that with the confusing graphic shown in the Presentation Agency blog post. It seems intended to impress rather than to explain. The six categories are wrapped in concentric rings like a bullseye target. The largest is on the outside, followed by the second, and the sixth. Then comes the third, fourth and fifth. We have to look at all six percentages and sort them to see their rank. We can’t just go clockwise or counterclockwise to see their order.

Now look at the inconsistent caption boxes. The first word in four out of six categories is shown in a bold font. The box with 40% has two of five icons (men) shown in bold, but the box with 20% also has two of five icons (stars) shown in bold, rather than just one. One paragraph in the blog post starts by saying that:

“A full 56% of survey takers said finding the latest version of slides and videos sucked up a lot of time...”

If that’s what you want to say, then please change how you group the data on the graphic to present it to us clearly and simply (as shown above). Now "Other" is the smallest category.

A November 8th Slidecoaching.com blog post discusses choosing the best charts for your data. I don’t think a fancy bullseye bar chart beats a plain one. What do you think?

The 99 (or 100) second presentation

2011-11-17T06:46:00.000-08:00

In previous posts I have discussed several recent brief presentation formats with times of 200 seconds (Presto), 300 seconds (Ignite) or 400 seconds (Pecha Kucha).

There also is an even briefer one - the 99-second presentation. I saw it mentioned in a recent blog comment by Scott Berkun, which led me back to his blog post from March 2004. The 99-second presentation was described in a 2003 ASTD presentation by Sivasailam Thiagarajan (Thiagi), who started using them back in 1988! Over in New Zealand Simon Park recently has been using them to select university tutors.

Does bad public speaking kill?

2011-11-15T12:55:00.000-08:00

On November 12th Nic Williams blogged about How to stop killing people with your public speeches. His main point was that speakers should think about whether they are wasting their audience’s time:

“Let’s do the math. If you give a speech to 200 people for 30 minutes you are consuming 100 hours of human life.

Giving an hour-long talk to a thousand people? That’s six weeks of human life devoted to your talk.

*gulp*!

Let’s assume 6 weeks of human life is at stake. It is not a loan and you cannot give it back. One hour after you finish speaking, you’ve used up 6 weeks of human life.

If you’re bad enough for long enough you kill a whole person.”

To avoid wasting time you should learn the craft of giving speeches. Nic recommends joining Toastmasters, but there are other options to consider.

What happens when we really do the math? Assume an average U.S. lifetime is 78.3 years. There are 365.25 days in a year. Each day is 24 hours. Multiplying those three numbers, a lifetime is 686,378 hours.

For a single one-hour long speech to waste as many hours as a whole life, we’d need an improbably large audience - one that only the Pope might get. (We might say that bad television kills though).

How about a college course involving lecturing to an audience of 500 freshmen, three hours per week for 20 weeks? That’s still only 30,000 hours. You’d have to do that about 23 times to waste a life, but probably would be fired before you did that much damage. A philosophy department might though.

So, saying that bad speeches kill is a silly exaggeration. Douglas Adams would have called it “a load of dingo’s kidneys.” Actually it’s even worse - because in the above discussion we have not used the correct units, which are man-hours, not just hours. I’ve previously discussed wasting time using the wrong units.

Let’s bury the idea that bad public speaking kills.

Great speech on leadership at the U.S. Air Force Academy

2011-11-12T06:03:00.000-08:00

On November 1, 2011 General Mark A. Welsh, III, who is Commander of U. S. Air Forces in Europe, spoke to the cadets for fifty minutes. He tells great stories about people who inspired him - including his son Matt and Major Marie Rossi.

I found it in this Veterans Day blog post by Grant McCracken.

Should presenters be nervous about the Twitter backchannel?

2011-11-11T10:43:00.000-08:00

Yes! On November 2nd Drew Neisser blogged at Fast Company about Giving Kick-Ass Presentations in the Age of Social Media. His seven points were:

1. Don’t panic if they aren’t looking at you.

2. Stifle the temptation to ask for a device moratorium.

3. If you aren’t nervous, you should be now.

4. If you don’t speak Twitterese, it’s time to learn it.

5. Congratulations! You may be speaking to millions you can’t see.

6. The reviews are in - in real time.

7. When all else fails, surprise the audience with honesty.

Even before I read his #3, I was inclined to be nervous about something new. After all, Twitter is like giving a heckler a large, digital megaphone. Some people will use it to yell: HEY! LOOK AT ME!

So far I haven’t presented at a conference that displayed a Twitter backchannel. Long ago I used to follow two unmoderated Usenet Newsgroups - sci.materials and sci.engr.metallurgy. The majority of users posting and commenting were intelligent and quite civil, but there also were a few loudmouthed jerks and trolls. I'd expect the same from Twitter.

Imagine what Abe Lincoln might have put up with if Twitter was around during the Gettysburg Address:

DrummerBoy61: 4score n7? Y not 87? LOL!

Kilrain20thMaine: Ha, ha! Stovepipe hat makes Abe look 2 tall.

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

OhioCpl27: His wife Mary Todd be crazy!

Bruce63: Abe Lincoln once turned to somebody and said, do you ever find yourself talking with the dead?

I’ve seen several blog posts that have discussed living with the backchannel. Ellen Finkelstein recently blogged on how to harness the back channel during your presentations. Last year Denise Graveline blogged about integrating Twitter in your public speaking: 14 ways. Olivia Mitchell blogged about how to manage the Twitter backchannel, and also provided a detailed publication as a 62-page Acrobat file discussing How to present with Twitter (and other backchannels).

The image of a rowing coach with a megaphone is from here. That last Tweet is the opening line from Bruce Cockburn’s song Postcards from Cambodia.

Overcoming the fear of public speaking

2011-11-09T06:28:00.000-08:00

How can we quit feeling like a deer caught in the headlights, and get comfortable in front of an audience?

In a blog post on November 7th Nick Morgan made the following five suggestions:

1. Redefine the fear as adrenaline, and therefore a good thing.

2. Rehearse, rehearse, rehearse. Rehearse a lot.

3. Breathe deeply, from the belly. Breathe slowly, and often.

4. Focus on the audience, not on yourself.

5. Focus on an emotion that you want to convey to the audience.

On October 17th Alex Rister gave ten similar suggestions:

1. Prepare.

2. Record your speech.

3. Appear more confident than you feel.

4. Be familiar with your introduction.

5. Practice mentally.

6. Practice out loud often.

7. Concentrate on the message, not on yourself.

8. Breathe deeply.

9. Channel adrenaline to positive outlets.

10. Accept some fear as normal.

She uses graphics well to emphasize her points. Alex added more advice on October 22nd.

The poster with deer came from here.

How many rehearsals should you do before giving a presentation?

2011-11-07T10:55:00.000-08:00

Or, what ratio of rehearsal time to presentation time is sufficient to push your speech up to excellent? I went looking for a specific number but instead found a huge range of answers.

When you don’t rehearse at all, you are likely to have a presentation disaster, as described by Nick Morgan.

Alan L. Stevens suggested that that one or two rehearsals are sufficient, since you want to sound fresh when you speak. (I think that’s a bit low, and just will create an unfortunate event rather than a complete disaster).

Pete Ryckman suggested at least five rehearsals, while David Murray (who edits Vital Speeches of the Day) suggested eight. Ruth Sherman said ten was conservative, and noted that Winston Churchill had used 60. Fred E. Miller also said 60 was a good rule of thumb, but as a minimum. Steve Siebold mentioned that once he and Bill Gove did 130 rehearsals.

Why is there such a huge range of ratios? How large is your audience, and how important is your presentation? What level of finish is appropriate? Siebold and Gove did 130 rehearsals for a 45-minute speech given in a hockey stadium to 7,000 distributors. Introducing a product also calls for a large number of rehearsals, since the presentation likely will wind up archived on video posted on the web. When the stakes are lower, five to ten rehearsals might be more appropriate.

How did the Anti-PowerPoint-Party do in elections for the Swiss parliament?

2011-11-05T06:58:00.000-07:00

Back in July I blogged about how Mathias Poehm’s Anti-PowerPoint-Party (APPP) wanted us to go back to using flipcharts. In August I suggested that interactive whiteboards would be better than flipcharts for replacing PowerPoint.

On August 16th the party produced a press release about having gotten on the ballot. Just before the elections the New York Times described how the Idea of ‘One Person One Party’ Makes for a Crowd in Switzerland. Another article elsewhere discussed how Fools and Pirates Compete for Election Glory.

Elections were held on October 23rd, and the APPP did not win even a single seat, not even in Zurich. Neither did the Pirates Party or the Fools Party.

The image of a wrecked Moissant airplane came from here.

What can Donald Duck teach us about public speaking?

2011-11-03T06:00:00.000-07:00

He’s a comically exaggerated, negative example to remind us that clear enunciation is important. Donald’s buccal speech is difficult to understand and sometimes can be completely misinterpreted.

In the 1988 film Who Framed Roger Rabbit there is a hilarious piano duel between Daffy Duck and Donald Duck containing the following dialogue:

Daffy: “Does anybody understand what this duck is saying? I’ve worked with a lot of wise-quackers, but you are despicable.”

Donald: “doggone, stubborn little... I’m gonna - waah”.

Daffy: “This is the last time I work with someone with a speech impediment!”

Some have claimed that instead of saying “little” Donald “dropped the N-bomb” on Daffy. Snopes said that claim of racism was false. However, Donald did throw Daffy inside a grand piano, and then dropped the lid on him.

This post was inspired by Andrew Dlugan’s recent one on What can MIckey Mouse teach you about public speaking? The image of Donald is from Wikimedia Commons.

Terrorists and snakes top list of Canadian fears

2011-10-31T06:14:00.000-07:00

The October 26th Vancouver Sun published a brief article describing an online survey done on August 23rd for the family history website Ancestry.ca and described in a press release intended to scare us for Halloween.

They mentioned heights, public speaking, and spiders, but didn’t provide specific percentages. The newspaper article just listed the top two percentages shown above; the press release contained none. Public speaking isn’t the number one fear up there in Canada.

In my last post I described how giving presentations isn’t the top fear of employees in the United States either. Boo!

Giving presentations isn’t the top fear of employees in the United States

2011-10-28T06:39:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, for Halloween, CareerBuilder released the results of a survey on what employees are most afraid of at work. It was done online by Harris Interactive in late August and early September. As shown above, layoffs were the greatest fear (36%), pay cuts were second (13%), and presenting in front of other people (9%) tied for third. (Click on the bar chart to see a larger, clearer view). Four times as many people feared layoffs as feared giving presentations. So much for speaking in public always being the number one fear!

The press release also included a list of scariest jobs, which were:

1. Bomb Squad Technician
2. High Rise Window Washer
3. Armed Forces
4. Miner
5. Police Officer
6. Alaskan Crab Fishing
7. Mortician
8. Firefighter
9. High School Teacher
10.Cemetery Worker
11. Exterminator
12. Stand-Up Comedian
13. Animal Control
14. Stunt Person
15. Politician

Happy Halloween!

Any Last Words?

2011-10-27T06:02:00.000-07:00

Last year there was a book by Robert K. Elder containing a collection of the Last Words of the Executed. (You can search inside it at amazon.com). That book describes perhaps the most macabre form of public speaking. It’s certainly one way to get scared for Halloween. Thirteen examples (with Wikipedia links where available) are:

“I am no more a witch than you are a wizard, and if you take away my life, God will give you blood to drink.”
Sarah Good, Salem, Massachusetts, July 19, 1692

“I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country.”
Nathan Hale, New York, September 22, 1776

“It’s in God’s hands now.”
Nat Turner, Virginia, November 11, 1831

“No, I am ready at any time; but do not keep me needlessly waiting.”
John Brown, Virginia, December 2, 1859

“Gentlemen, do you see this hand? Does it tremble? I never hurt a hair of that girl’s head."
Tom Dula, North Carolina, May 1, 1868

“I had a square trial. Everything the witnesses said was pretty much true. I felt at the time that I ought to have done it, and afterwards I felt I did wrong. I tell you it’s a hard thing when a man brings it on himself, but whisky did it.”
Isaiah Evans, Louisiana, May 10, 1878

“What time is it? I wish you’d hurry up. I want to get to hell in time for dinner.”
John Owens, Wyoming, March 5, 1886

“I killed the president because he was an enemy of the good people - of the working people. I am not sorry for my crime. I’m awfully sorry I could not see my father.”
Leon Frank Czolgosz, New York, October 29, 1901

“I have something to say, but not at this time.”
Grover Cleveland Redding, Illinois, June 24, 1921

“Make it snappy.”
Charles H. Simpson, California, July 13, 1931

“Gents, this is an educational project. You are about to witness the damaging effect electricity has on wood.”
Frederick Wood, New York, March 21, 1963

“I’d like you to give my love to my family and friends.”
Ted Bundy, Florida, January 24, 1989.

“You can be a king or a street sweeper, but everyone dances with the Grim Reaper.”
Robert Alton Harris, California, April 21, 1992. (This was paraphrased from a movie).

The image depicts the hanging of Jefferson Davis (which did not really happen).

Communicating clearly to nontechnical audiences - the grandmother test

2011-10-24T12:54:00.000-07:00

Albert Einstein reportedly once said that:

“You do not really understand something until you can explain it to your grandmother.”

In a blog post on October 19th titled "Tech Communication Tips" Matt Eventoff described how:

“I often ask professionals to explain a concept to me as if they were addressing an eighth grade class – I find this exercise works well to help a professional prepare a presentation to a non-tech crowd – this often generates stories and analogies that would otherwise have remained undiscovered.”

Here is an example from failure analysis. The ASM Materials Engineering Dictionary says that a striation is:

“A fatigue fracture feature, often observed in electron micrographs, that indicates the position of the crack front after each succeeding cycle of stress. The distance between striations indicates the advance of the crack front across that crystal during one stress cycle, and a line normal to the striations indicates the direction of local crack propagation.”

That definition is almost meaningless unless (as shown above) you already have seen a photo of some striations. (The scale marker in the lower right corner is 3 microns long, which is about 0.00012 inches).

I co-authored a paper for insurance adjusters that appeared in the April 1994 issue of Claims Magazine. It was titled: "Don’t Let Your Case Rust Away: evidence preservation vital of surfaces produced by fracture." We discussed striations with two analogies:

“Repeated cycles of loading can cause cracks to initiate and grow, a process called fatigue. The fatigue cracks will grow until the remaining cross-section can no longer carry the load, and fracture occurs.

In fatigue, the deformation only occurs locally and repeatedly at the tip of the growing crack. This repeated opening and closing of the crack tip forms microscopic features called striations. Striations are rows of parallel hills and valleys which appear similar to the surface of corduroy fabric, or a plowed field.”

The painting by Albert Anker and the photo by Jsemenak both are from Wikimedia Commons.

Getting worse with practice: blame Toastmasters, complacency, or perfectionism?

2011-10-22T11:19:00.000-07:00

On August 17th, at The Science Talent Project blog, Eric-Wubbo Lamejier posted on Teaching to the Test and the Terrible Toastmasters - or: when subgoals strike back. He described and then claimed he could explain:

“...the phenomenon of public speaking clubs that make people speak worse with practice.”

He said that he’d also observed and also was baffled by:

“...the phenomenon that quite some of the 'champion' speakers gave worse speeches than people giving their very first speech.”

I don’t think that is surprising at all. People come to Toastmasters for a variety of reasons. Some come mainly to get over their fear of public speaking, so their first speeches are not good. Others seek a place to improve their speaking and to practice their business presentations. One woman already had written three books. Predictably she gave a wonderful first speech. People arrive at Toastmasters with a wide variety of backgrounds. In the club I belonged to the age range was from about 25 to 75 and the education level ranged from high school to PhDs. (One former president even is a veterinarian with an MBA).

Dr. Lameijer concluded that the Achilles heel for Toastmasters was speech contests, particularly the judging process for them. He states that:

“...the uniform jurying process tends to keep people focusing on process goals (ability to use diverse body language) even if they have mastered those enough already, and should focus on outcome goals (such as inspiring or persuading people) instead. Without outcome goals to tweak the learning process, skills become ritualistic and detatched from the original goals.”

The Judge’s Guide for the International Speech Contest can be summarized as follows:

CONTENT (50%)

Speech Development - 20% (structure, organization, support material)

Effectiveness - 15% (achievement of purpose, interest, reception)

Speech Value - 15% (ideas, logic, original thought)

DELIVERY (30%)

Physical - 10% (appearance, body language, speaking area)

Voice - 10% (flexibility, volume)

Manner - 10% (directness, assurance, enthusiasm)

LANGUAGE (20%)

Appropriateness - 10% (to speech purpose and audience)

Correctness - 10% (grammar, pronunciation, word selection)

Note that half are about content - outcome goals, and not just process goals (delivery and language).

Eric’s description of how body language is judged in contests claims:

“Actually, one side effect is that, because people get points for having body language, contestants tend to use body language whether it is appropriate or not; the same goes for vocal variety.”

This is nonsense, because the Judge’s Guide calls for effective body language and says that:

“Body language should support points through gestures, expressions, and body positioning.”

Speech contests are a pleasant, but minor part of Toastmasters. They occupy just two club meetings per year. For a club meeting twice a month there are 24 meetings per year, so only 8% are contests. I belonged to a club that met weekly, so only 4% of the meetings were for contests. That doesn’t seem like enough to account for people getting worse with practice.

I think that either complacency or perfectionism can account for some people getting worse with practice. Three years ago Chris Elliott blogged on Are You Getting Worse as a Speaker? He concluded:

“....that if you have stopped practicing as much, been resting on your laurels, and are getting too comfortable then you are getting worse.”

Earlier this year John Zimmer blogged about how (as shown above) Perfect Public Speaking is an Asymptote. All it really takes to get worse with practice is an obsessive level of perfectionism. It is futile to seek seek absolute perfection rather than excellence. Morton C. Orman discussed this problem in How to Conquer Public Speaking Fear, one of the most popular web articles on this type of anxiety. He noted that:

“....If you have the wrong focus (i.e., purpose), if you try to do too much, if you want everyone to applaud your every word, if you fear something bad might happen or you might make a minor mistake, then you can easily drive yourself crazy trying to overprepare your talk. In these instances, the more effort you put in, the worse you probably will do.”

This post is one of three dozen about Toastmasters. You can see them all here. Toastmasters celebrated its 87th anniversary today.

Speechwriting always needs editing

2011-10-21T06:47:00.000-07:00

Perhaps the first line in that famous soliloquy from Hamlet really began like the parody of Sylvester Stallone once used by Robin Williams in a comedy routine. It’s not quite right.

In 1995 Anne Lamott wrote a wonderful book called Bird By Bird: some instructions on writing and life. One widely reproduced essay in it describes how great writing begins with terrible first drafts. She says the first draft is the down draft - where you just get the words out. The second draft is the up draft - where you fix it up. The third draft is the dental draft -where you check each tooth to see if it has cavities.

Back when he was a teenager Josh Ritter’s father taught him the importance of editing. Josh went on to a career as a singer-songwriter (and novelist). Last Saturday he wrote about that experience. He said that in a song:

“I had to know what I was trying to say and then, word after word, line after line, make sure the thing read right, sang right, and just felt right.”

Sometimes Josh’s editing continued even after a song was recorded. The second verse of Harrisburg (recorded in 2002) says that Romero:

“Could have stayed somewhere but the train tracks kept going

And it seems like they always left soon

And the wolves that he ran with they moaned low and painful

Sang sad misereres to the moon”

But, what is a miserere? It’s a type of lament. Josh revised the last line to the less obscure:

“sang their sad lullabies at the moon”

You can hear a longer live version from May 8, 2010. It also contains an interlude with a verse from Chris Isaak’s 1991 hit song Wicked Game, performed by bassist Zach Hickman. Another live version contains a verse from Bruce Springsteen’s song State Trooper.

Where talk is not cheap

2011-10-17T12:02:00.000-07:00

A week ago the Washington Post ran a story titled At the Washington Speakers Bureau, Talk Isn’t Cheap. It discussed how a former official can have another lucrative career on the public speaking circuit. That story struck me as an example of the well-known Matthew Effect (25:29) that:

“For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.”

No one said that life was fair. The image came from Wikimedia Commons.

What's the difference between a fear and a phobia?

2011-10-11T14:50:00.000-07:00

A fear may mean that something upsets you slightly, while a phobia means that it terrifies you (as shown above). A phobia is a fear with a capital F. Fear of public speaking is a social fear. Speech anxiety is a type of social phobia.

One simple way to think about the difference is just to ask how much money you would be willing to pay to avoid giving a speech. Would it be:

A. $ 0.10

B. $ 100

C. $ 100,000

D. $ 100,000,000

E. $ 100,000,000,000

If you answered A or B, then you just have a fear. If you answered E, the hundred-billion-dollar ransom once demanded by Dr. Evil in an Austin Powers movie, then you definitely have a phobia.

A detailed clinical definition for a social phobia can be found on page 411 of the massive Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Metal Disorders (4th edition, 1994), usually abbreviated as the DSM-IV, which begins by stating that:

“The essential feature of Social Phobia is a marked and persistent fear of social or performance situations in which embarrassment may occur (Criterion A). Exposure to the social or performance situation almost invariably provokes an immediate anxiety response (Criterion B). This response may take the form of a situationally bound or situationally disposed Panic Attack (see p. 394). Although adolescents and adults with this disorder recognize that their fear is excessive or unreasonable (Criterion C), this may not be the case with children. Most often, the social or performance situation is avoided, although it is sometimes endured with dread (Criterion D). The diagnosis is appropriate only if the avoidance, fear, or anxious anticipation of encountering the social or performance situation interferes significantly with the person’s daily routine, occupational functioning, or social life, or if the person is markedly distressed about having the phobia (Criterion E)....”

A few surveys have looked at how common both social fears and social phobias are. There was an article on “Social Fears and Social Phobia in the United States: Results from the National Comorbidity Study Replication” by A. M. Ruscio et al. You can read it here.

The bar chart shown above (click on it to enlarge) shows that about 20% of adults in the US fear public speaking, while about half that, or 10% have a phobia. That 10% is much smaller than some of the nonsense you will find online, like at SpeakFreaks which instead claims that:

"Speech Anxiety is believed to be the single most common phobia affecting as much as 75% of the population, and as you have probably already heard, the fear is ranked higher than death!"

What is a communication pyramid?

2011-10-02T08:40:00.000-07:00

It is a graphical device for describing how some elements of communication relate. What those elements are (and how many) varies depending on who is building the pyramid, which may be either upright or inverted.

For example, last month Fred E. Miller blogged about one with three levels. He didn’t mention that these oft-repeated. and rather mythical, percentages are from Albert Mehrabian. Calling them a pyramid is putting an old whine in a new bottle. On his web site Mehrabian cautioned that they are not universal, and to:

“...Please note that this and other equations regarding relative importance of verbal and nonverbal messages were derived from experiments dealing with communications of feelings and attitudes (i.e., like-dislike). Unless a communicator is talking about their feelings or attitudes, these equations are not applicable....”

In her book Point, Click & Wow! Claudyne Wilder described another type of Communication Pyramid:

“The inverted pyramid depicts four levels of communication, from the most basic form of conveying data to the highest level of suggesting its meaning for the future by sharing a vision.”

There was a seven-level upright pyramid described in a magazine article titled "Don’t Misconstrue Communication Cues: Understanding MISCUES can help reduce widespread and expensive miscommunication." You can read the text here or here.

In March MIchael J. Maher blogged about a different seven-level pyramid. Also, Kessels & Smits have described another three-level pyramid.

So, there are lots of pyramids other than the great one at Giza.

Rehearse your speech until you’re at least oyfol

2011-09-27T07:12:00.000-07:00

On September 12th C. McNair Wilson blogged at Dynamic Communication Workshops about becoming an oyful speaker. He made up oyful a few years ago. It’s an acronym meaning On Your Feet Out Loud. You’re not rehearsing effectively if you aren’t oyfol.

Mr. Wilson’s acronym made me laugh because oyfol sounds almost like awful, and the Merriam-Webster dictionary defines Oy as a Yiddish word used to express exasperation or dismay. Oy is short for the phrase oy vey.

Once you get on your feet and rehearse your speech out loud, you can begin to really improve it. I’ve discussed more details of how you should rehearse back in 2008.

The image of a speaker is from Wikimedia Commons.

Social fears in learning situations: a survey of students at the University of the West of England

2011-09-26T11:45:00.000-07:00

In February 2009 Phil Topham reported on Feeling stupid: A survey of university students’ experience of social anxiety in learning situations. A sample of 300 students were asked which of nine learning experiences caused them anxiety, embarrassment or inhibition: never, occasionally, or frequently. Those experiences were:

A. Presentations
B. Seminars
C. Group project work
D. Work experience/placement
E. Practical sessions
F. Talking to staff
G. Lectures
H. Using shared IT facilities
I. Using the library

Main results are shown below in three bar charts. Click on them to see larger, clearer versions.

Most students never experienced anxiety about using the library (57%) or shared IT facilities (54% ). Also, about 41% never experienced anxiety about lectures.

Over half of the students occasionally experienced anxiety about talking to staff, and in practical sessions or group project work.

Most students frequently experienced anxiety about presentations (83%). About half as many (42%) were anxious about seminars. Only about 8% frequently experienced anxiety about using the library or shared IT facilities.

How did they manage anxiety from these learning experiences? Not very effectively, as shown above. Many adapted safety behaviors (75%) or coping strategies (65%). About the same amount tried avoidance (37%) as the obvious of prepare/practice (35%). Almost a third tied to minimize attention to them by location (34%) or behavior (28%) - while 33% tried to completely avoid the event.

As shown above, most sought help for anxiety from friends (80%) or family (52%), while less than 20% sought help from tutors or lecturers (14%), counseling service (13%) or their general practice physician (13%).

Should you give a knockout eulogy?

2011-09-24T13:09:00.000-07:00

On September 4th Diane DiResta blogged about How to Give a Knockout Eulogy. She actually just gave one excellent example. Her blog is titled Knockout Presentations, so naturally she used knockout in her title. When I hear the word knockout, I picture an unconscious, downed boxer. So, for me, her title was almost across the line between tasteful and tasteless.

What would be a truly tasteless title? How about Eulogies that Knock ‘em Dead? That would be a cynical way for funeral directors to grow their business. (Martin John Yate wrote a popular series of books on job search topics starting with Resumes That Knock ‘em Dead, and Cover Letters That Knock ‘em Dead. Eventually he got around to using that exaggerated phrase for Knock ‘em Dead Business Presentations.)

There really doesn’t seem to be a whole book written for dummies just on eulogies. However, there are some useful short articles about how to give a eulogy by Marie Wallace, Jim Anderson, and Lisa B. Marshall.

Show and tell

2011-09-23T06:34:00.000-07:00

On Tuesday I went to the 15th annual Fruit Field Day held by the University of Idaho’s Parma Research and Extension Center. This year it was held at their orchard and vineyard. Hundreds of people showed up to hear Dr. Essi Fallashi, the director, speak about their results.

Essie didn’t just tell us. Instead he showed us. He held up samples of some varieties and discussed their advantages - how they provided more yield per acre, could be stored longer, etc.

There were tables full of samples of peaches, pears, nectarines, apples, plums, grapes, almonds, walnuts, etc. You could see, touch, smell, and taste them. Then you could walk over and watch and listen to descriptions of how they were grown.

It’s easy to forget how powerful demonstrations of products and techniques can be. They aren’t easy to do, but are very effective.

Read the manual

2011-09-21T07:24:00.000-07:00

RTFM is a technical acronym. Stated politely it means to “read the fraking manual.” I saw a warning label with that basic message yesterday. It was on a battery powered manlift for use in orchards that was displayed at the Fruit Field Day over in Parma, Idaho. (A stepladder might seem cheaper, until you consider that workers spend about 30% of their time climbing up and down rather than doing useful work).

Here is the Untrained Operator Hazard warning label. What does this have to do with public speaking? Well, on Monday Dave Paradi reported
preliminary results from his biennial survey of what annoys audiences about PowerPoint presentations.

The table shows three top answers for his 2011 survey, and his two previous surveys in 2007 and 2009. With one exception, percentages reporting these problems have increased rather than decreased. That means that people aren’t bothering to read up on how to use PowerPoint effectively, although Dave provides lots of advice on how to do so.

Misunderstood jargon can put you in harm’s way

2011-09-17T09:41:00.000-07:00

In public speaking we must think about communicating clearly to our audience. That includes avoiding jargon.

Back in college I heard a very impressive story about the consequences of being misunderstood. The office manager for an engineering department described to me what had happened to her husband during World War II.

He was an experienced lawyer before enlisting in the US Army. So, he’d applied to use his knowledge of the law in the Judge Advocate General’s Corps. Instead he wound up in the infantry - eventually leading a rifle company all the way across France and into Germany.

At the end on the war he finally had time to track down what happened to his application form. It turned out that he'd written down that he had "practiced law.” The first clerk who read that jargon phrase describing his qualifications thought it meant he hadn't been a real lawyer - he had just practiced being one. His application never got sent where it should have gone. Instead of a quiet headquarters position, he’d wound up being sent in combat.

The image came from the Library of Congress.

Should listening to a speech be more like eating a hot dog, or driving down a road?

2011-09-15T06:14:00.000-07:00

Which metaphor we choose determines how we regard normal features of spoken language like ah, um, and er.

If we choose the prescriptive, hot dog metaphor, then those are “filler” words. They’re ugly, evil and disgusting. They should be ruthlessly eliminated! Nobody wants a hot dog with filler - we’d all prefer a sausage with “all meat.”

If we choose the descriptive, driving metaphor, then those just are “filled pauses,” which like filled potholes, perhaps aren’t any worse than empty potholes (pauses).

The first viewpoint is common in public speaking textbooks. For example, in discussing pauses on page 302 of the 8th (2004) edition of Stephen E. Lucas’s The Art of Public Speaking he proclaims that:

“Most important, do not fill the silence with ‘uh,’ ‘er,’ or ‘um,’ These vocalized pauses, as they are called, are always annoying, and they can be devastating. Not only do they create negative perceptions about a speaker’s intelligence, but they often make a speaker appear deceptive.”

The second viewpoint began to get widely noticed after Michael Erard wrote an article in the January 3, 2004 issue of the New York Times titled Just like er words not um throwaways. Then, in 2007, he published a book titled Um - slips, stumbles, and verbal blunders, and what they mean. This July in Slate he added An Uh, Er, Um Essay in praise of verbal stumbles. Mr. Erard has an MA in linguistics, and linguists tend to be descriptive, not prescriptive.

Erard’s latest essay prompted a long (over 1600 word) rant by Marsha Hunter on August 16th asking Is Um an Honored Part of Speech? She claimed it was not, and pointed out that it doesn’t appear in scripted (written) speech - novels, plays, or films. She further claimed:

“....People do speak without saying um, and we’ve all heard them: politicians, teachers, professors, lecturers of every stripe, talking heads, our friends, perhaps even you, esteemed reader. A fair percentage of speakers express themselves fluently and smoothly with no ums whatsoever....”

Should filled pauses be eliminated, or just reduced to some acceptable level? Some speech coaches acknowledge that having a few is not fatal. In a blog post on September 12th Simon Raybould said that:

“It’s not about how many times the presenter does, or doesn’t use a particular filler word – if it’s not a problem to the audience.”

What level is unacceptable? On page 54 of her book The Theory That Would Not Die (2011) Sharon Bertsch McGrayne noted that the renowned Cambridge University professor Harold Jeffreys (reportedly an appalling lecturer) was once counted mumbling er 71 times in 5 minutes (14.2 per minute). An article by William H. Stevenson, III in the February 2011 Toastmaster on Cutting Out Filler Words pointed out that Caroline Kennedy had been widely criticized when she used 65 fillers in 5 minutes (13 per minute). A 2008 web article by Felicia Slattery began with a client’s comment that four or five within a minute was too many.

Conversely, what level is acceptable? In a comment on Marsha Hunter’s post I pointed out that professors certainly do use fillers (as was noted by Erard in his 2004 article). Twenty years ago Schacter, Christenfeld, Ravina, and Bilious examined how professors at Columbia University really lectured, and they found one to six ums per minute. See “Speech Disfluency and the Structure of Knowledge’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Volume 60, page 362, 1991. Google the title as a phrase, and you’ll find a free .pdf to download.

The bar chart shows Schacter et al’s results for how frequently professors said uh during introductory lectures (blue) and interviews (pink). (Click on it for a larger, clearer version). During lectures the rate ranged from 1.0 to 6.5 per minute, and depended on the department. During interviews (conversation) it was higher, and ranged from 4.4 to 5.8 per minute.

I think that a rate of 2 filler words per minute would be acceptable. What do you think?

The hot dog and pothole images are from Wikimedia.

Nervous gestures can irritate your audience

2011-09-14T07:48:00.000-07:00

In a blog post on September 11th Joe Pops related how he was distracted by people who jingle their pocket change during conversations or public speaking. It reminded him of the song Jingle Jangle Jingle, about cowboy spurs. Those gestures are unconscious, so the best way to spot them is to videotape yourself and then watch. Once you see what they are, you can take steps to remove them. For example, change can easily be corralled with an inexpensive coin holder as shown above.

Some people expertly twirl pencils, pens, or laser pointers. Perhaps back in high school they were drum majors or majorettes in marching bands.

My first job was in a research lab. They required wearing safety glasses and covered my prescription ones under their vision plan. Unfortunately the plastic frames they provided had nonadjustable nose pieces, as shown above on a woman chemist. They didn’t really fit me. Although I tried adding foam pads, the glasses still constantly slid down. So, I unconsciously kept pushing my glasses up. That gesture continued for several years after I had switched to wire rim glasses with adjustable nose pieces that didn’t slip.

I’ve discussed more gestures in a previous post back in 2009.

The image of baton twirling came from the Library of Congress.

Social and specific fears in young Israeli soldiers

2011-09-12T06:23:00.000-07:00

In my continuing quest for surveys including the fear of public speaking, I tried widening the search to include the term “social phobia.” I found two articles with data about a sample of Israeli soldiers. They were 850 students (535 men and 315 women) in either the Mechanics School or the Military Medicine School. Those in the sample had an average age of 19 years, and an average of 12 years of education. The first article is “Social phobia symptoms: prevalence, sociodemographic correlates, and overlap with specific phobia symptoms.” You can read the abstract here.

As shown above, the article reports results on severe anxiety for all 24 items in a Hebrew language version of the Liebowitz Social Anxiety Scale. Click on the chart for a more legible version. The category including giving a talk in front of an audience was feared by the most people, 14.2%, followed by giving a report to a group, with 13.2%. Trying to pick up someone was third, at 11.2%. Dating is scary!

In their discussion they pointed out that the sample was not quite like general public in that age group. Not all Israelis are conscripted, and anxious females tend to wind up as clerks. Nevertheless, the sample is similar in age and education to the surveys of US, Swedish, and Indian college students I have discussed previously.

The second article is “Prevalence of self-reported specific phobia symptoms in an Israeli sample of young conscripts.” You can read the abstract here. Animals were feared by the most people, followed by a cluster of four fears held by fairly similar percentages (15.8 to 18%): heights, being alone, injury, and closed places. Last was a cluster of three fears held by 6.3 to 8.2%: storms, flying, and water.

The survey of US college students by Seim and Spates had separate percentages for specific fears of spiders, snakes, rats, and insects, while the Israeli survey combined them under animals.

Public speaking to SMERFs

2011-09-10T08:29:00.000-07:00

No, not the cute, little, blue, animated characters that Neil Patrick Harris dealt with in The Smurfs movie.

SMERF is an acronym used to describe a market segment of the meetings business that consists of Social, Military, Education, Religious, and Fraternal nonprofit groups. They’re price-sensitive and typically fill slow dates (possibly weekends) in the off season. Obviously they need lodging, food, and drinks. Less obviously they may need a speaker. If you want to get paid to speak, they are one place you could start.

A Toastmasters District Conference is one example of a SMERF meeting. The 2010 District 15 Spring Conference I attended in Boise began on Friday afternoon, and ended on Saturday night.

You can find out about SMERFs both in the quarterly SMERF Meetings Journal and the monthly Small Market Meetings. The February 2010 issue of the latter discussed how In rocky times the SMERF market remains reliable. They also had two articles about the military - Military reunions find many options, and Military reunions - all hands on deck. The SMERF Meetings Journal had articles about Choosing the right speaker and Motivational speakers who deliver for less. Similarly, on September 8th In his Overnight Sensation blog, James Feudo discussed How to Hire a Toastmaster for a Speech.

How else can you find out about this market near you? Contact Convention & Visitors Bureaus, hotels (ask for the SMERF Group Meetings Manager), and meetings planners. Be aware that some groups rotate meeting locations on a regular schedule, so where they were last year may not be where they will be next year. (The location for the Toastmasters District 15 Conference moved through their five Divisions, typically between Boise, Salt Lake City, and Pocatello or Idaho Falls).

The image of smurf cyclists came from Wikimedia.

Motivational speech and Explosions in the Sky

2011-09-08T08:47:00.000-07:00

It’s not much of a philosophy, but what did you expect from a sign for a do-it-yourself car wash?

One of the better motivational speeches in a film can be found here in the 2004 high-school football one, Friday Night Lights. At half time, Coach Gary Gaines (Billy Bob Thornton) preaches:

“It’s real simple. You got two more quarters, and that’s it. Now, most of you have been playing this game for ten years, and you’ve got two more quarters. And, after that, most of you will never play this game again for as long as you live. And y’all have known me for a while, and for a long time now you’ve been hearing me talk about being perfect.

Well, I want you to understand something. To me, being perfect is not about that scoreboard out there. It’s not about winning. It’s about you, and your relationship to yourself, and your family, and your friends.

Being perfect is about being able to look your friends in the eye, and know that you didn’t let them down, because you told them the truth. And that truth is that you did everything that you could - there wasn’t one more thing that you could have done.

Can you live in that moment, as best you can, with clear eyes and love in your heart? With joy in your heart. If you can do that, gentlemen, then you’re perfect.

I want you to take a moment, and I want you to look each other in the eyes. I want you to put each other in your hearts forever, because forever is about to happen here - in just a few minutes.

I want you to close your eyes and I want you to think about Boobie Miles, who is your brother. And he would die to be out there on that field with you tonight, and I want you to put that in your hearts. Boys, my heart is full. My heart’s full. Ivory? (Ivory leads them in reciting the Lord’s Prayer)”

Notice that the wistful song playing in the background is Your Hand in Mine by the band Explosions in the Sky. That song originally was on their 2003 album, The Earth is Not a Cold Dead Place, and you can listen to it here. Then in 2004 they did the soundtrack for Friday Night Lights. There are three different versions: a long one, a shorter one with strings (my favorite), and a brief (goodbye) one.

Recently Explosions in the Sky got some more unintended fame from another sign on a marquee. They will appear in Boise on September 11th. So, back in August, the Egyptian Theater downtown quite logically put their name up as:

“EXPLOSIONS IN THE SKY CONCERT SEPT 11”

Press in New York City called it poorly timed. Actually the band picked that name way back in 1999. In fall 2001 they had already gotten hassled. Well, eveything is somewhere, and on September 11th they’re going to be right here (not in New York City). By the way, there also is a song called Memorial on their 2003 album.

There always will be an audience for hearing new things

2011-09-06T16:40:00.000-07:00

I have gradually been reading Cort Conley’s 1982 historical book, Idaho for the Curious - A Guide. On page 312 he quotes from a 1908 request published in a small town weekly newspaper, the Nezperce Herald:

“This paper is always glad to get the news.

If you are dead or about to commit suicide, or if you have been arrested lately and want to bring the matter to the attention of the people; if you have eloped with another man’s wife, if you are going away or coming back; if you or your wife or children or any of your relations have a party, delirium tremens, bone erisipelas, scarlet fever, money left you, a call to preach, smallpox, an idea, or anything of the sort, tell us about it.

We must have news.”

Back then new things were communicated mostly via speeches or in the newspaper. Now we have many other tools, but a hunger for news remains.

The image of an audience for a talk by Richard Stallman in 2009 is from Wikimedia Commons.

Secret life of pronouns, articles, conjunctions, and prepositions

2011-09-05T08:01:00.000-07:00

One surprise about how we use language comes when we look at our frequency of word use. I just saw a table in an article by the psychologist James W. Pennebaker based on his new book, The Secret Life of Pronouns. His Top Twenty words list is shown above. (Click on it for a larger, clearer version).

It only has pronouns, articles, conjunctions, prepositions, and verbs. (I have color coded them). There are no nouns, adjectives, or adverbs. The most common verb, is, doesn’t even make it into the Top Ten. Together the Top Ten make up slightly more than a fifth (21.4%) of what we write or say, while the Top Twenty make up almost thirty percent (29.1%.).

He notes that these “function” words are what determines style. They have a supporting role as background for our other content words.

Survey shows people fear public speaking more than death and zombies

2011-09-02T09:53:00.000-07:00

In April an online survey about fears was done, and then published in the June issue of Magic Numbers magazine. Between April 6th and April 8th they surveyed 4409 users of iPhone 4 (39%), iPhone 3G(31%), iPod Touch (18%) and iPad (12%). Their sample was mostly men (77%) with relatively few women (23%). They came mostly from Europe (63%), with about a third (31%) from North America, and only 6% from the rest of the world.

Results are shown above in a bar chart. (Click on it to see a larger, clearer version). I have ranked the fears in decreasing order for women. The largest percent of them feared insects, followed by a tie between public speaking and heights or depths. Death or the dead came in third, followed by dentists or medical procedures. The largest percent of men feared heights or depths, followed by public speaking, insects, death or the dead, and dentists or medical procedures.

In that endlessly cited 1973 Bruskin survey, public speaking was fear #1 (40.6%), while death was #7 (18.7%). In the 1993 Bruskin-Goldring survey, speaking before a group was #1 (45%), while death was #5 (31%).

Adding the dead (presumably zombies, the walking dead) to the question raised its relative ranking versus public speaking. Bloodthirsty zombies have been getting more popular in films ever since the 1968 release of Night of the Living Dead.

York College professionalism survey shows students don’t realize how important employers think communication skills are

2011-08-28T11:57:00.000-07:00

Back on October 21, 2010 the Center for Professional Excellence (CPE) at York College posted a press release with a link to some preliminary results from their 2010 survey on Professionalism in the Workplace. More recently the York College CPE posted the detailed results from their 2010 survey on Professionalism in the Workplace as a 130 page Acrobat .pdf document at the bottom of a web page describing the previous 2009 survey.

In their 2010 survey they asked both 430 employers and 404 students about qualities that best describe a professional, qualities that describe being unprofessional, important qualities in professionalism, and the extent to which those qualities were found in employees. In this post I’m going to highlight some of their results.

Qualities that best describe a professional (page 41) are shown above, ranked in the order of importance chosen by employers (dark green bars). (Click on the chart for a larger, clearer version). Communication skills were most important to them, but only were ranked fifth by students (light green bars). Students thought that interpersonal skills, time management, appearance, and work ethic were more important than communication.

Qualities that describe being unprofessional (page 43) are shown above, again ranked in the order of importance chosen by employers (red bars). Poor work ethic was most important to both them, and by students (pink bars). 17.4% of student mentioned poor grammar/communications skills, while 36.2% of employers did. It was ranked third by employers, but fifth by students.

Nineteen important qualities in professionalism were ranked on a scale from one to five by both employers and students, where 1 means not important and 5 means very important. Results (starting on page 47) are shown above. Employers and students generally provided similar rankings.

The extent to which those same 19 qualities were found in employees also were ranked on a scale from one to five by both employers and students, where 1 means very rare and 5 means very common. Results for employers (starting on page 51) are shown above in dark orange, and compared with the qualities ranked as important, shown in dark blue. With the lone exception of concern for opportunities for advancement, there was a significant gap between important qualities and the extent to which they were found.

Results for extent to which qualities were found by students are shown above in light orange, and compared with the qualities ranked as important, shown in light blue. Again, with the lone exception of concern for opportunities for advancement, there was a significant gap between important qualities and the extent to which they were found.

The York College survey is more complete than the NACE Job Outlook Survey I blogged about almost three months ago, since it includes perceptions by both employers and students.

Selection bias

2011-08-26T07:08:00.000-07:00

If you’re a coach or trainer, you likely will encounter many people who are extremely nervous about public speaking, and want to be less nervous. Also, you will encounter non-nervous people who greatly enjoy speaking, and seek to improve from good to great. You will not encounter slightly nervous people, who won’t bother to ask for help. Based on that nonrandom sample from the general population, you may be tempted to incorrectly conclude that most people have a phobia about public speaking. (Only about 10% of U.S. adults have a phobia). Selection bias is a problem for all professionals, and it will distort how you see the world.

When I was a medic in the Air Force Reserve in the early 1970s, we did routine flight physicals, each of which included a 12-lead electrocardiogram (EKG). We used a special die to trim 3” samples from those 12 strip charts, and mounted each set on a self-adhesive form. A wise old man, Dr. Richard V. Lynch, was commander of our clinic at the Greater Pittsburgh Airport.

Each afternoon Colonel Lynch would eagerly pounce on that stack of EKG forms and go through them with a fine-tooth comb. He even replotted them as vectorcardiograms. Occasionally he’d frown, mark one of the forms “apparent extreme bradycardia” and tell us to please rerun it. That meant we’d accidentally flipped the mode lever on the machine one notch too far, and ran it at double speed (50 mm/sec) rather than normal speed (25 mm/sec).

Dr. Lynch also was professor of cardiology at the West Virginia University medical school. He had realized that if a specialist doesn’t do something about it, he mainly will see referrals where another physician first looked at the patient, ran an EKG, and noticed there was something very wrong. His diagnostic skills gradually will deteriorate. He knew the way to avoid that problem was by looking at a sample of healthy people every month. Those flight physicals were his reality check for staying sharp.

Ten outstanding podcasts from the book Trust Me: Four Steps to Authenticity and Charisma

2011-08-25T06:25:00.000-07:00

Starting last month Nick Morgan did another series of podcasts about public speaking based on his 2009 book Trust Me: Four Steps to Authenticity and Charisma. In it he talks about being open, being connected, being passionate, and listening. Here are the links:

July 20th: How to use the power of your unconscious mind (3 minutes)

July 21st: Why you need authenticity and charisma (3 minutes)

July 25th: How to communicate powerfully (5 minutes)

July 27th: Why the debt limit talks are doomed - a rhetorical analysis (6 minutes)

August 1st: Why you need to be open - and how to do it (5 minutes)

August 3rd: How to connect better with the people around you (4 minutes)

August 10th: How to use body language to connect powerfully with other people (7 minutes)

August 15th: Becoming a passionate communicator (5 minutes)

August 17th: Finding passion in your voice and gestures (4 minutes)

August 22nd: In praise of listening (5 minutes)

Listening to the whole series will take less than fifty minutes, and is time well spent. You can look here to find an image of the four spaces discussed in his August 10th podcast.

The image of Jimmy Carter campaigning came from the Library of Congress.

Would you like to order the Type-A steering wheel?

2011-08-23T08:16:00.000-07:00

While driving in Boise recently, I was startled to see the irritated driver of the SUV in front of me use the center, left-turn-only lane to pass the car in front of him. That car only was going the marked 30 mile per hour speed limit. The incident got me musing about whether vehicle manufacturers are missing a potentially profitable marketing niche, as follows.

Once upon a time a customer (let’s call him Rupert) was considering ordering a Ferrari. He was discussing various options with his dealer.

Salesman: “Would you like the Type-A or the Type-B steering wheel?”

Rupert: “What does the Type-A wheel look like?”

Salesman: “It has a giant, specially-marked, blue horn button in the middle. The horn keeps on blowing unless you hold the button down.”

Rupert: “What’s the Type-B steering wheel like?”

Salesman: “It’s the one for more normal people!”

Please slow down, and lighten up. (The original image of a steering wheel came from here).

Fear of speaking while black - preliminary results from the NSAL

2011-08-22T06:29:00.000-07:00

110 years ago, in Up from Slavery: An Autobiography, Booker T. Washington said that:

“....People often ask me if I feel nervous before speaking, or else they suggest that, since I speak so often, they suppose that I get used to it. In answer to this question I have to say that I always suffer intensely from nervousness before speaking. More than once, just before I was to make an important address, this nervous strain has been so great that I have resolved never again to speak in public. I not only feel nervous before speaking, but after I have finished I usually feel a sense of regret, because it seems to me as if I had left out of my address the main thing and the best thing that I had meant to say.”

Is there any recent information about how a representative sample of African Americans feel about public speaking and other fears? Yes, although it has not yet been analyzed in detail or published in a magazine article. Ten years ago a mental health study called the National Survey of American Life (NSAL) began, led by professor James S. Jackson. The NSAL surveyed a large sample of African Americans and Afro-Caribbeans. Raw data from the NSAL are posted on the Collaborative Psychiatric Epidemiology Surveys (CPES) web site. The CPES also includes another study of minorities, the National Latino and Asian American Survey (NLAAS).

The bar chart shown above ranks eight fears from screening questions in the NSAL - six specific fears SC27A through 27F, SC29A (public speaking) and SC30 (crowds). Point to and click on the chart to see a larger, clearer version. For most questions, about 5890 people in the sample provided yes or no answers. (Only about 3870 answered SC29A). Animals or bugs were feared by the the most people, followed by heights, and giving a speech or speaking in class.

Another bar chart compares the NSAL results with those for the general US public found in the National Comorbidity Survey Replication (NCSR), which I discussed in a previous post. The two biggest differences between the NSAL and the NCSR results are for giving a speech or speaking in class (the number one fear), and for flying (the number eight fear). In the NCSR 10.2% more feared giving a speech or speaking in class than in the NSAL. Conversely, 8.9% less in the NCSR feared flying than in the NSAL. These comparisons are interesting, but preliminary. Eventually psychologists and psychiatrists will do more detailed analyses on this subject and data.

There already have been two magazine articles in the Journal of Anxiety Disorders based on data from the NSAL. In 2009 J. A. Himle et al discussed the prevalence of generalized anxiety disorder, panic disorder, social anxiety, and post traumatic stress disorder in “Anxiety disorders among African Americans, Blacks of Caribbean Descent and Non-Hispanic Whites in the United States.” In 2011 J. A. Soto et al discussed “The relationship between perceived discrimination and Generalized Anxiety Disorder among African Americans, Afro Caribbeans, and non-Hispanic Whites.” One discussion of this article used the phrase “racial battle fatigue” to describe their results.

When I Googled the phrase “speaking while black” I found that it already had been used by Mayowa Obasaju in the title for her 2007 psychology MA thesis at Georgia State University - Speaking While Black: The Relationship Between African Americans’ Racial Identity, Fear of Confirming Stereotypes, and Public Speaking Anxiety. She studied a sample of 84 undergraduate students - 72 females and 12 males.

The image of Booker T. Washington came from the Library of Congress.

Deja view - counting evidence twice

2011-08-20T13:56:00.000-07:00

Wait a minute! Didn’t that horse already cross the finish line?

In citing research to support an argument, it’s not very hard to accidentally count something twice - particularly when we don’t get all the way back to primary sources.

For example in David J. Dempsey’s 2010 book Present Your Way to the Top, at the bottom of page 3 he says that:

“....In a survey that appeared in the Book of Lists, 3,000 people were asked ‘What are you most afraid of?’ and the number-one response was ‘speaking before a group.’ It ranked higher than the fear of heights, insects, and even death (Ref. 2). In another study, 2,500 people were asked to list their greatest fear, and the largest percentage of respondents listed public speaking (Ref. 3).”

His reference 3 was to the 7th edition of Stephen E. Lucas’s book The Art of Public Speaking. I’ve previously blogged about how Lucas referred to the 1973 Bruskin survey, where that data in the Book of Lists originally came from. So, references 2 and 3 actually are to the exact same data.

Stephen J. Senn has described how this same pesky problem occurs in medical science. His article on Overstating the evidence - double counting in meta-analysis and related problems discusses ways to keep from fooling ourselves.

Some criminals deliberately miscount bills when giving change. A folded bill can be put in the front of a stack and counted twice. It then is unfolded as it’s handed back. If you don’t recheck the count you will be shortchanged. Other short change artists fold and hide one bill they got from you, in the back of a stack. Then they say that you made a mistake, and get you to add an extra.

In war (hot or cold) it’s common to confuse the enemy about your unit strength. Back in high school I remember reading Robert Lee Scott’s book God Is My Co-Pilot about his World War II experiences flying a P-40 from near Kunming, China. He had his propellor spinner repainted when refueling and rearming after each solo sortie, and produced the impression that one plane was a whole squadron.

In 1955 the Soviet Union flew their ten new Bison bombers past the reviewing stand on Aviation Day. When they got over the horizon they circled back. They made a total of six passes - to give the illusion of sixty bombers and create western fears of a Bomber Gap.

How to make a large number incomprehensible - or comprehensible

2011-08-17T08:36:00.000-07:00

On August 15th Faith Pincus posted about Rhetorical Techniques: Sample Analogy in her Speech Advice blog. She discussed an article in TheWeek that was an extract from Charles Fishman’s recent book The Big Thirst. Her paraphrase was that:

“The United States uses 5.7 billion gallons of water every day, to flush the toilet. 5.7 billion gallons of water every day. That's a hard number to get your mind around, so what does it mean? It means that the United States flushes the same amount of water every day that the UK and Canada, combined, use for all of their daily household water needs.”

She thought that comparison was great. I think it’s mediocre at best. First, it compares one incomprehensible large number with another. Both are large abstractions without an obvious meaning. Second, the comparison is more than slightly bogus since the population of the UK plus Canada isn’t nearly as large as the U.S. population.

A longer direct quote from the article is that:

“For Americans at home, flushing the toilet is the main way we use water. We use more water flushing toilets than bathing or cooking or washing our dishes or our clothes. The typical American flushes the toilet five times a day at home, and uses 18.5 gallons of water, just for that. What that means is that every day, Americans flush 5.7 billion gallons of clean drinking water down the toilet. And that’s just at home.

It’s impossible to get your brain around that number, of course—5.7 billion gallons of water a day. But here’s a way of thinking about it. It’s more water than all the homes in the United Kingdom and Canada use each day for all their needs—we flush more water down the toilet than 95 million Brits and Canadians use.”

When we divide 5.7 billion by 18.5 we get 308 million, which is about the U.S. population. Our population is over three times that 95 million, so you’d expect that we’d waste more water than them. Also, multiplying anything by 308 million makes it ridiculously large.

Is there another well-known large number we can compare with 5.7 billion gallons per day? Yes - it’s the amount of water going over Niagara Falls. During the summer tourist season that is 100,000 cubic feet per second, which converts to 64.6 billion gallons per day. So, flushing our toilets uses about 9% of what goes over the falls. If you’ve been there or seen it on TV 9% of Niagara Falls is pretty easy to imagine.

Stating the number per person as 18.5 gallons a day from five toilet flushes helps keep it comprehensible. We’re actually getting somewhere in learning to conserve water, but still have room to improve. That’s 3.7 gallons per flush. The toilets currently sold use just 1.6 gallons per flush. Back in the sixties toilets used 5.5 gallons per flush, and in the eighties we got down to 3.5 gallons per flush. We’ve clearly still got a lot of the older ones out there wasting water.

Handcuffed to the desktop computer

2011-08-16T14:11:00.000-07:00

Back in April 2008 I gave a talk about Internet Research to the Boise chapter of the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners. They met at our county sheriff’s office. Fortunately the handcuffs were metaphorical.

The multipurpose room layout where they met is shown above. There was an electronic whiteboard at the front, and a projector and screen for PowerPoint near the front of the right wall. Their desktop computer was located at one side of the room. It had a conventional mouse on a cord. My audience of a dozen people were at tables located at the diagonally opposite end of the room.

Back then I didn’t have a wireless multimedia presenter (or remote) that would have let me stand where I chose - in front of the audience, or near the screen. Instead I was stuck in front of the computer. Earlier when I asked about the room setup I was told PowerPoint could be used, but not about the electronic whiteboard.

After my presentation I connected to the Internet and demonstrated some of the sites that I had mentioned. The county had a very effective firewall, so it took several seconds to get each response. A few prepared examples using screenshots would have been far more effective.

That presentation was a learning experience for me. When I gave a similar presentation the next month at the Toastmasters District 15 Conference I had my own laptop, projector, and remote.

20 fears for a new millennium - replacing the 1977 Book of Lists

2011-08-14T14:49:00.000-07:00

The perennially cited survey of The 14 Worst Human Fears in the 1977 Book of Lists is embarrassingly ancient. That data really came from a 1973 Bruskin survey, so this year they are 38 years old. They literally are a half-truth, because the median age reported in the 2010 US Census was 37.2 years. That is, half the current population weren’t even around when Bruskin asked their questions.

What should replace that survey? Results from the National Comorbidity Survey Replication (NCSR), as are shown above in a bar chart. Click on it to see a larger and clearer version. Animals or bugs tops the list, followed by heights, the dentist or doctor, and storms or still water. Public speaking/performance came fifth, just above crowds, and speaking up in a meeting/class was seventh.

In January 2008 A. M. Ruscio et al published an article on "Social Fears and Social Phobia in the United States: Results from the National Comorbidity Survey Replication." I posted a bar chart of those social fears in this blog on June 23, 2009. The NCSR was conducted between 2001 and 2003, so it’s about thirty years newer than the Bruskin survey. The NCSR results in that article described 13 social fears, but did not include other common specific fears like heights, flying, and closed spaces.

People clearly are fascinated by lists of fears. Not having those specific fears in a list now seems like being served a regular hamburger after getting used to a deluxe double version - perhaps a McDonald’s Big Mac or a Big Boy. (I suppose the British equivalent would be being served fish without chips). Were those fears included in the NCSR? Of course they were, they just were not analyzed in that particular article. In fact, I couldn’t even find another published article about specific fears, like I did in July with the NCS. Psychologists and psychiatrists must have better things to do than providing lists for use by speaking coaches and speech teachers, but I’m not either.

So, I decided to find the specific fears results in the raw data, and then add it to the social fears to make a more comprehensive list and bar chart. Raw data from the NCSR is included in a series of studies collectively known as the Collaborative Psychiatric Epidemiology Surveys (CPES). The data are on a web site, although it’s a bit of a labyrinth to navigate. You can find both the questions asked and the answers, so the surveys really are quite transparent.

The specific fears are in six screening questions: SC27a through SC27F, and fear of crowds is in a seventh, SC30. The data show a “valid percent” which ignores a few confused individuals in the sample of 9,282 people who answered don’t know - rather than yes or no.

Back on March 19, 2001 the Gallup Poll reported the results of a telephone survey on 13 fears. They asked 1016 US citizens - or about nine times less than the NCSR. That means that the Gallup poll is far less precise. Sampling error for the Gallup Poll is three times larger than for the NCSR. (The sampling error for the Bruskin survey was about twice that for the NCSR).

How do the results for similar questions compare? Six of them are shown above in another bar chart. For flying there was an almost perfect match - 18% for Gallup and 17.6% for the NCSR. For heights Gallup found 36%, while the NCSR found 31.3%.

For the other four fears there were huge differences. For crowds Gallup found 11%, while the NCSR found 21.1%. For closed spaces Gallup found 34%, while the NCSR found 19.3%. For storms Gallup found 11%, while for storms or still water the NCSR found 21.8%.

For public speaking the surveys asked somewhat different questions. Gallup asked about “public speaking in front of an audience” - and found 40%. The NCSR asked about both “acting, performing, or giving a talk in front of an audience” (21.5%) and
“speaking up in a meeting or class? (19.5%). If you add those two percentages, you will get 40.7%, which would agree with the 40% reported by Gallup. The NCSR also had a screening question, SC29a, about “giving a speech or speaking in class” which was feared by 38.5% of the sample.

If you want to force fear of public speaking back up to being number one, than you can make up your own bar chart using the NCSR screening question, or add the two previously mentioned results (40.7%). I can see no reason for omitting that carefully made distinction, unless we’re comparing raw data with another CPES survey. However, that’s a story for another day.

Interactive whiteboards should replace PowerPoint, not flipcharts

2011-08-12T08:45:00.000-07:00

On July 21st I blogged about how the Anti-PowerPoint Party wants us to go back to using flipcharts. That solution doesn’t fix the problem, or consider what other hardware and software already are around. It’s as idiotic as asking us to go back to believing that the earth is flat (and square).

Interactive whiteboards (IWBs) are a better solution. They are display devices which can do anything a flipchart can do, and far more - as is shown in this nine-minute video demonstration. For teaching radiology and other visual topics they should be excellent. Last year Patricia Deubel discussed their use in education in general, and the Australasian Journal of Educational Technology devoted an entire issue (Volume 26, Number 4) to them.

Images of IWBs came from here and here on Wikimedia.

Call your doctor if you have tremors or uncontrolled muscle movements

2011-08-11T09:33:00.000-07:00

Before we give others advice, we should think about whether it makes any sense. Yesterday I saw a television commercial for a drug ending with an incredible warning. On MSN Health I found the following similar written one:

"....Stop using metoclopramide and call your doctor at once if you have tremors or uncontrolled muscle movements, fever, stiff muscles, confusion, sweating, fast or uneven heartbeats, rapid breathing, depressed mood, thoughts of suicide or hurting yourself, hallucinations, anxiety, agitation, seizure, or jaundice (yellowing of your skin or eyes)..."

How am I supposed to call my doctor if I’m already having tremors or uncontrolled muscle movements? If I was lucky enough to have an old phone with big buttons, then I might still be ok. But, if all I had was a cell phone I might be completely out of luck.

That warning reminded me of some that are posted on ladders.

Reframe your way around fear of public speaking

2011-08-10T07:29:00.000-07:00

One way to overcome fear of public speaking is to reframe what you are doing. In a brief video Ivan Misner tells a story about an accountant who was terrified of speaking to her networking group about tax law. She was able to convey the same information easily in the form of a test or quiz though.

The very helpful idea that a speech isn’t something strange and different, just an enlarged conversation is at least a century old. In a longer video Professor Michael Motley discusses it as changing your view from a performance orientation to a communication orientation.

Wait a minute. That’s not my laser pointer!

2011-08-09T06:14:00.000-07:00

On July 27th there was an F Minus cartoon about seeing a laser pointer on the screen while yours is turned off. So far I haven’t encountered that situation with dueling presenters.

Television shows like Flashpoint and Criminal Minds often have shown laser sights though. Another disturbing possibility is that the spot is coming from a handgun rather than a pointer.

Don’t act like Jedi Knights with Frickin’ Laser Pointers. Laser pointers aren’t toys.

The image of a Smith & Wesson 380 Bodyguard handgun is from Peter Josef Schausberger.

Our map may not quite match the territory

2011-08-06T18:46:00.000-07:00

A map should let us see where we’re going and how to get there. Back in June I spoke in Salt Lake City. Most of that metro area is easy to navigate, because the streets are marked in a logical grid system. The area around the University of Utah and old Fort Douglas is an exception. On the morning of June 14th I set off with a city map on my lap for my destination in the University research park. It showed me that East 500 South became South Foothill Drive, which turned to run southeast. I needed to get in a left turn lane for Wakara Way, follow it into the research park, and then turn right onto Chipeta Way.

Oops! I turned one light too soon and wound up on South Wasatch Drive. My map said I could just turn right and get over to South Connor Road, which would become Chipeta Way. Wrong! That area had University of Utah housing, so many streets now were dead-ends. My first turn led me into a parking lot, which gave me a place to stop and recheck the map. My second try led me a few blocks further - into another parking lot. On my third try I finally found a through street that led over to my destination. Fortunately I’d allowed extra time to get through downtown (which turned out not to be a problem), and I still arrived early.

Sometimes our map might even be wrong on purpose. When I was growing up in Pittsburgh I noticed that the city map from Gulf Oil always contained a fictitious road connection in Schenley Park between Schenley Drive and the middle of a horseshoe bend on E. Circuit Road. It probably was one of a set of errors for letting them detect if someone had copied their map.

Back when I was a student the printed directory for Carnegie Mellon University used to contain a set of phony names with real addresses, and phony addresses with real names. Those features were for detecting who was reselling it as a commercial mailing list. One of my friends was renamed Wadza Duckworth, and another had his computer science department address relisted as being a tiny, always-locked equipment access closet within a room in Wean Hall. Any time those ringers got mail the sender got a cease-and-desist letter from an attorney.

The previous two paragraphs began as comments to a blog post by Scott Berkun on missing maps and the fragility of technology. He reused them in a post on how to use bad data for good, and now did I too.

Public speaking tops every list of fears???

2011-08-04T10:59:00.000-07:00

One of many persistent half-truths about public speaking is that fear of it consistently ranks number one in survey after survey. This pernicious nonsense has been around in books for at least 25 years. The basis for it is good old hubris - grandly generalizing from a few surveys about adults in the U.S. to the entire world. Lilyann Wilder opened the introduction to her 1999 book 7 Steps to Fearless Speaking by claiming that:

“Fear of public speaking consistently tops every list of human fears.”

A decade later Gary Edward Haymes used more adjectives on page 166 of his 2009 book Go Beyond Stress: Twelve Self-Hypnotic Stress Buster Sessions:

“In every poll taken since the end of World War II, the absolute number one fear of all living humans is delivering a public speech.”

Obviously neither Lilyann nor Gary had seen the counterexample of lists in the Epidemiologic Catchment Area Study I discussed on Monday.

An overblown statement containing every rather than mostly (or often) is a great way to instantly destroy your credibility as an author or speaker. Think hard before you make one. Your audience may be appalled rather than impressed.

The pause that refreshes

2011-08-03T11:38:00.000-07:00

It is also true about public speaking, even though it was an old slogan from 1929 used to sell Coca Cola. When used sparingly pauses can be devastating. We can pause anywhere in a speech - at the beginning, in the middle, or at the end. Stephen D. Boyd suggested that:

“One way to insure good eye contact is to look at your audience before you start to speak. Go to the lectern and pause, smile, look at the audience, and then speak.”

George Torok said that the pause is the One Thing to be a powerful presenter.

I still remember back when I was in high school (about 45 years ago) that Al Julius, then the news director at KQV-AM radio in Pittsburgh, used to close his commentaries with a simple:

"This-----is Al Julius."

That single five-second pause (where all you could hear was the teletype machine clattering faintly in the background) stood out like a mountain above an ocean of disc jockeys - who all were deathly afraid of leaving any dead air.

Moving on beyond Toastmasters

2011-08-02T04:17:00.000-07:00

Recently I concluded there no longer was a good reason for me to stay in Toastmasters International. It has been a useful experience. On July 30th James Feudo posted a Toastmasters Tips Roundup on his Overnight Sensation blog. I agree with James that:

“You can become a better speaker by taking an active role in the right Toastmasters club.”

In 2008 Olivia Mitchell discussed How to Get the Most out of Toastmasters, and last year Kevin Kane described How to Make Sure that Your Toastmasters Experience Doesn’t Suck.

Last Wednesday I spoke to to 25 members of the Ada County Advanced Master Gardeners class. I gave them a 45-minute Brief Introduction to Public Speaking.

Back in September 2007 I walked down the hill past the Boise Depot to my first meeting of (The) Capitol Club Toastmasters. After the second meeting as a guest I joined. I served as Vice President Education for two years in a row, gave 35 speeches from manuals, and received my Competent Communicator, Advanced Communicator Bronze, and Advanced Communicator Silver awards. Also I gave four more educational speeches from the Better Speaker series, spoke to two youth leadership programs, and gave a club contest speech.

At the 2008 District 15 Spring Conference I spoke in an educational session (and gave a similar speech in 2010 at a Division TLI). I wrote and co-authored a pair of articles for the District 15 Newsletter, the Pulsebeat: Rocket Science for Speech Topics and Fear of Public Speaking Affects 1 in 5 Americans. Currently the Pulsebeat is in limbo, and no longer even shows up on the menu at the district web site. Fortunately both articles also are posted on this blog, here and here.

The fear of public speaking article about the NCS and NCS-R in the Pulsebeat was an excerpt from a longer manuscript about recent surveys on social fears submitted to Toastmaster magazine, but rejected. The other Canadian and Swedish surveys about fears were mentioned later in my blog. Another shorter manuscript about Timing Tiles also was rejected.

By July I’d noticed that Capitol Club’s Wednesday lunch format didn’t really fit into my life anymore. I decided to try going to a club that met in the evening.

On further reflection I realized there’s no good reason to stay. For me the costs exceed the benefits. I would need another five speeches for the Advanced Communicator Gold Award. That award also calls for mentoring someone through their first three speeches, which I’d enjoy. But, it also calls for conducting a Success/Communication/, Success/Leadership, or Youth Leadership module which I would not enjoy right now. Continuing in Toastmasters feels like this cartoon.

What I really enjoy is finding information and sharing it. This blog lets me do that far more effectively than attending meetings of a Toastmasters club. Typically a weekly club meeting is attended by about twenty members. Right now this blog averages about 100 hits per day, or 700 per week, - so it provides information to 35 times as many people. (The latest comment on it came from Sydney, Australia).