Don’t end by driving your audience off a cliff

The Looney Tunes cartoon ending, with Porky Pig stuttering: “That’s all folks” is a horrible way to treat your audience. If you do that, they will feel let down - much like Wile E. Coyote going off a cliff in a Roadrunner cartoon.

On December 16 at our Capitol Club Toastmasters meeting I presented Concluding Your Speech. It was the last talk from the Better Speakers Series. The prepared text from Toastmasters International for the talk described six types of endings. I added an example for each one as follows:

1. Call for action. At the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, back on June 12, 1987, President Ronald Reagen famously said: “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”

2. Tell a story. It can be one of your own, someone else’s, or even a fairy tale. A small boy was crying. Although he was stretching as high as he could to reach a door bell, it was still just a few inches out of reach. An old man passing by took pity on him, and picked him up. After he rang the bell, the man put him down and asked “now what?” The boy said, “I don’t know about you mister, but I’m going to start running away - just as fast as I can.”

3. Use a quotation. Abraham Lincoln said that: “Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power.”

4. Refer back to the beginning. Suppose that we started in Marion, Ohio. Most of the speeches for the 1920 presidential campaign that led to an election landslide were made from the front porch of Warren G. Harding’s home. He died before even completing one term. He and his wife Florence are buried in Marion, in a marble memorial just a few miles from his home. (The losing Democratic candidate for vice president was expected to get out of politics. He was Franklin Roosevelt!)

5. Ask a rhetorical question. Billy Corgan of the Smashing Pumpkins said: “If practice makes perfect, and no one’s perfect, then why practice?”

6. Repeat your main points. Suppose that you were trying to get funding for a five-year exploration mission, perhaps a trek to the stars. Near the end of your presentation to management you could get bogged down in details - like the budget for repair, replacement, and refurbishment of equipment in fiscal year number five. You need to go back and clearly state that what you really want to do is:
a) to explore strange new worlds
b) to seek out new life and new civilizations
c) to boldly go where no man has gone before.

I also discussed concluding or ending a speech in a previous post back in June 2008. There is a very detailed 16-page module by Warren Sandmann on Introductions and Conclusions in the ACA Open Knowledge Guide to Public Speaking.

Joy of being published again

Earlier this month the Journal of Failure Analysis and Prevention published a four-page feature article that I wrote on the topic of Fire Sprinkler Heads, Design, and Failure. You can read a preview of the first page here. It includes an updated fable about seven blind men and an elephant.

The article has an interesting history. It grew from a previous post on this blog. Mac Louthan, the editor of the journal, saw it and emailed me. He asked me if I could turn it into a magazine article, so I did. I first met Mac back in the early 1970s. The last time I saw him in person was at a conference a few years ago – before I started blogging.

So, here I am enjoying yet another “15 minutes of fame.”

Nick Morgan sticks his neck out and checks the emperors for clothes

Big names in business like Steve Jobs and Jack Welch often are pointed to as obviously being great communicators. For example, there is a recent book by Carmine Gallo called The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs: How to Be Insanely Great in Front of Any Audience.

This sheepish attitude of fawning adulation reminded me of a scene in the movie Wayne’s World where Mike Meyers (Wayne Campbell) and Dana Carvey (Garth Algar) bow down before Alice Cooper and keep repeating the catch-phrase “We’re not worthy!”

I was pleasantly surprised to find that one speaking coach, Nick Morgan, had the chutzpah to stick his neck out and say otherwise. He is like the little boy at the end of Han’s Christian Andersen’s fairy tale about The Emperor’s New Clothes. This fall he critiqued the big names in a series of blog posts. For example, Nick called Steve Jobs good, but not great. His posts offer constructive criticism. He points to videos from specific speeches. You can read them, watch, and then see if you agree or disagree:

Steve Jobs October 29

C. K. Prahalad November 11

Paul Krugman November 12

Richard Branson November 16

Philip Kotler November 17

Gary Hamel November 18

Michael Porter November 19

Marshall Goldsmith November 23

Ram Charan November 24

Jack Welch December 1

Eric Schmidt December 7

In a blogosphere with mostly sheep it is inspiring to find a giraffe. By the way, the giraffe image was edited from one by Miroslav Duchacek.

Pantophobia is not just the fear of pants

Pantophobia is not just the fear of pants, although it certainly could include the startlingly green jeans shown above. The Oxford English Dictionary defines it as “a condition characterized by groundless or irrational fears; fear of everything; generalized anxiety.” In current terminology this condition is known as generalized anxiety disorder. It is given the acronym GAD. You can read about it at the Mayo Clinic or NIMH.

Pantophobia is mentioned in A Charlie Brown Christmas, the 1965 animated TV special, which airs annually. You can watch that scene here on YouTube, starting about four and a half minutes from the beginning. In the scene Charlie Brown goes to see Lucy, who has a booth labeled “Psychiatric Help 5 cents.” They have the following dialog:

Lucy: All right now, what seems to be your trouble?

Charlie: I feel depressed. I know I should be happy, but I’m not.

Lucy: Well, as they say on TV, the mere fact that you realize you need help indicates you are not too far gone. I think we better pinpoint your fears. If we can find out what you are afraid of, we can label it. Are you afraid of responsibility? If you are, then you have hypengyophobia.

Charlie: I don’t think that’s quite it.

Lucy: How about cats? If you’re afraid of cats you have elurophobia.

Charlie: Well, sort of, but I’m not sure.

Lucy: Are you afraid of staircases? If you are, then you have climacophobia. Maybe you have thalassophobia. This is fear of the ocean. Or, gephyrophobia, which is the fear of crossing bridges. Or, maybe you have pantophobia. Do you think you have pantophobia?

Charlie: What’s pantophobia?

Lucy: The fear of everything.

Charlie: That’s it!

Improve your public speaking with iUmmm?

One of the sillier iPhone apps is a filler-word counter called iUmmm. If you were looking for an inexpensive stocking-stuffer gift for someone who both has an iPhone and is the Ah-Counter at Toastmasters club meetings, then it may be exactly what you were looking for.

I found a review of it here. The web site for iUmmm shows a screen with room for displaying five filler words at a time. There is an unlimited database for storing both words and events. However, it is not clear whether it would be easy or hard to scroll the list, or to add new filler words while listening to a speech. With a pen and paper it is easy to add new categories as they occur. So, like, you know, I’ll stick with my pen and note pad for now.

Stuttering and Richard Thompson

I did not realize that the critically acclaimed singer-songwriter and guitarist Richard Thompson had a problem with stuttering when speaking in public. Back in the early 1980’s I saw him headline the Ann Arbor Folk Festival. He walked onstage with just his acoustic guitar, started singing, and held a theater audience spellbound for over an hour. That day no stutter was evident in his remarks between songs. Thompson’s name appears in this list of famous people with speech disorders.

Recently I saw an article in Performing Musician magazine that mentioned his stutter. I also found a BBC TV documentary about him called A Solitary Life. At ~3:00 minutes into the first segment of the YouTube video you can hear his stutter come out, prompted by the high stress of being followed around by a camera crew. Thompson played lead guitar for Fairport Convention, and then began writing songs for them. Later he left them, and his wife Linda sang while he played guitar. Eventually Richard began singing.

The Stuttering Home Page is one of the best online sources for information about stuttering. Pamela A. Mertz writes a blog about stuttering called Make Room for the Stuttering that recently passed the landmark of 200 posts.

You can find many songs by Richard Thompson on YouTube. Fairport Convention play Meet on the Ledge here. Linda Thompson sings the title song from the album I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight here. Richard sings 1952 Vincent Black Lightning here. He and Jo-El Sonnier perform the break-up polka song, Tear Stained Letter, here. Sonnier also has a Cajun nightmare video version here. Bonnie Raitt sings Dimming of the Day here.

The photo by Kevin Smith shows Richard Thompson playing at Croperdy, during the 2005 Fairport Convention reunion.

How to turn a newspaper column into trash by reformatting

Today the American Reporter, which is an online newspaper, reran an old humor column by Erik Deckers from the week of October 31, 2003. It is titled Just Imagine Them Naked. You can read a correctly formatted version at his Laughing Stock web site. That version has 18 paragraphs.

The American Reporter rerun today turned his column into trash. They left out all the carriage returns and line feeds that formerly had separated it into easy to read short paragraphs. Now it is just one gigantic paragraph - with almost 740 words. Their combination of small type and no paragraphs made it almost unreadable.

Back in April I discussed the Joy of software: what you see may not be what you get. A web publisher should never do this to a writer!