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It’s very easy to get into a rut and use the same cliches everyone else does. Why not do something surprising and go off in an entirely different direction?
Louis L’Amour wrote 89 novels, almost all of which were Westerns. I once read that the supply boats for offshore oil rigs on the Gulf coast used to deliver and swap them by the boxful.
Mr. L’Amour also tried turning that genre inside out. His novel Last of the Breed is an Eastern in which a Native American test pilot had been shot down over the Soviet Union, and then escapes from a prison in Siberia. He flees to the east toward the Bering Strait, pursued by a Yakut trapper.
The image of a fork in the Oxbottom Road is from Nigel Freeman.
Allyn & Bacon has an excellent Public Speaking web site that contains supplemental materials for a basic college course.It contains the following six topics and sub-topics. You can find their hyperlinked Table of Contents here.
1. Assess Your Speechmaking Situation
a. Find a topic
b. Clarify your speaking goal
c. Develop your central idea or thesis
2. Analyze Your Audience
a. Determine characteristics of your audience
b. Consider cultural considerations
c. Interact with your audience during your talk
d. Get feedback following your talk
3. Research Your Topic
a. Develop your expertise
b. Work with other experts to boost your credibility
c. Assess the credibility of resources
d. Work with reference librarians
e. Find evidence to back up your claims
4. Organize and Write Your Speech
a. Choosing a pattern of organization
b. Starting your talk
c. Ending your talk
d. Developing visual aids
e. Using PowerPoint
5. Deliver Your Presentation
a. Select a mode of delivery
b. Demonstrate dynamism
c. Manage your nervousness
d. Interact with your audience
e. Use visual aids
f. Dress for success
6. Discern Other Talks
a. Analyze other talks
b. Give feedback to other speakers
c. Learn from expert speakers
d. Work with public speaking support groups e. Volunteer to speak
f. Consider a career in public speaking
For each sub-topic there is is a thoughtful paragraph with a few links. For example, under Deliver Your Presentation the paragraph on Manage your nervousness mentions taking the Personal Report of Public Speaking Anxiety, which I have mentioned in a previous post about how to tell if you really have a high level of anxiety.
Under Discern Other Talks the paragraph on Work with public speaking support groups mentions Toastmasters, Powertalk International (ITC), Speaking Circles International, and the Association for Women in Communications.
The home page for the website has links to other sites for six public speaking textbooks with even more information.
The most obvious ways to buy books about public speaking are to check the shelves at your local bookstore, or to go online and look at Amazon. There are four other less obvious places where you can dig up books, and be your own Santa Claus.
One is remainder stores like Edward R. Hamilton, Bookseller. They are over 40 years old, and still have the same cranky Yankee business model. You can get a printed catalog or look on their web site. Then you write down or print your order on a form, attach a check or money order including just $3.50 for shipping and handling, and mail it to a post office box in Connecticut. They send your books (or CDs, or DVDs) via media mail. Right now they have Scott S. Smith’s, The Everything Public Speaking Book for $6 instead of the $12 at Amazon shown in my previous post. Last decade Hamilton finally got less cranky and also started another web site where you can order with a credit card.
A second is eBay, the online auction site which, among other things, is a worldwide garage sale. There are both new and used books on eBay, and some are “Buy It Now” with fixed prices. Some charity thrift stores also are on eBay. Goodwill in Seattle had a used copy of Timothy Koegel’s, The Exceptional Presenter for $7 (with free shipping) rather than the $15 new at Amazon.
A third is used book stores shown on Bookfinder.com. Two of my local thrift stores, Idaho Youth Ranch and Goodwill (Easter Seals, Meridian) even are there via ABE Books.
A fourth is book swapping sites like PaperbackSwap.com. I listed some books I no longer needed, and then earned credits for paying to send them out to other members. Then I requested several fairly recent public speaking textbooks from other members.
The Wikimedia Commons photo of a laborer is from David Goehring.
If you are serious about public speaking, then you will want Santa to bring you some good books rather than just games or toys. Here are seven suggestions with current prices at Amazon. I have read or skimmed these at my friendly local public library:
1. Kristin Arnold, Boring to Bravo, 2010, $17
2. James S. O’Rourke, The Truth About Confident Presenting, 2010 $15
3. Scott S. Smith, The Everything Public Speaking Book, 2008, $12
4. Richard Zeoli, The 7 Principles of Public Speaking, 2008, $10
5. Timothy Koegel, The Exceptional Presenter, 2007 $15.
6. Marathe Mandar, The Successful Speaker, 2007 $27
7. Cyndi Maxey and Kevin O’Conner, Present Like a Pro, 2006, $10
Check the shelves at your local bookstore, either an independent or a chain (perhaps Barnes and Noble, Borders, etc). Another was is to go online and look at Amazon. You can use the Look Inside feature at Amazon, or search Google Books to examine the table of contents and sample some pages before you buy.
Don’t just assume that Amazon will have the lowest price! When comparing prices it is useful to try Bookfinder, which has a default setting that lists total prices including shipping. There are other less obvious ways to buy books, but that’s another story.
Back in late August a web site created by John Capps called SpeechFocus went online. The main feature is four videos of university student audiences (minus sound so far).
All were recorded at a state university in New Jersey, and they look appropriately bored. There is one with 12 people in a U-shaped layout, one with a small audience of 16, and there are two with a large audience of 30.
Without sound it’s a pretty rough simulation of a public speaking class. But, it is a novel alternative to practicing in front of your pets or some stuffed animals.
One advantage of speaking over writing is that we can convey tone via inflection and gestures. We even can use paired fingers to make “quotation marks” in the air when explaining an evil plan. In writing we just have to use punctuation marks or emoticons.
For example, a percontation point (like a backward question mark, as shown above) can be used at the end of a rhetorical question.
Chess has a vocabulary with six punctuation combinations for commenting on moves:
!! = Brilliant Move
! = Good Move
!? = Interesting Move
?! = Dubious Move
? = Mistake
?? = Blunder
In his Sheldon cartoons Dave Kellett occasionally has lamented that we need more punctuation marks to address everyday situations. Some of his are existing symbols with reassigned meanings like:
% = Only a tiny part of me could be considered glad.
//// = I build huge mental walls to block awkward truths.
Others are brand new symbols for:
Your ravings make no sense. I highly suspect you’ve been breathing paint fumes.
Don’t particularly want to know the answer.
To the Car! Quickly!
Is it better to give a broad (wide) or a deep (narrow) presentation? Should you try to cover a lot of material (overview) without much detail, or just one topic in excruciating detail? I think the answer depends both on the audience and the presenter.
On October 29th in her Speaking About Presenting blog Olivia Mitchell discussed 6 Reasons You Shouldn’t Give an Overview Presentation, which were:
1. It’s not memorable
2. Nothing will stand out
3. Positions you as a generalist
4. It’s uninspiring
5. It’s boring
6. It’s not efficient
She referred to a 2008 post by Garr Reynolds, Deep or wide? You decide. Mr. Reynolds in turn referred to Michael Ally’s book, The Craft of Scientific Presentations. Both posts showed graphics like the left and center boxes shown above. Olivia also referred to a November 2009 post by Jon Thomas, The Advantage of Depth Instead of Width in a Presentation.
On page 63 of The Craft of Scientific Presentations Michael Alley says that:
“Just because giving a ‘broad-scope’ presentation is difficult does not mean that one should avoid giving such presentations. Rather, giving a broad-scope presentation means that the challenge is greater and the speaker has to think long and hard about the presentation’s structure.”
An old psychology (or philosophy) joke says that the whole world is divided into two types of people: those who divide things into two groups, and those who don’t. I am one of the second type of people. I think it is possible to give an “L-shaped” presentation that starts by explaining one key point in depth, and then continues more broadly (as shown above at the right).
For example, back in January at the SIEO-NACE Sun Valley Symposium I gave a 45-minute presentation that was an Introduction to Stainless Steels and Corrosion. It was divided into three sections:
1. Passive Film and Processing (21 slides)
2. Types and Typical Compositions (10 slides)
3. Corrosion - Pitting, Crevice, and Stress Corrosion Cracking (16 slides)
My first section had the key point, how stainless steels work. The surface of a stainless steel reacts with oxygen to form an extremely thin, self-healing, chromium-rich passive film which stops further corrosion. This process is called passivation, and the invisible film is only 10 to 100 atoms thick. When you understand how thin the film is, then you can understand why the surface must be processed meticulously to remove contaminants from fabrication. I spent over 40% of my time on that first section. The slide sequence I used was discussed in a January 12th blog post on How Thin is Extremely Thin?
I think you can and should give an overview presentation when you really know both your audience and your topic. It is not easy, but it is rewarding. Previously I had attended two other Sun Valley symposia, so I knew that an in-depth presentation would not really be appropriate. Another speaker had cancelled in mid-December. I had just three weeks to prepare as a fill-in. The talk was a celebration of my 30th anniversary as a NACE member. By the way, I'm sure I read Jon Thomas's post before I started planning.
