A YouTube video ranking almost two-dozen common public speaking tips

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Today my Google Alert on public speaking led me to a 25-minute YouTube video from November 7, 2025 by Vinh Giang mistitled Ranking Every Public Speaking & Communication Tip! He ranked each of those 23 from best to worst on a seven-point scale, as I have shown above in a version of the table he developed in the video.

I agree that “Imagine the audience naked” is one of the worst tips. But he ranked “Avoid filler words completely” at the third level from best, while I regard it as some of the worst advice – as is to “Just be yourself.”   

You never could rank EVERY TIP without making a video that ran forever! A thoughtless video title is just as bad as a thoughtless speech title.  

 

There also is another version titled The Best (AND Worst) Public Speaking Advice RANKED. 

Seven tips on how to write a great speech

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There is an excellent short article by Kulamkan Kulasegaram, Douglas Buller, and Cynthis Whitehead in Perspectives on Medical Education on pages 270 to 272 of the July 13, 2017 issue titled Taking presentations seriously: Invoking narrative craft in academic talks. They give the following seven speechwriting tips:

 

1] The act of writing a presentation can yield a clear academic presentation and provide clarity on the topic of presentation.

 

2] Work backwards from key message or conclusion you want the audience to understand at the talk.

 

3] Plot the most efficient and engaging route to this conclusion when writing your presentation. Remove extraneous information that distracts from this conclusion; focus the presentation on the salient points that lead up to your conclusion.

 

4] Each element of the presentation must serve the dual purpose of conveying information and facilitating engagement with the presentation. The effectiveness of conveying information depends on the level of engagement or interaction with the audience.

 

5] Interaction with the audience in a talk means engaging their attention and memory on the concept(s) you wish to convey.

 

6] You can more effectively engage with the audience by designing your talk around instructional design and information processing principles that address the audience members’ capacities for attention and memory.

 

7] Creating presentations is an exercise in creating meaning out of slides, words, and concepts. Revisit your talk once you have completed it and evaluate whether the meaning you want to convey is delivered effectively through the elements of your presentation.

 

The image was adapted from this one at OpenClipArt.

 

 

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

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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

 

Be Clear on Your Purpose

Select the Right Visual

Remove the Clutter

Engage with Colors but Don’t Create Rainbows

Use Text to Guide Your Viewers

 

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

 

Regarding pie charts, he says:

 

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

 

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

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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

 

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

 

Including data that isn’t relevant to topic or audience

Having an inaccurate gauge of your audience’s understanding

Providing data with no context or comparison

Neglecting other aspects of your performance

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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

 

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

 

 

6 Tips for better public speaking

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There is an excellent brief article by Jim Mandelaro at the University of Rochester on November 21, 2024 titled Fear of public speaking? This Rochester professor has you covered. It presents these six tips:

 

Know your audience!

Be yourself.

Find your perfect pace.

Work up to eye contact.

Focus on getting started.

Practice, practice, practice.

 

And it links to a five-minute YouTube video by Amy Arbogast titled 6 Tips for better public speaking. Under Know Your Audience she says:

 

“Good speakers think about what they’re going to say. Great speakers think about who they’re saying it to. Ask yourself, ‘What do I want my audience to learn or take away from what I say? How do I want them to feel or respond?’ And think about who’s going to be there – what do they already know or not know? What kind of jargon is going to be familiar to them, or is going to make them feel a little left out? What’s important to them? And how can you make them care about what you are saying?  Thinking through these questions will make it much easier and more intuitive to convey your message.”

 

The cartoon was adapted from one with six thinking hats at Openclipart.

 

Six excellent tips for anxious speakers from a Life Kit show at National Public Radio

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

National Public Radio has a show called Life Kit which was discussed by Joshua Dudley at Forbes on March 9, 2023 in an article titled NPR’s ‘Life Kit” is there for those who need a hand in figuring life out. The excellent 22-minute October 24, 2023 show is titled Anxious about public speaking? We’ve got tips and can be heard as a podcast with a transcript. Those six tips are from speechwriter Lauren Dominguez Chan (who wrote for Surgeon General Vivek Murthy). Reporter Kyle Norris says they are:

 

Anyone can be a good speaker because a good speaker sounds like themself.

Identify your core message.    

It's prep time. Begin by writing down what you know about the event.

Find some sticky stories that relate to your core message.

Write for the ear. Keep your sentences and words short and sweet.

Practice and get feedback because that can help you feel less nervous or anxious.

 

He also says go to a place where people practice public speaking, like a Toastmasters club.  

Earlier in the show he describes how Rachel Oman went to a Toastmasters club in Blaine, Washington and did impromptu speaking (Table Topics). Her first time she even took along her 12-year-old daughter Brynn.

 

Toastmasters posted a link to this show under In The News at the Media Center on their web site. But on November 1, NPR retitled that show as Oops, I messed up. 7 common public speaking issues – and how to fix them.

 

The microphone image was adapted from one at Openclipart.

 

 

Five tips for building an informative speech

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There are some excellent recent articles about public speaking hidden in magazines you likely never have ever heard of (or seen). But you can find the full-text for them for free in the PubMed Central (PMC) database from the U. S. National Library of Medicine, which has 6.7 million articles. When I searched there under PowerPoint I found a humongous haystack with 10,793 articles. Searching under lecturing resulted in a smaller haystack with 7,1122 articles. Searching for PowerPoint AND lecturing reduced that down to a manageable 280. Then I sorted them by Pub Date to show the most recent first.

 

The 52nd article on that list is by Eric Steinberg and Doug Franzen and is titled Five tips for building a successful didactic talk. It appears in AEM (Academic Emergency Medicine) Education and Training in 2020, Volume 4, Number 1, on pages 72 to 74. Sections in it are titled:

 

Passion + Purpose = Engagement

Know Your Audience

Bones and Flesh

Pictures Speak 1,000 Words, Your Text Shouldn’t

Practice Makes Perfect

 

‘Didactic’? But I don’t want to ‘die.’ The title of that article refers to a ‘didactic talk’, which is something I instead would have called an informative or informational speech (a speech to teach).  I learned about that topic a decade ago from a Toastmasters advanced manual titled Speaking to Inform. The article by Steinberg and Franzen references another by Danielle Ofri titled The passion and the peril: storytelling in medicine which you can find at the web site for Academic Medicine.

 

The cartoon was adapted from one at Wikimedia Commons showing a Guy presenting a business graph.

 

Tips for creating good Table Topics questions

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Table Topics is the impromptu speaking section of a Toastmasters club meeting, where members who do not have another meeting role get to speak. As is shown above, a good question for Table Topics is open ended, but not wide open. It should not be closed (able to be answered either yes or no). “What’s the worst street name you ever saw?” is open ended enough to be answered in just a minute or two. But “What is the meaning of life?” is a wide open question.

 

The worst name I saw decades ago was Stinking Creek Road. It is off Interstate 75 at Exit 144, about twenty miles south of Jellico, Tennessee (on the border with Kentucky). Imagine you were a realtor trying to sell a house on that road. You immediately would be asked about just how close it was to that smelly creek. Here in Idaho the Bureau of Land Management has a web page for the Poison Creek Picnic Site. It is on Mud Flat Road (another awful name), and not far from the small city of Grand View (a great name). I blogged about that picnic site in a July 25, 2017 post titled Answering questions about geographical names – the joy of impromptu speaking (Table Topics).

 

The October issue of Toastmaster magazine has an article by Silvana Clark on pages 24 and 25 titled Creative Tips for the Topicsmaster which lists four ideas. After reading it I have some additional ideas based on having written nearly three dozen posts in this blog.

 

Her first excellent idea, if a club is meeting online, is to ask members to take 30 seconds to find something in their house that has a special meaning for them. Then each member displays that item and explains its significance. In person you might instead what item you have in your wallet, purse, or pocket. On May 6, 2010 I blogged about What stories are you carrying in your pocket?

 

Silvana’s second idea is to Google some variation of “Untraditional Holidays” and ask people to describe how they would celebrate something like Big Bird’s Birthday (March 20th). A better way to accomplish this would be to visit or call your friendly local public library and ask the reference librarian to get you their copy of a book called Chase’s Calendar of Events. It lists days, weeks, and months. Every day celebrates several things, as was noted in a Pearls Before Swine cartoon back on August 24, 2016. I blogged about the book in a post on June 9, 2017 titled June is Effective Communications Month, but somehow I didn’t get the message.

 

Her third excellent idea is to make up titles and covers for twelve books and tell participants to pretend they are authors being interviewed on a talk show like Oprah. 

 

Her fourth idea is to look up unusual laws online, and ask participants to discuss why one of them should be enforced. For example, on October 4, 2020 an article at KTVB7 discussed Did you know? Not smiling in Pocatello could have landed you in jail.

 

At the beginning of her article Silvana mentioned procrastinating till the night before a club meeting and just Googling a phrase like “Questions for Table Topics.” That is too narrow for finding excellent questions. They might instead be under other names like Icebreakers or Networking. There is an article by Claire Lew titled The 25 most popular icebreaker questions based on four years of data. There is another article at the Conversation Starters World web site with a list of 200 Icebreaker questions. At the Harvard Business Review there is an article by David Burkus on January 30, 2018 titled 8 Questions to ask someone other than “what do you do?”

 

There is a well-known list of 36 questions about getting to know someone better, which you can find in a Reader’s Digest article. On February 12, 2018 I blogged about them in a post titled Falling in love and Table Topics questions.

 

Most of us could not answer “What is the meaning of life?” in a two-minute Table Topic speech. But Alexander Papaderos managed to do it in about five minutes, beginning with a piece from a broken motorcycle mirror.

 

How not to construct an infographic about speech anxiety

At VENNGAGE there is an infographic (shown above) from Rachael Keeney titled Speech Anxiety and subtitled What You Need to Know About Glossophobia. Both the ‘graphic’ and ‘info’ aspects are questionable. The orange color code for 74% fear on the pie chart and for the 73% and 75% does not match the red icons of men and women.

I revised the infographic as shown above (changed the 73% and 75% from orange to red) and removed the superfluous pie chart. The fourth point on that list of Tips To Overcome Speech Anxiety is to Know your topic. But those 73%, 74%, and 75% (from Statistic Brain) are just baseless rubbish, which I blogged about in a December 7, 2014 post titled Statistic Brain is just a statistical medicine show.

Alan Alda on public speaking tips and rules of three

I have been enjoying reading Alan Alda’s new book If I Understood You, Would I Have This Look on My Face (My Adventures in the Art and Science of Relating and Communicating). I got it from my friendly local public library. In Chapter 11 he discusses tips and rules of three. Watch the 5-minute YouTube video from Big Think titled 3 Ways to express your thoughts so that everyone will understand you. Here is his text from pages 98 and 99:

“TIPS

Even though I don’t much like them, I have to admit that tips can sometimes be useful. Here are a few that have been good to me.

      The Three Rules of Three

1] When I talk to an audience, I try to make no more than three points. (They can’t remember more than three, and neither can I.) In fact, restricting myself to one big point is even better. But three is the limit.

2] I try to explain difficult ideas three different ways. Some people can’t understand something the first couple of ways I say it, but can if I say it another way. This lets them triangulate their way to understanding.

3] I try to find a subtle way to make an important point three times. It sticks a little better.

But even though I’ve discovered a few tips that have helped, for my money, tips tend to be anemic when they don’t come fortified with experience, or with a vivid story that lets you enjoy a vicarious experience.

I was once asked to write a list of tips on how to communicate well, and I resisted. I finally hammered out three, but they were so snarky I never sent them in:

1}   Beware of tips. Tips are intellectual and often mechanical. They don’t transform you. An experience transforms you. There’s a stretch of road I’ve driven down many times where I used to ignore the speed limit sign. One afternoon, I got a speeding ticket and I never ignored the speed limit again. The sign was a tip. The ticket was the experience.

2}   Make a personal connection with your audience. Look them in the eye and speak to them as if they’re a close friend and not a multitude. This is, of course, impossible to do just by reading this tip, Experience is what transforms you. (See Tip 1.)

3}    If you can, experience improvisation. It will focus you on the other person. Improv games allow most of the tips about public speaking to become second nature, rather than forced and mechanical. A common tip advises you to vary the pace of your talk. Improv puts you so in touch with the audience that varying your pace happens automatically. You do it without thinking, which is the only way it will be effective. Trying to follow tips, rather than letting behavior emerge from the experience of improvisation, can actually make a talk more wooden. You see it in the pauses speakers make when they try to apply the tip to pause every few sentences. During these mechanical pauses, the air is dead. But when an improviser takes a pause, something meaningful is happening. She pauses because she’s watching the audience to see if they understand her, and she’s actually thinking of what she ought to say next. The pause is filled with something that’s happening between her and the audience. She’s alive.”

Three other videos based on the book are:

Knowing How to Tell a Good Story is Like Having Mind Control

Grow your empathy through better visual perception

Good communication 101: Mirroring, Jargon, Highfaluting Words