Stop playing - do serious digging before you come up with an opening statement

On August 27, 2019 at DiBartolomeo Consulting International there was a blog post titled 3 ways to lose your fear of public speaking that admonished:

“The first way to reduce the unknown is to study your topic thoroughly. You must strive to be the smartest man or woman in the room on your particular topic.”

It opened with a misleadingly claim that:

“According to the Chapman University Survey of American Fears, the number one fear of people is public speaking.”

They likely got that statistic from a October 30, 2014 Washington Post article titled America’s top fears: Public speaking, heights and bugs which shows up near the top on Google or Bing searches about surveys of public speaking and fear. But there were five annual Chapman surveys in 2014 through 2018 (and another for 2019 may appear next month). The other four tell a very different story than the 2014 survey. Rankings for fear of public speaking in them all are shown above.  

On October 27, 2014 I blogged about What do the most Americans fear? The Chapman Survey on American Fears and the press release copying reflex. In that post I noted that there were questions on lots of fears, but they were asked in different ways so they could not be compared directly. On October 29, 2014 I blogged about how twelve fears were listed under ‘Phobias’ in a post titled Chapman Survey on American Fears includes both zombies and ghosts.

Questions in the later surveys were asked consistently. In the 2015 survey public speaking ranked #26 of 88 fears, in the 2016 survey it ranked #33 of 79 fears, in the 2017 survey it ranked #52 of 80 fears, in the 2018 survey it ranked #59 of 94 fears. On January 5, 2019 I blogged about other misuses of the 2018 survey in a post titled How shallow research will destroy your credibility.

An image of a girl with a toy shovel came from the Library of Congress.

UPDATE

The 2019 Chapman Survey finally came out before Memorial Day of 2020 and found fear of public speaking ranked #54 of 88 fears. 

A cartoon tip on how not to wow your audience

On September 27, 2019 Zack Weinersmith published a Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal cartoon captioned Public Speaking Tip: Start off by wowing your audience with some big numbers. The text balloon says:

“First, I want you to imagine a cube sitting on the surface of the earth. The cube is 14,000 meters on each side. Nearly 3 trillion cubic meters. It’s not relevant to this talk on agricultural pest management, but wow, that’d be a really big cube.”  

How many words should be on a PowerPoint slide: 6, 12, 20, 25, 36, or 49?

In the September 2019 issue of Toastmaster magazine there is an article by Ryan Urie on pages 26 and 27 titled Make Your Slides Sing. In it he makes a silly statement that you should:

“Use as few words as possible, ideally no more than five or six per slide.”

Where on earth did that come from? Well, back on January 29, 2007 Seth Godin had blogged about Really Bad PowerPoint and dogmatically claimed (without any basis):

“No more than six words on a slide. EVER. There is no presentation so complex that this rule needs to be broken.”   

But six words is barely enough for an outrageous, brief, tabloid newspaper headline like Dwarf Rapes Nun; Flees in UFO.

Drive-By Billboards – 12 or 20 Words

Two other rules for limiting the number of words on a slide are based on the time required for reading. A May 29, 2018 article by Paul Nowak at Iris titled What is the average reading speed? says the range is from 200 to 250 words per minute. For simplicity I just will pick 240, or 4 words per second.

On page 140 In her 2008 book Slide:ology in a section on Text titled Remember the 3-second rule Nancy Duarte stated that:  

“Presentations are ‘glance media’ – more closely related to billboards than other media….

Ask yourself whether your message can be processed effectively within three seconds. The audience should be able to quickly ascertain the meaning before turning their attention back to the presenter.”

Her 3-second rule corresponds to 12 words, or twice Seth Godin’s 6. But then, on page 144 in another section headed How Many Words Should Be on a Slide? she instead says:

“There really are no official rules on the word count for a slide. Ultimately you need enough words to make you comfortable delivering your message. Put enough there to serve as a mnemonic, but go for a very low word count.”

On October 26, 2011 at Forbes there was an article by Jerry Weissman about venture capitalist Vinod Khosla’s Five-Second Rule. That corresponds to 20 words. On April 6, 2015 I blogged about it in a post titled Billboards and the five-second rule for PowerPoint slides.

NxN (5, 6, 7) Rules of Thumb – for 25, 36, or 49 Words

Communication Guidelines from the Boise State University College of Business and Economics say:

 “Use the 6 x 6 Rule: Keep the number of lines per slide to six or less and the number of words per line to six or less.”

Elsewhere (for the last fifteen years or so) along with the 6 x 6 rule there are similar versions - a 5 x 5 rule and a 7 x 7 rule, where the lines sometimes are stated as a number of bullet points.

None of these rules explicitly state how those words should be arranged – as a powerful headline sentence or phrase. On April 25, 2019 I blogged about how Your presentation and slides need powerful headlines, and on June 4, 2018 I blogged about how A presentation slide, presentation, or blog post needs a great headline rather than just a title. On February 19, 2014 I blogged about how Assertion-Evidence PowerPoint slides are a visual alternative to bullet point lists.

How does a PowerPoint from Toastmasters compare with Ryan Urie’s ideal of 5 or 6 words per slide?

Not well! As an example, let’s look at the Marketing Presentations web page on the Toastmasters International web site. The Open House PowerPoint presentation is titled Find Your Voice. The first (title) slide has nine words. The second slide has 3 bullet points and a total of 48 words. The third slide has 8 bullet points and a total of 46 words. The fourth slide has 5 bullet points and a total of 58 words. The fifth slide has 6 bullet points and a total of 41 words. The sixth slide, titled A Glimpse into Pathways, has 10 bullet points and a total of 111 words.

The pointing Uncle Sam image was adapted from an old poster at the Library of Congress.

September 28, 2019 update – should you only have images (0 words) on PowerPoint Slides? Probably not!

I received a comment on this post from Glenn (whose profile has neither a last name nor a location) that:

“I believe the correct answer for number of words on a non-title PowerPoint slide is zero. Use images only.”

Also, at The Official Toastmaster International Group on LinkedIn Sue Ness commented:

“No words. Just illustrations to support your message.”

On Page 210 of the 2014 book by Carmine Gallo titled Talk Like Ted: the 9 public speaking secrets of the world’s top minds he said:

“Remember Titanic explorer Robert Ballard in Chapter 4? His 2008 TED presentation contained 57 slides. There were no words on any slide! He showed pictures and artists’ renderings of the fascinating undersea worlds he’s discovered, but no text. Why? ‘I’m storytelling, not lecturing,’ Ballard told me.”

Mr. Ballard’s TED talk on The astonishing hidden world of the deep ocean has compelling, unambiguous images. Most of us do not have that quality of graphics, or have rehearsed so much that we can succinctly describe our slides without written words.  

In an article on October 8, 2012 titled Slides without Words at his web site The Mobile Presenter Dirk Haun noted:

“There's also a very practical reason to add a caption as a service for your audience: People may get distracted for a moment (say, by their phone or by something that happens next to them) and miss your introduction of the slide. Adding a caption will let them understand what you are talking about without having to interpret the photo.”

Stephen M. Kosslyn’s 2011 book titled Better PowerPoint (quick fixes based on how your audience thinks) discusses use of text. On page 61 under Point 3. Using Text with Photos and Clipart he says to:

“Include text with photos and clipart to ensure that:

Audience members will interpret the graphics correctly; many graphics are inherently ambiguous, and text can clarify what the graphics mean in the context of your presentation.

Audience members will remember the key concept you are illustrating.”

On Page 62 under Point 5. Presenting Evidence he say to:

“Use photos to present evidence for your case. Presenting both text and a graphic will greatly help your audience members to retain the information (Goldilocks).”

I believe that not having any words is overly restrictive and simply silly.

  

The joy of travel surprises

On September 10, 2019 I blogged about Visiting Crater Lake. Before we left I had researched the drive by looking both in an AAA TourBook for Oregon and an Oregon Road & Recreation Atlas. I looked at the web site for Crater Lake National Park, and for reviews of restaurants along our routes at TripAdvisor.

But some of our best travel experiences are surprises. On our way south from Bend, Oregon we stopped at the Lava Lands Visitor Center at the Newberry National Volcanic Monument. A graphic shown above let us put Crater Lake into a volcanic Cascade Range context along with Mount Hood, which we used to see east of us back when we lived in Portland.

In Klamath Falls we stayed for three nights at the Days Inn. The desk clerk told us that after we had visited Crater Lake we should see the half dozen waterfalls west from the north entrance  along Oregon Route 138 - the Rogue-Umpqua Scenic Byway to Roseberg as is shown above on a map. We took her advice on Thursday, September 5th after visiting the Collier Logging Museum. Views of Clearwater Falls and Whitehorse Falls are shown above. They are not very tall, but are located just off the Byway and sound very soothing.

Toketee Falls was another surprise. The road to its trailhead was flanked by a very leaky 12-foot diameter redwood pipeline for the North Umpqua Hydroelectric Project (shown above). We decided to skip the half-mile forest hike to those falls, which would have included going up 97 steps, and down another 125.

On Friday we drove down to Crescent City, California and then north along the Pacific Coast Highway to Florence, Oregon. In late afternoon we stopped north of Reedsport at the Oregon Dunes Overlook shown above.

Saturday we drove home to Boise. From Florence we went east on Oregon 126 and then took what our Garmin GPS recommended for getting through Eugene and Springfield. East of McKenzie Bridge we also followed the GPS and took the very scenic Old McKenzie Highway (Oregon 242) over to Sisters. The Dee Wright Observatory surrounded by black lava rock at the summit (as shown above) is a striking landmark on this route. Then we took U.S. Route 20 back to Boise.

We had two other surprises in our room at the Days Inn in Klamath Falls. Most motel rooms come with a rarely-used land line telephone and a cheap LED AM-FM clock radio on the nightstand. The Days Inn had neither. But the microwave oven had a clock display, so we didn’t miss the clock on that radio. I haven't used a motel room phone very often.

Fear of public speaking doesn’t happen to everybody - or all the time

On September 16, 2019 Douglas Kruger posted a 4-1/2 minute YouTube video titled From amateur to expert - my number one tip for conquering fear. I watched it after he posted about it at the LinkedIn groups Public Speaking and Public Speaking Network. His tip about reframing fear is sensible, but his introduction to it is not. He begins:

“Despite how confident they may look, nobody you have ever met in your lifetime is exempt from fear. Fear is one of the most basic human emotions and it seems to underpin everything. If you are really paying attention to it we seem to stew in fear as a species. So when was the last time you felt terribly nervous before a big presentation, before a big meeting, before an important date?  

It happens to everyone, and it happens all the time. We simply don’t have access to other people’s internal emotional states. And that’s why we tend to perceive the people around us as more confident, and we perceive ourselves as more fearful.  

It’s a fallacy. It’s a fallacy that is easy to understand when you realize that you only have access to your own internal state. What you have access to in terms of other people is their external state. You’re seeing the body language. You’re seeing the act. You’re seeing the persona. The fear is always there.

I’ve been a professional speaker for some fifteen years now, and people ask whether or not I become nervous, and I get a little afraid before I get up on the stage. And the answer is yes, it never goes away. It gets better. It gets easier, and you learn to control it. But I think there is something of a perverse comfort in the idea that it doesn’t ever go away, and so if you’re feeling the fear you’re human, you are mortal , you are normal.”    

Mr. Kruger commits another fallacy of assuming that everyone else thinks the same way he does. He does not provide any proof for his claim that fear happens to everyone, and it happens all the time.  

While we cannot directly access the internal state of other people, we certainly can ask them about how they feel – specifically how much they fear things like public speaking. On December 20, 2016 I blogged about Bursting the overblown claim that 95% of Americans fear public speaking at some level. In that post I discussed percentages from both three annual Chapman Surveys of American Fears and YouGov surveys in the U.S. and Britain. (Since then there have been two more Chapman surveys). Percentages from them all for Not Afraid are as follows:

Chapman 2014 – 34.1%

Chapman 2015 – 36.7%

Chapman 2016 – 38.3%

Chapman 2017 – 41.9%

Chapman 2018 – 41.4%

YouGov U.S. 2014 – 23%

YouGov Britain 2014 – 19%

Averaging the five Chapman surveys, 38.5% or almost 2 out of 5 Americans were NOT afraid of public speaking. The YouGov surveys found more like 1 out of 5. If people were as self-aware as a pro like Mr. Kruger, then you might expect them to all be afraid. But they aren’t.

Do people fear speaking all the time, or just in some situations? Back on November 2, 2008 I blogged about how Public speaking is still the #1 specific social fear according to the latest results from the NCS-R survey. In that post I mentioned two interesting results from the earlier National Comorbidity Survey – that while 30.2% feared public speaking only 15.2% feared talking in front of a small group.

The joy of acronyms or initialisms – and the heartbreak of RAS Syndrome

Acronyms are a compact way for describing things. On July 5, 2019 I blogged about how in a speech The first time you use an acronym you need to define it.

The Merriam Webster dictionary defines an acronym as:

“a word (such as NATO, radar, or laser) formed from the initial letter or letters of each of the successive parts or major parts of a compound term.”

and then adds it also means:

“An abbreviation (such as FBI) formed from initial letters: INITIALISM.”

Their entry for initialism further explains:

“Acronym is a fairly recent word, dating from the 1940s, although acronyms existed long before we gave them that name. The term was preceded in English by the word initialism, meaning an abbreviation formed from the initial letters of a phrase, and which has been in use since the late 19th century.

Some people feel strongly that acronym should only be used for terms like NATO, which is pronounced as a single word, and that initialism should be used if the individual letters are all pronounced distinctly, as with FBI. Our research shows that acronym is commonly used to refer to both types of abbreviations.”

An acronym may change over time. In eastern Idaho there is what currently is known just as the  Idaho National Laboratory (INL) - pronounced eye-null. Before 2005 it instead was known as the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory (INEEL) - pronounced eye-kneel. Before 1997 it was known as the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory (INEL) - pronounced eye-nell. When it began in 1949 it instead was the National Reactor Testing Station (NRTS).  

Triple-letters are a special subset of acronyms. Let’s look at those from the first half of the alphabet. We begin with the American Automobile Association (AAA). Next comes the Better Business Bureau (BBB), the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), and Direct Distance Dialing (DDD). Then there are Eastern Equine Encephalitis (EEE) a disease, Family Food Fight (FFF) an American reality cooking competition television series, Girls, Guns and Glory (GGG) a former band name, Hash House Harriers (HHH) a running group, the Insurance Information Institute (III), Japanese Jujitsu (JJJ), the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), Lawrence Livermore Laboratory (LLL), and the Million Marijuana March (MMM). The vowels are completed by Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) and the Union of UK Unicyclists (UUU).

But there also is the heartbreaking RAS Syndrome (redundant acronym syndrome) which you should avoid. An article by Mark Memmott at NPR on January 6, 2015 titled Do You Suffer from RAS Syndrome? explained how:

“At her favorite gourmet market last week, Korva went to the ATM machine, inserted her card, squinted at the LCD display, entered her PIN number and withdrew cash to pay for her RAS Syndrome therapy.”

The joy of portmanteau words

Yesterday’s blog post discussed The joy of compound words. Portmanteaus are more compact combinations. The Merriam Webster dictionary defines a portmanteau as:

“A word or morpheme whose form and meaning are derived from as blending of two or more distinct forms (such as smog from smoke and fog).”

A portmanteau originally was a suitcase with two compartments, as is shown above. Wikipedia has a long list of portmanteau words.

Three portmanteaus I particularly like are:

Electrocute: electricity + execute

Jackalope: jackrabbit + antelope

Satisfice: satisfactory + suffice

There is a seven-minute YouTube video of a TEDYouth talk from 2014 by lexicographer Erin McKean titled  Go ahead, make up new words! in which she explains:

“Another way that you can make words in English is kind of like compounding, but instead you use so much force when you squish the words together that some parts fall off. So these are blend words, like ‘brunch’ is a blend of ‘breakfast’ and ‘lunch’." 

Portmanteau words come from 1865 in the novel Through the Looking Glass by Charles Dodson (Lewis Carroll). You can find the full text here at Gutenberg. In Chapter VI. Humpty Dumpty, he recites the first verse of the poem Jabberwocky:

“Twas brillig, and the slithy toves

Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;

All mimsy were the borogoves,

And the mome raths outgrabe.”

Then he explains some terms:

“Well, ‘slithy’ means ‘lithe and slimy.’ ‘Lithe’ is the same as ‘active.’ You see it’s like a portmanteau—there are two meanings packed up into one word….”

“Well, then, ‘mimsy’ is ‘flimsy and miserable’ (there’s another portmanteau for you).”

Wikipedia explains that the name Tiguan (a compact crossover vehicle from Volkswagen) is a portmanteau of tiger and leguan (German for iguana).  

Chapter 2 of Boise author Amanda K. Turner’s 2012 book This Little Piggy Went to the Liquor Store describes five humorous portmanteaus created by her in-laws, the Turners:

Balslamic: balsamic + Islamic

Dwelve: dwell + delve

Marianade: marinate + marinade

Snidbits: snippets + tidbits

Substanance: substance + sustenance

The joy of compound words

Effective public speaking depends on choosing specific words to describe our ideas. Frequently those are compound words, especially nouns. The Merriam Webster dictionary defines a compound as: “A word consisting of components that are words.”

Often (but not always) those components will be a pair of nouns like tooth + brush = toothbrush. Word order matters – a boathouse is not the same as a houseboat.

At the Learn English Today web site the web page including compound nouns discusses several other possibilities:

An adjective and a noun (blackboard, greenhouse, redhead)

An adjective and a verb (dry-cleaning)

A verb and an adverb (drawback, takeover)

An adverb and a verb (input, outbreak).  

Words may either be placed next to each other or coupled via hyphens, like the model train engine and car shown above. Rules for hyphenation are complex. The U.S. Government Printing Office Style Manual (whose 2016 edition can be downloaded here) has chapters on Compounding Rules (#6) and Compounding Examples (#7). Rule 6.7 says that:

“A hyphen is used to avoid doubling a vowel or tripling a consonant except after the short prefixes co, de, pre, pro and re, which are generally printed solid.”

Some compound words contain more than two words, as shown above by a longer model train. An article by Karina Martinez-Carter on June 10, 2013 at The Week titled 8 of our favorite ridiculously long German words mentioned Rechtsschutzversicherungsgesellschaften (legal expenses insurance companies). Decades ago I read a humorous claim that there was a single German word corresponding to the following English sentence:

“The woman who stands in a kiosk next to the opera house and sells the remaining tickets at a discount right before the performance begins.”   

Hopefully you do not have either a fear of words - which The Phobia List web page refers to as logophobia or verbophobia, or a fear of long words – which they call sesquipedalophobia or (absurdly) hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia.

Back on August 30, 2012 I blogged about Uncommon fears and made up hoplocynohydrophobia  to describe the fear of getting shot by a swimming dog carrying a handgun in its mouth. I just searched at Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo and found no one but me has ever used that word.

Don’t stick a ‘candle’ in your ear to remove excess wax

Sometimes I am amazed by the curious things people do and believe.

Ear candling or ‘coning’ involves sticking the bottom of a rolled-up wax-coated cloth cone in your ear (while lying on your side) and then lighting the other open top end – as is shown above. Over at Amazon you can buy a 2017 book by Vikki Kinsella titled Hopi Ear Candling: a complete home study course. The section describing how candles work says:

“The candle is inserted in the ear canal – always the narrow end first – and then the top of the candle is lit. The candle burns, sending smoke into the ear canal and this pushes out the air. The warmth will help the wax to soften and loosen any debris that is within the ear. The smoke can fill the ear and will help mucus and any other debris sitting within the sinus passages. The debris is dissolved and then can be drawn up through the ear by the pressure that has been created when the candle begins to burn. There is a small portion of the candle that does not burn and some of the debris will collect in this section.”

At the American Academy of Audiology web site on June 22, 2010 there was an Opinion Editorial  by Jackie Clark, Douglas L. Beck, and Walter Kutz titled Ear Candles and Candling: ineffective and dangerous. It discussed how the following four claims for ear candling are false:

1] Interconnections in the head allow the candles to drain the entire system through the ear.

2] Oxygen drawn through the candle will create a vacuum.

3] When a vacuum is created, it will pull residue out from the ear canal.

4] The method is safe, noninvasive, and effective. 

That editorial referred to a 1996 magazine article by D. R. Seely, S. M. Quigley, and A. W. Langman in Laryngoscope titled Ear Candles – Efficacy and Safety, which you can download here. They surveyed otolaryngologists and found the complications shown above in a chart.  

  

On February 18, 2010 the U.S. Food & Drug Administration had a consumer update titled Don’t get burned: stay away from ear candles. Health Canada also discussed Ear candling and advised:

“However, this old home remedy has no proven medical benefits and can cause serious injuries.”

Ear candling also just was thoroughly debunked by Edzard Ernst on page 165 of his 2019 book Alternative Medicine: a critical assessment of 150 modalities, which you can read at Google Books.

There is a 13-minute YouTube video by Clifford R. Olson from August 31, 2018 titled Do ear candles work to remove earwax? His answer is no. What got me started on this topic is another 15-minute YouTube video from Jonathan Jarry on September 3, 2019 titled Video – the strange case of the illegal ear candle.

The very last word on ear candles comes from a May 17, 1993 Seattle Times article by humor columnist Dave Barry titled I’m all fired up over a cure for ear wax. Dave said that if something went wrong, then the newspaper would use this headline:

MAN KILLED IN EAR BLAZE

Deserved to Die, Authorities Say

Evolution of road graders

A road grader is a fascinating piece of construction equipment. Modern ones like the Caterpillar motor graders shown above have enhanced GPS-based controls on their blades (antennas indicated by arrows). They don’t need surveyors and stakes to grade land to a desired contour. How did graders evolve?  

On Tuesday, September 3rd we were driving south in Oregon on U.S. Route 97 and drove past the Collier Logging Museum 30 miles north of Klamath Falls. On Thursday September 5th we stopped and visited that lovely 146-acre museum. It has equipment from three eras: horse and oxen (1860 – 1900), steam (1890 – 1920), and internal combustion (1920 – today). There also is a ‘village’ of historic log cabins.

In displays on the horse and era there was a sign and an Adams Leaning Wheel grader. At the Historic Indianapolis.com web site I found more on Adams graders in an article by Lisa Lorentz on August 31, 2014 titled Sunday Adverts: Don’t Read This. The South African KHPlant web site has more Historic Motor Grader Pictures showing the evolution.

I looked on the Library of Congress web site and found two pictures showing road grading in Alaska, one from 1916 showing another tractor towed grader, and one from 1942 showing a motor grader working on the Alaska-Canada highway.    

Visiting Crater Lake

Last week my wife and I finally visited Crater Lake National Park in southern Oregon. That six mile long by 4- 1/2 mile wide lake is the deepest in the U.S. at 0.37 mile (1,949 feet) and it is amazingly clear and blue.

On Wednesday, September 4th we took the two-hour 33-mile Rim Drive Trolley Tour narrated by a park ranger. The trolley stopped six times for us to look and take pictures, four of which are shown above.

Looking east there is Wizard Island. Looking south there is a smaller island, the Phantom Ship (circled in yellow). Another view through trees shows the Phantom Ship more clearly, and closeup. Although it looks small it really is 500 feet long and 170 feet high.

Crater Lake was formed by collapse of the ~12,000 foot high Mount Mazama after a gigantic volcanic eruption 7,700 years ago. That eruption spewed 50 cubic kilometers of molten rock – about 100 times that for the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens.  

     

Crater Lake was on my ‘bucket list’ of places to see. We saw it during the less crowded time after Labor Day. Still we had to stay at a motel in Klamath Falls, since the park lodge was fully booked.