At her Speechwriter-Ghostwriter blog on February 25, 2020 Jane Genova had a post
titled Like Michael Bloomberg, anyone can be nailed to cross for
language/behavior light years ago. Her first two sentences were:
“It’s not only dysfunctional relatives who keep bringing up
what allegedly or really did happen light years ago. What we’re witnessing is
that in politics there is no statute of limitations on what others claim had
been said/done decades ago.”
But whatever Mr. Bloomberg did was on this planet, not in a
galaxy far, far away. A light-year is an astronomical unit for distance, not for
time. She should have said decades both times – in the title and text. It only
takes a minute to check and not be guilty of bad writing.
A bag full of clichés can be a humorous way to tell a story.
The Missing Years is a 1991 folk album by John Prine containing a song titled
It’s a Big Old Goofy World that has a whole stack of similes beginning with:
“Up in the morning, work like a dog
Is better than sitting like a bump on a log
Mind all your manners, be quiet as a mouse
Someday you’ll own a home that’s as big as a house
I know a fella, he eats like a horse
Knocks his old balls round the old golf course
You oughta see his wife, she’s a cute little dish
She smokes like a chimney and drinks like a fish
There’s a big old goofy man
Dancing with a big old goofy girl
Ooh baby, it’s a big old goofy world”
In June 2017 the country single All the Pretty Girls sung by
Kenny Chesney was released. That song begins:
“All the pretty girls said pick me up at eight
All the pretty girls said I’m going to L.A.
All the pretty girls said I hate my hair
Talking to the mirror in their underwear
All the lost boys said I just got paid
All the lost boys said I wanna get laid
When the town goes blue and the lights blink red
All the lost boys do what the pretty girls said
I’m home for the summer, shoot out the lights
Don’t blow my cover, oh I’m free tonight
I’m coming over, call all your friends
Somebody hold me, all the pretty girls said
All of the whiskey went to my head
Shut up and kiss me, all the pretty girls said”
Shut up and kiss me also is the title of a 1994 country song
by Mary Chapin Carpenter.
The cartoon was adapted from one at Wikimedia Commons.
Have you ever gotten stuck when trying to find a topic for a
speech? Me too! One way to bypass that dilemma is to get advice from a magazine
article. The December 2019 issue of Toastmaster magazine has an article by
Craig Harrison titled Everyone Has a Story. On January 5, 2020 I blogged about
how Toastmasters may also enjoy reading another magazine. That post mentioned the
January-February 2020 issue of Speaker magazine (from the U. S. National
Speakers Association) that has another article by Ben Glenn titled Tips for a
creative mindset. His seven are: Research, Write It Down, Be Curious, Incorporate
Pop Culture, Travel, Go for a Walk, Test Your Material.
Once you have a rough idea for a topic you can go on to research
it. Look around to find out how other well-known speakers previously had covered
it. Should you begin this process just by using a browser to web search with
Google (at their Advanced Search page) or Bing? Heck no!
About a decade ago I
saw an ad in Toastmaster for a monthly magazine called Vital Speeches of the
Day. It prints great speeches but an annual subscription currently costs $89. That
is more than I want to spend by myself, so I looked for other ways to get
access.
But you and I are not alone. Instead we are part of a large,
powerful group – Idaho Taxpayers. Collectively we already have paid for access
to that magazine (and lots more) via an state organization called Libraries
Linking Idaho (LiLI). 85 years of articles from that magazine are available from
our public library web sites. I can sign into the EBSCOhost databases with my
card number from the Ada Community Library. How many other magazines (journals)
are on those databases? The big three are Academic Search Premier (4,600), Business
Search Premier (2,300) and MasterFILE Premier (1,700). You likely have either EBSCOhost
or a similar set of databases purchased by your state library system.
For example, suppose I wanted to do the electronic
equivalent of browsing through a stack of recent issues from Vital Speeches of
the Day. I first could pick the database Academic Search Premier, and Select
Advanced Search. In Select a Field, pick SO Journal Name and enter Vital
Speeches of the Day. Then click Limit your results for Full Text. To the right
of Refine Results point to Relevance and change to instead use Date Newest. Then
I later can select some other fields to search by: Subject, Author, Title, etc.
One of the speeches I found in the February 2013 issue was Barack Obama’s speech
at the funeral of his inspiration and colleague, Hawaii’s Senator Daniel K.
Inouye, titled Freedom and Dignity Were Not Abstractions.
Back on February 24, 2015 I blogged aboutHow to do a better
job of speech research than the average Toastmaster (by using your friendly local
public and state university libraries). In that post I covered the following five
items:
1] Start with your public library.
2] You don’t have to reinvent the wheel.
3] Learn how to fish for information.
4] For even more depth, visit your state university library.
5] Where can I find out even more about research?
Now you can better use Google or Bing (and other tools). On July
8, 2010 I blogged aboutWeb search: 10 strategies for various occasions. They are:
Guess and Go, A Shot in the Dark, Bingo, Everything But the Kitchen Sink, Take
a Big Bite, A Little Help From Our Friends, Pearl Growing, Find Someone Who
Cares, Let the Fish Swim to You, and No Stone Unturned. One of those, Find
Someone Who Cares, is to interview an Expert. On August 24, 2009 I blogged
about the Joy of research: Answers may not come from where or who you might
expect.
How much research is enough? That depends. On January 24,
2020 I blogged aboutA humorous reminder that you don’t have to be the world
expert on a topic in order to speak. If you are speaking to twenty people in a Toastmasters club
for six minutes, then you may not need much depth. But if you are doing an
18-minute TED talk you will want to go way deeper. On February 4, 2019 I
blogged aboutReliable places to find information for your speeches. In that
post I discussed using some other tools you might find at a state university
library, and elsewhere (like databases for finding about opposing viewpoints on
controversial topics, and the planetary card catalog WorldCat).
Back on July 5, 2014 I blogged about how Reference librarians
are the heroes of research. In that post I discussed how one got me an
extremely obscure handbook via interlibrary loan. Some old books are digitized
at Google Books (many with that pesky Snippet View) or are in the Internet
Archive. On January 10, 2020 I blogged aboutHow old are brief (3 to 7 minute)
speech formats? There I mentioned finding two books from back in 1886 with
Five-Minute Sermons for Low Masses on All Sundays of the Year. The oldest book
I found so far at the Internet Archive is by John Bulwer - Chirologia or the
Natural Language of the Hand from back in 1644. It is about gestures and is
discussed in an article at the Public Domain Review.
You need to maintain a skeptical attitude when doing
research. On October 9, 2017 I blogged that It must be true, since I read it in
a book. That post discussed reading a claim in a cookbook that iodine was added
to salt as an anticaking agent – which is nonsense. In local public libraries
you can find over a dozen books about homeopathy, although on January 6, 2016 I
blogged about how According to Consumer Reports, homeopathy is an emperor with
no clothes.
This blog post also is a handout for the February 26, 2020
meeting of the Pioneer Toastmasters Club in Boise, Idaho with a theme of
Finding speech topics and doing research.
Back on April 5, 2018 Doug Savage had the first in a series
of Savage Chickens cartoons about FREAKBOT, which freaks out about your
life so you don’t have to. Today he posted another cartoon titled Afraid? specifically about public
speaking anxiety. Would delegating a robot standing beside you to scream Aaaugh! help you
feel better about being behind the lectern?
Back on June 11, 2018 I had blogged aboutHow should you
stage a panel discussion at a conference? At Level 5 in the new Pathways
educational program at Toastmasters International one elective project is to Moderate
a Panel Discussion, as is briefly described in their evaluation form.
In my previous post I had linked to an article by Kristin
Arnold in the April 2015 Toastmaster magazine on How to moderate a panel
discussion. But I omitted both her next article in the November 2016
Toastmaster titled 10 Ways to add more pizzazz to your panel discussion and her
previous article in the March 2014 Speaker magazine on Moderating Panel
Discussions.
In addition to her Powerful Panelsblog, Kristin has written
another two dozen articles on a wide variety of topics at LinkedIn Pulse, titled
as follows:
Both her Toastmaster magazine articles also mention a free,
seven-part video course, which you can watch on YouTube in almost exactly an
hour (once you click to skip those darn ads):
In the second part Kristin mentions at 2:40 that panelists
shouldn’t be ‘Dashboard Dogs’ – almost identical bobbleheads as shown above.
But if there are greatly different opinions, you instead might wind up
intervening in a dogfight between two like The Donald and Hillary Clinton.
This and That images from the National Bobblehead Museum
came from Adam Moss at Wikimedia Commons.
At the GQ website on February 12, 2020 there is an article
by Clay Skipper titled How to overcome insecurity, according to Hollywood’s
favorite therapist. It contains an interview with Dr. Barry Michels which has
useful Jungian advice on confidence and self-doubt. But it also contains a
hilariously overconfident statement that:
“This is why public speaking is the number one fear in every
single survey that's ever done. It actually ranks higher in people's minds than
death.”
Blanket statements are dangerous. You have to do a lot of
serious research before you can confidently say either EVERY or NONE rather
than just SOME. The best known survey contradicting his statement is described in another article by Geoffrey
Brewer at Gallup on March 19, 2001 titled Snakes top list of Americans’ fears.
That one did not include death though.
Chapman University is in Orange, California – just a 35 mile
drive from Hollywood. The most recent 2018 Chapman Survey of American Fears ranked
dying (death) at #54 (27.9%) and public speaking at #59 (26.2%). On January 27,
2020 I blogged aboutWhy do we often hear about the 2014 Chapman Survey of American
Fears, but not about the other four done in 2015, 2016, 2017, and 2018? The 2014
survey had ranked fear of public speaking at #1, but did not include death. The
2015 survey ranked public speaking #26 (28.4%) and death #43 (21.9%).
I have been enjoying reading Alberto Cairo’s excellent 2019
book How Charts Lie, which is subtitled Getting Smarter About Visual Information.
It is all about graphicacy, the analog of literacy, which the Merriam-Webster
dictionary defines as:
“the ability to understand, use, or generate graphic images
(such as maps and diagrams).”
Mr. Cairo’s book has the following chapter titles:
1] How Charts Work
2] Charts That Lie by Being Poorly Designed
3] Charts That Lie by Displaying Dubious Data
4] Charts That Lie by Displaying Insufficient Data
5] Charts That Lie by Concealing or Confusing Uncertainty
6] Charts That Lie by Suggesting Misleading Patterns
(7)] ConclusionDon’t Lie
to Yourself (or to Others) with Charts
You can download the graphics from that book here. You can read
the text here at Google Books. Alberto’s blog has a February 14, 2020 post on ‘How
Charts Lie’: a few edits to the first print edition.
In Chapter 2 (Charts That Lie by Being Poorly Designed), his
first example on page 54 as shown above, is what at first glance appears to be
a plot having time as the horizontal scale with two lines on a common vertical
scale one increasing and one decreasing. Instead it is nefarious nonsense. When
you glance at the number in the upper right (328,000) you see it is only 35% of
the one at the lower right (935,573). On October 1, 2015 at Politifact Linda Qiu
described how a Chart shown at Planned Parenthood hearing is misleading and ‘ethically
wrong.’ Cancer Screening was cherry picked as a topic that decreased. The largest
category (which also increased) really was STI/STD Testing and Treatment.
In Chapter 3 (Charts That Lie by Displaying Dubious Data) on
page 99 he uses the example shown above, where the red state of Kansas anomalously
has the highest page views per person on Pornhub. Then he explains that Kansans
likely really aren’t naughty. Northern Kansas is the geographical center for
the U.S., and people whose location cannot be determined are assigned there by
default. On February 10, 2019 I had blogged about another example - A
misleading bar chart with inflated fear percentages. SlideHeroes had misread tables
in a survey and wrongly used a cumulative percent that included people who had
refused to answer (Didn’t Know).
In Chapter 4 on page 121 (Charts That Lie by Displaying
Insufficient Data) he uses a hypothetical example about smallpox and
vaccination that I replotted as shown above. More people died because of the
vaccine than did from smallpox. But that bar chart omits mentioning that
actually 99 times as many people were vaccinated than not vaccinated. We just are
shown the numerator for what should have been expressed as a fraction dividing
by a very different denominator.
As shown above, I have replotted the graphic from page 122
to display calculation of the probability for dying. The percentage if you take
the vaccine (0.01%) is forty times smaller than that (0.4%) if you do not. But
the calculation calls for a lot of information - it involves knowing six
percentages.
As shown above, in my plot of his chart from page 123, we
also can compare the number who died based on the figures for a mostly vaccinated
population (139) with the disaster which would have happened had there instead
been no vaccination (4000).
In Chapter 6 (Charts That Lie by Suggesting Misleading
Patterns) on page 168 Mr. Cairo first has a chart showing how employment rose
after January 2017, when Donald Trump was inaugurated. Then he has another
chart revealing that rise simply is a continuation of the same long rise going
back to 2011 during the Obama administration.
Back on January 28,
2011 I blogged about how Michelle Bachmann pinned my bogometer! In her Tea
Party Express reply to Obama’s State of the Union address she showed a bar
chart of the unemployment rate which suggested a jump under Obama. But there
was a smooth curve going from Bush to Obama.
Results from surveys sometimes are meant to get exposure for
a product, such as mattresses. On February 12, 2020 there was a blog post by McKenzie
Hyde at Early Bird by Amerisleep titled What are the most common nightmares? As
shown above, the majority (52.5%) are in the categories of General Well Being
or Life Threat. I first saw this survey mentioned in an article by John Anderer
at Study Finds on February 10, 2020 titled What are the most common nightmares
that people have?
They surveyed 2000 people. Percentages for 32 specific
situations are shown above in a bar chart. The Top Five are Falling (64.7%), Being
Chased (63.3%), Death (54.9%), Feeling Lost (53.8%), and Feeling Trapped
(52.4%). The rest of the Top Ten are Being Attacked (49.5%), Missing an Important
Event (43.7%), Waking Up Late (42.5%, Sex (40.3%), and Loved One Dying (35.8%).
Public speaking was not on the list, but Taking/feeling unprepared for an exam is
- at 27.2% and a rank of #17. Being naked in public (21.2%) only is ranked #22.
And Going Bald (4.7%) is last, but presumably not for Donald J. Trump.
Another bar chart shown the gender distribution for 22
situations. Note that for 16 of 22 there is a larger percentage of females than
males.
But if you take an insomnia medication like Ambien, then there
instead can be weird combinations, as are described in a comedy routine by
Patton Oswalt about the Vestibule of Dreams:
“The nightmare group comes out. Oh, it’s the clown with
chainsaws for tits. Hello, we’ll be your nightmare. Or it’s the having sex with
someone famous. Ladies and gentlemen, Miss Scarlett Johansson, here we go. Or
it’s the naked at school dream. Or it’s the, you know, I’ve gotta go take this
test that I hadn’t studied for. All those classic ones. You take Ambien, go in
the vestibule, all the doors open up, and all the groups come out, and they’re
like…
I thought he was having a nightmare. What the h*ll! Is he on
Ambien again? Idiot! Alright, you know what, f*ck it. Put Scarlett Johansson’s
face on the chainsaw-titted clown. And it’ll be on a plane that’s crashing, and
it’s late for a calculus test. And he’s naked, he’s naked. Do the whole thing.”
On February 10, 2020 at Inc. there was an article by Deborah
Grayson Riegel titled How to use notes when public speaking without losing your
audience and subtitled Your notes shouldn’t become the focus of your
presentation. Her ten tips have the following headings:
1] Look polished
2] Write big
3] Number them
4]Practice
5]Plan your moves
6] Choose the right (or left) hand
7] Don’t read
8] Distract from the notes
9] Challenge your assumption
10] Don’t apologize
Deborah admitted that she rarely refers to notes. It’s
always dangerous to give advice on something you do not do. Her detailed advice
for the third point, Number them says to:
“Write large page numbers on each sheet of paper or index
card. That way, if they get shuffled or out of order, you can quickly find your
place.”
Deborah’s advice won’t keep you out of trouble if you get
nervous and drop those cards. Back on April 19, 2017 I blogged about how You
never should have to worry about shuffling or dropping your cue cards. Just chain
(or tie) them together as shown above.
In her second paragraph she also says:
“And if you’re not lucky enough to have a ‘confidence
monitor’ (that flat screen at the foot of the stage that allows the speaker to
see his slides without breaking eye contact with the audience) you may have to
rely on old-fashioned paper to bring up with you.”
I always print out my PowerPoint slides at six per page and then
staple those few pages together as my emergency backup. If the projector doesn’t
work I can still use notes to speak without the slides.
Back on October 3, 2015 I blogged about how Outline notes are a visual aid for the speaker.
Corey Barton Homes recently put up a billboard on the north
side of Lake Hazel Road for their Locale subdivision. It has a map for what
will eventually go into the quadrant east of Cole Road and south of Lake Hazel
Road. As shown above, there will be five types of color-coded homes (and
neighborhood names): Yellow attached townhomes (Hayloft), Red alleyload homes
(Stones Throw), Light-Blue patio homes (Barnwood), Brown front load homes
(Sawmill), and Medium-Blue estate homes (Sugarwood).
But when I showed my wife a closeup of it (click on it for a larger, clearer view) , she noticed
something I had missed. Look in the three yellow ovals I added later. Going north-south
there is two-block-long NEEDS A NAME AVE., and south of it going east-west
there are two parallel block-long NEEDS A NAME streets.
Decades ago, when I briefly lived in metro Houston, a newspaper
article in the Chronicle had quipped that if developers were honest most of
their subdivision streets would have to be named with variations of Long Flat
Dusty Road.
A brand new laptop was misbehaving randomly. It was going
into standby mode and turning the display off. A technician replaced some parts
but the problem remained. Whenever a product begins to fail intermittently, you
need to know how it was supposed to work in order to troubleshoot it.
One way to turn off the display is to have a small,
normally-closed, magnetic reed switch (as shown above) at the lower left corner
of the body, and a small magnet in the corresponding upper left corner at the
edge around the display. When you close the cover the magnet moves near the
switch, and it cuts off the power. At Computerworld on February 3, 2020 there
was a Shark Tankarticle titled Memory-Lane Monday: PEBKAC – but VERY close to
the keyboard. PEBKAC is a user error acronym meaning a Problem Exists Between Keyboard
And Chair.
The user was seen wearing a magnetic bracelet on
her left wrist. She was inadvertently shutting of the display. The troubleshooter
explained to her why she should not be doing that.
Back on November 1, 2017 I posted on the topic of A humorous
story about ‘healing’ a laptop computer with a dim screen.
An image of a reed switch and a cartoon of a laptop user
both came from Wikimedia Commons.
Public speaking still is relevant. At the Public Speaking
Network group on LinkedIn David Murray from the Professional Speechwriters Association posted an excellent three-minute YouTube
video (shown above) titled Naked as we are: why do we still give speeches?
If you are the Vice President Marketing (or Public
Relations) for a Toastmasters club, then you should watch it to borrow an
inspiring quote on why people should consider joining Toastmasters
International. Here is a transcript:
David Murray: Despite all the developments in technology and
mass communication, I am standing before you today as I might have done 50,000
years ago to give you a speech. Why do we still give speeches, and why do we
still go to them?
Jane Stovall (Executive Communications Manager, UPS):
Speeches matter because at the end of the day we’re humans.
Mike Long (speechwriter and playwright): Speeches exist for
one thing, that is to inspire people to do something, believe something, take
action at a particular moment in time.
Amelie Blanckaert (speechwriter): Speeches are more than
important, they are vital. I call it physical dialogue because when you speak
to someone, in front of someone without any screen, but just, you know, naked
as we are, then the best can come out of us.
David Murray: Lucinda Holdforth says speeches aren’t for
what happens inside of us but for happens between us, between me and you,
between you and one another.
Amelie Blanckaert (speechwriter): We can solve problems, we
can exchange strong ideas, we can have a true discussion, and I believe in that
- especially in the world we are into
that becomes more and more impersonal, more and more virtual.
Eric Schnure (Co-author, The Political Speechwriter’s
Companion): We wouldn’t be here if there weren’t speeches that actually did
make a difference. We’re not just talking because we want to talk, we’re
talking to be heard, and we’re talking hopefully because we want something to
happen.
David Murray: So what do speeches do? They allow leaders to
offer their ideas through their humanity.
Sarah Gray (speechwriter, National Cancer Institute): Being
with your people, live, it shows you’re vulnerable, it show’s you’re open to
dissent, and it shows that you deserve them to be following you.
David Murray: We come together to breathe in tandem, to
experience our own responses and feelings alongside each other.
Sarah Gray: When you think about the times in your life that
you’ve changed your mind about something really fundamental, I don’t know about
you, but for me it’s because someone I trust is telling me an argument that I
can understand.
David Murray (quoting Lucinda Holdforth): We come together
like this because to speak freely, and to listen attentively is to be human, to
express a core human capacity, and a central democratic freedom.
That was the subject for today’s Dilbert cartoon. The captions
are:
Pointy Haired Boss: Your slide deck is too well-designed.
It suggests you spend too much time on things that are not
important.
Asok (the intern): You don’t give me important tasks.
Pointy Haired Boss: That’s no excuse for good design.
Sometimes you can’t win. His design presumably looked better
than usual for that company. But if Asok spent less time and created a bad
design, then he also would be criticized. Since interns are disposable, he
eventually might be eliminated via The Set-Up-To-Fail Syndrome.
Back on September 1, 2012 I blogged about PowerPoint Flaws
and Failures: Rules Commonly Broken. That post linked to a long magazine
article by Stephen M. Kosslyn and his colleagues which discussed eight
cognitive communication principles for designing effective slides.
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