A poll done in Providence found 41% of adults feared public speaking

Halloween is coming in three weeks, so it’s time to scare people with surveys about their fears. I ran across results from a telephone poll of 500 adults done by SurveyUSA for WLNE-TV in the Providence, Rhode Island area back on November 10, 2005. They asked just this single question:

“Do you personally have a fear of public speaking?”

in with five about sex offenders and another topic. 

Results are shown above in a bar chart. (Click on it to see a larger, clearer version). 41% feared public speaking, 58% didn’t, and 1% weren’t sure. The sample was 53% female, and 46% of them feared public speaking, while only 37% of the males did. There was not much effect of age. 42% of those aged 18 to 34 feared speaking, 40% aged 35 to 54 feared it, and 42% of those age 55 and older feared it. Ethnically the sample was 87% white, and 41% feared public speaking. Of the 6% Hispanic (just 30 people), only 31% feared public speaking. (The rest of that sample was 4% black, and 3% other).

The 41% found in this survey very close to the 40% found by the 2001 US Gallup poll. I am not sure why this poll data was released on Veteran’s Day of 2005.

When I think of Providence, I think of the fictional town of Quahog based on it, which is the setting for the adult TV cartoon show Family Guy.

Hiding data in a Harlequin PowerPoint chart

In his Make a Powerful Point blog on October 4th Gavin McMahon asked Are you chart smart? 3 stupid charting mistakes. The second mistake he showed was a Harlequin chart with unnecessary multiple colors (a different one for each bar) like in the costume shown above.

That vertical bar chart also had vertical captions, which are undesirable since they force your audience into tilting their heads sideways to read them, as is shown above in a painting. This posture is known as the Goren Lean (from Vincent D’Nofrio’s portrayal of Detective Robert Goren in the TV show Law and Order - Criminal Intent).  

PowerPoint has lots of options for making bad charts. An example is shown above. (Click on it to see a larger, clearer version). Data for it came from an August blog post. I’ve redone it using vertical bars, each both with a different color and texture, and a water droplet background (which looks more like a sponge). The vertical axis should be labeled percent, but I left off that helpful detail. I also left off the title that identified the data and source. And, of course, the vertical captions are in the silly Comic Sans font.

A better version with horizontal bars and captions is shown above. You don’t have to lean to read it, and you can tell what it’s about.

The Harlequin image came from Wikimedia Commons. You can see other versions of the Goren Lean here.

Now we’re only number 46!

On September 15th I blogged about being number 44 on Public Speaking 101: The Top Online Resources, a web page list at the Masters in Communication web site. Now an updated version of that list has 103 entries, and I've slipped down to number 46. Should that list now be called Public Speaking 103?

I looked a bit further at their web page with a Detailed List of Campuses that have a Masters in Communication Program, and am even less impressed by their level of detail. For the state of Washington just three universities in the Seattle area were listed, but they missed the University of Washington (who came to mind since on August 31st in Seattle they clobbered the Boise State University football team 38 to 6). They also missed Washington State University.

In the bay area of California they just listed California State University East Bay, but missed both San Jose State University and San Francisco State University. They also missed the University of California campuses in Davis and Santa Barbara.

Don’t rely on a single list. Look around, and you’ll probably find another.For public speaking blogs, look at Alltop Speaking.

What did you have for breakfast this fall morning?

Now that mornings are cooler, for breakfast people are choosing hot oatmeal with milk instead of cold cereal.

Oatmeal is made by cooking rolled oats, as are shown above. A variety of flavored instant varieties can be found in American supermarkets. They can be prepared by adding boiling water and waiting a minute or two, or mixed with cold water and microwaved. (I prefer to keep bulk oatmeal around, and add my own cinnamon, raisins, and sweetener). Are any other grains processed and used similarly for breakfast elsewhere? Yes!

Last year in Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid’s book Mangoes & Curry Leaves (Culinary Travels Through the Great Subcontinent) I read that:  

“Flattened rice, also known as rice flakes, is called chira or poha in northern India, aval in southern India. It’s rice that’s been cooked and then run through rollers and flattened into flakes. The flakes are a pale grayish white and fairly soft, rather than crisp. Sold in clear plastic bags, they keep well. Chira is very quick to reconstitute and requires no boiling, so it’s a godsend for cooks in very hot weather or in a big hurry.”

Here in Boise (at India Foods on Fairview Avenue) I found two-pound plastic bags of both thin and thick poha for sale. Thin poha (shown above) is the rice analog of instant oatmeal. 

Other ground-up grains like grits (from corn) and Cream of Wheat (farina) also are common breakfast foods. Porridge is the more general term, and it appears in stories like Goldilocks and the Three Bears. 

What do these breakfast cereals have to do with public speaking? In storytelling you have to begin with what your audience is familiar with, and then take them elsewhere.

Images of Goldilocks and a bowl of oatmeal both came from Wikimedia Commons.

Public speaking was the most common fear for twin women in Virginia

Back in 1992 the Archives of General Psychiatry published an article written by K. Kendler, M. C. Neale, R. C. Kessler, A. C. Heath, and L. J. Eaves titled Genetic Epidemiology of Phobias in Women (Interrelationship of agoraphobia, social phobia, situational phobia, and simple phobia). You can find an abstract at PubMed, or read the full text here.

They asked a sample of 2163 women who were in the Virginia Twin Registry a series of 16 questions about four categories of unreasonable fears that were severe enough to interfere with their lives (phobias), and listed their results in Table 1. I’ve shown those results above in a bar chart. (Click on it to see a larger, clearer view). Those fears were grouped into four categories:

AGORAPHOBIA
Being in Crowds - 6.6%  
Going out of the house alone - 4.1%
Being in open spaces 0.9%

ANIMAL PHOBIA
Snakes - 5.5%
Spiders - 3.3%
Bats - 1.6%
Insects - 1.0%

SITUATIONAL PHOBIA
Other high places - 7.4%
Airplanes - 4.7%
Other closed places - 3.7%
Bridges - 3.1%
Tunnels - 2.9%

SOCIAL PHOBIA
Giving a speech - 9.4%
Meeting new people - 4.4%
Using public bathrooms - 1.9%
Eating in public - 1.6%

The most common fear was giving a speech (social), followed by other high places (situational), being in crowds (agoraphobia), snakes (animals), and airplanes (situational).

They did a very detailed analysis, which I’m not going to try to summarize here, to find influences of genetic and environmental risk factors,. An image of the Kessler Twins came from Wikimedia Commons.

Putting numbers into context with a browser tool - The Dictionary of Numbers

On May 15th Randall Munroe blogged about an interesting new extension for the Google Chrome web browser called the Dictionary of Numbers:

“It searches the text in your browser for quantities it understands and inserts contextual statements in brackets. It might turn the phrase ‘315 million people’ into ‘315 million people [≈ the population of the United States]’.”

I illustrated it using a grayed version from one of Randall’s Xkcd cartoons that apparently parodied the recent monster movie Pacific Rim. So far I’ve been using Firefox, so I have not tried Dictionary of Numbers yet.

Funneling your big ideas through a small vocabulary

Explaining hard ideas simply always is a challenge. Almost two years ago I blogged about Communicating clearly to nontechnical audiences - the grandmother test. This week on The Eloquent Woman blog I read Denise Graveline’s post, Big ideas don’t need big words. But, where do you find the small ones?

Denise mentioned one solution - a recent tool called the Up-Goer Five Text Editor that was created by Cambridge geneticist Theo Sanderson. He was inspired by one of Randall Munroe’s Xkcd cartoons that tried to explain the Saturn V moon rocket using just the ten hundred (thousand) most common English words. (That cartoon may have come from an earlier one about the Simple English Wikipedia). Up-Goer puts a red underline below each uncommon word you use, and thus invites you to reconsider that choice.  

Up-Goer Five has inspired tumblr sites like Ten Hundred Words of Science and Up Goer Your Ph.D. I think it’s a useful tool. It can force you into a childlike sense of wonder, like the following seven-minute video description of the Cassini spacecraft’s mission to Saturn and its moons:




Carl Zimmer ranted that Up-Goer Five was useless:

“.... Because an average six-year-old has a vocabulary, by some estimates, of 16,000 words. And an average adult's vocabulary is around 60,000. So Up Goer Five is only useful if you are going to talk to pre-schoolers. For an audience that's any older--even second grade--I can't see how it can help.”

I think Carl’s claim is hilariously xenophobic since it ignores the large number of people learning English as a second or foreign language. I grew up listening to shortwave radio, so I was familiar with how the Voice of America (VOA) uses Special English broadcasts as a teaching tool. The Special English Word Book has just 1580 words. For an example, read or listen to this VOA news item on Mars Rover Marks First Year on Red Planet.

VOA also has a wonderful English in A Minute series that explains idioms like Burn the Midnight Oil:

“Everybody knows that Americans burn a lot of oil. But is there a special oil that they burn in the middle of the night?”

Using simple language can make us laugh though. Sixty years ago Andy Griffith recorded a hilarious six-minute comic monologue about college football:




The title for this post was inspired by Sally James, and the oil drum image was based on this one from Wikimedia Commons.