There is a lot of mediocre content on the web about public speaking. But sometimes we instead find an excellent web page that distills a subject down to only the most important points.
One example is the page on Public Speaking Guidelines from the Department of Medicine at the University of Wisconsin.
An image of distillation was adapted from one at Wikimedia Commons supplied by Pearson Scott Foresman.
At Bad Astronomy on February 22, 2021 Phil Plait has an article titled Watch groundbreaking video from the Mars Perseverance landing! That sky crane lowering the rover is incredible. A February 23, 2021 NASA JPL article titled Mars Decoder Ring explains a message in the parachute, which also is described by Martin Belam at The Guardian in another article titled ‘Dare mighty things’: hidden message found on NASA Mars rover parachute.
The message with the JPL motto is from an April 10 1899 speech by Theodore Roosevelt titled The Strenuous Life, and the whole sentence with that quote is:
“Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat.”
How do students who stutter (and those who don’t) think that their college professors perceive them? The March 2021 issue of the Journal of Fluency Disorders contains an article by Danielle Werle and Courtney T. Byrd titled College professors’ perception of students who stutter and the impact on comfort approaching professors. They surveyed 246 adult students, half who stuttered and the other half who did not. Participants were asked to rank how they believed professors perceived them regarding sixteen traits on a scale ranging from zero to one hundred. Seven traits are positive: Bold, Bright, Calm, Competent, Intelligent, Open, Self-Assured. The other nine traits are negative: Aggressive, Dull, Incompetent, Mediocre, Nervous, Passive, Reticent, Self-conscious, Shy.
Table 2 of the article listed the ranks for sixteen traits, as shown above in alphabetical order via a bar chart. For six traits indicated by asterisks (Incompetent, Nervous, Open, Self-assured, Self-conscious, and Shy) there were statistically significant differences between stutterers and non-stutterers. Four of those traits (Incompetent, Nervous, Self-conscious, and Shy) are negative, and stutterers had higher rankings than non-stutterers. The other two, Open and Self-assured are positive and non-stutterers had higher rankings than stutterers.
A second bar chart plots the differences in rank (stutterers minus non-stutterers). They rank as follows: Nervous* 21.41, Shy* 21.04, Self-conscious* 20.97, Reticent* 11.48, Incompetent* 10.55, Dull 7.54, Passive 6.07, Mediocre 4.87, Intelligent 1.09, Aggressive 1.06, Bright -1.33, Bold -4.67, Calm -9.92, Competent -10.6, Open* -13.31, Self-assured* -17.93. For Competent and Incompetent the absolute value of the difference is almost identical.
The choice of traits for this survey has an obvious flaw. The analysis did not compare two obvious opposites – Competent and Incompetent. Examination of the bar chart reveals other sets of opposites (as indicated above): Aggressive and Passive, Bold and Shy, Bright and Dull or Intelligent , Calm and Nervous, Competent and Incompetent, and Self-Assured or Self-Conscious. An obvious way to do this is by flipping the scale over to compare Competent versus [100 – Incompetent]. A third bar chart shows the six sets of opposite traits together. There really are just nine independent traits. I found those sets described in a 2007 article in the Journal of Fluency Disorders (Volume 32, pages 297 to 309) by Sean P. MacKinnon et al that is titled Origins of the stuttering stereotype: Stereotype formation through anchoring adjustment. Their Table 1 has 25 items on semantic differential scales, including aggressive-passive, shy-bold, intelligent-dull, nervous-calm, and self-conscious – self-assured (but not competent -incompetent).
What about impact on comfort when approaching professors? All students were asked a Yes/No question – whether they felt comfortable approaching their professor to discuss their performance on oral presentations. (Those who stutter also were asked some other questions). A logistic regression model for that Yes/No question found only the trait Self-assured had a significant coefficient for prediction. Their results section mentioned testing from the statistical problem of multicollinearity (when two related variables both are competing to predict a result). But that problem instead needed to be discussed back when the questions were chosen.
Based on his resume you might expect that Ted Cruz wouldn’t do something very stupid and completely tone deaf. He graduated from Princeton and then Harvard Law School, clerked for William Rehnqiust ( Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court), Chief and was elected as a U.S. Senator representing Texas in 2012 and 2018.
But an article by Jessica Lee at Snopes on February 18, 2021 is titled Did Ted Cruz fly to Cancun during Texas energy crisis? Unfortunately the answer is TRUE. A second article by Dan Godwin at Fox4News on February 19, 2021 is titled Sen. Ted Cruz returns home, says Cancun trip during Texas’ deadly winter power crisis a mistake . And a third article by Leonard Greene at the New York Daily News on February 19, 2021 is titled ‘Good dad,’ bad senator: Cowardly Ted Cruz blames Cancun caper on his daughters. Worse still, a fourth article by Susan Milligan at US News on February 19, 2020 titled Ted Cruz’s crisis of crisis management opens by stating:
“The first rule of politics is, don’t abandon your constituents in a crisis – and in particular don’t tend to your own personal comfort while people who decide whether you keep your job are suffering.”
I think his nickname will stick. The image was adapted from a cartoon in a 1918 book by Fontaine Fox titled Cartoons Second Book at the Internet Archive.
There are some excellent recent articles about public speaking hidden in magazines you likely never have ever heard of (or seen). But you can find the full-text for them for free in the PubMed Central (PMC) database from the U. S. National Library of Medicine, which has 6.7 million articles. When I searched there under PowerPoint I found a humongous haystack with 10,793 articles. Searching under lecturing resulted in a smaller haystack with 7,1122 articles. Searching for PowerPoint AND lecturing reduced that down to a manageable 280. Then I sorted them by Pub Date to show the most recent first.
The 52nd article on that list is by Eric Steinberg and Doug Franzen and is titled Five tips for building a successful didactic talk. It appears in AEM (Academic Emergency Medicine) Education and Training in 2020, Volume 4, Number 1, on pages 72 to 74. Sections in it are titled:
Passion + Purpose = Engagement
Know Your Audience
Bones and Flesh
Pictures Speak 1,000 Words, Your Text Shouldn’t
Practice Makes Perfect
‘Didactic’? But I don’t want to ‘die.’ The title of that article refers to a ‘didactic talk’, which is something I instead would have called an informative or informational speech (a speech to teach). I learned about that topic a decade ago from a Toastmasters advanced manual titled Speaking to Inform. The article by Steinberg and Franzen references another by Danielle Ofri titled The passion and the peril: storytelling in medicine which you can find at the web site for Academic Medicine.
The cartoon was adapted from one at Wikimedia Commons showing a Guy presenting a business graph.
There are some excellent recent articles about public speaking hidden in magazines you likely never have ever heard of (or seen). But you can find the full-text for them for free in the PubMed Central (PMC) database from the U. S. National Library of Medicine, which has 6.7 million articles. When I searched there under the phrase “public speaking” I found a gigantic haystack with 3502 articles, which I sorted by Pub Date to show the most recent first. Adding the word PowerPoint reduced that down to a manageable 86.
Yesterday I blogged about the first article on that list, in a post titled Giving an Effective Medical Lecture. Today I will discuss the 23rd article which is by Wendy H. Vogel and Pamela Hallquist Viale and is titled Presenting with Confidence. It appears in the Journal of the Advanced Practitioner in Oncology on July-August 2018 Volume 9, No. 5. Pages 545 to 548.
Sections in it are titled:
Fear of Public Speaking
High-Level Tips
Developing Slides
Keeping the Audience’s Interest
Conclusion
Tables are titled:
Tips for giving a bad presentation
What to know about your audience
Examples of impactful openings
PowerPoint tips
Handling questions from your audience
Resources for presenters
Under High Level Tips they mention:
“The first tip is to know your subject and know it well. In fact, should your audio-visual equipment malfunction (and if you speak often enough, this is likely to happen), you should have your presentation memorized. However, it is a good idea to make a hard copy of your slides and use them in case of equipment failure.”
But I don’t think you ever should try to memorize (word for word). After an equipment malfunction you will have less than the expected time to present, and need to be able to adapt on the fly.
The image was adapted from a cartoon at Wikimedia Commons about a businesswoman presenting a line graph.
Are there excellent recent articles about speaking - in magazines you probably never have seen? Yes, there are. You can find and read them for free in the PubMed Central (PMC) database with 6.7 million articles. That database is by the U.S. National Library of Medicine. I did a search for the phrase “public speaking” and found 3502 articles. Adding AND PowerPoint reduced that list to 86 articles, which I could sort by Pub Date to see the most recent. The first article is by Robert C. Lowe and Steven C. Borkan. It is in the January 12, 2021 issue of Medical Science Educator and is titled Effective Medical Lecturing: Practice Becomes Theory. The .pdf version is nine pages and has thirty references.
Section headings are:
The Challenge
The Great Lecture
Lecture Time Management
How to Plan Lecture Content
De-emphasizing the Teacher
Audience as the Educational Target
Nuts and Bolts of Preparing PowerPoint Slides
Point by Point
Plot Unfolds
Stage Presence and Delivery
Engagement
Conclusion
Under Point by Point, Figure 4 discusses ineffective versus effective slides, as is shown above (in my version).
And Figure 1 gives a specific example of an ineffective and an effective slide, as is shown above (in my version).
The cartoon was adapted from one at Wikimedia Commons of a Serious Cartoon Guy Discussing a Line Graph.
Of course not! But every so often someone tries to tell us that. For example, a blog post on January 18, 2021 by Peter George at PeterGeorgePublicSpeaking titled How to tame your nerves when speaking in public says that:
“Every presenter - novice and veteran alike - gets nervous when speaking in front of others.”
Similarly, another blog post on January 30, 2021 by Maurice DeCastro at Mindful Presenter titled Public speaking: 5 ways mindfulness can help claims:
“Everyone feels some level of anxiety when presenting and speaking in public. Many people feel extremely nervous; even to the point of experiencing panic attacks.”
Let’s look at some survey results to check these claims. There is a Chapman Survey of American Fears which is done annually. You can find results for six of them from 2014 to 2019. They asked “How afraid are you of public speaking?” with a choice of four levels: Not Afraid, Slightly Afraid, Afraid, Very Afraid. Results for Not Afraid are shown above in a table. 34.1% to 41.4% were Not Afraid, with a mean of 38.0%. So roughly two out of five adults had no fear whatsoever.
Results for Very Afraid are shown in another table. Just 8.8% to 12.8% were Very Afraid, with a mean of 10.4 %. So roughly one out of ten adults were very afraid. That’s not very many people.
How did both coaches, Mr. George and Mr. DeCastro, instead decide everyone was afraid? Perhaps it is due to selection bias. As shown above in a Venn diagram, if only some of those with a fear ask for coaching, then selection bias will lead to a false impression. (Way back on August 26, 2011 I blogged about Selection bias and presented a different Venn diagram). On September 19, 2019 I also blogged about how Fear of public speaking doesn’t happen to everybody - or all the time.
On April 20, 2018 I blogged about Playing with words: PRO or CON? For next week’s meeting of my Toastmasters club I am the Grammarian and need to introduce a vocabulary Word of the Week. That word is concise. But procise isn’t a real word for its opposite. Similarly we can take a playful look at the prefixes for before (PRE-) and after (POST-).
English isn’t symmetrical. As shown above in a table of pairs where real words are green and unreal ones are red, it is not common for there to be words beginning with both prefixes. Two exceptions are preposition and postposition (with the latter being obscure) & premature and postmature (with the latter an uncommon medical term).
Why do they call it postage? You have to put the stamp on a letter before you can mail it. (It’s not preage). Language can be precise, but it isn’t postcise. You can prefer something, but don’t postfer it. When you give a speech, you present, but later don’t postsent. Your backside is your posterior. But the opposite of posterior is not preerior, it’s anterior (which I learned as medical terminology).
The bottom of page 12 in the January – February 2021 issue of Men’s Health magazine presents results from a Twitter poll which had asked What scares you the most? As shown above, based on 3,647 responses the results were 41.4% for failure, 34.6% for death, 19.6% for public speaking, and just 4.4% for flying.
Because this is a silly online poll done back in October 2020 (and not from a random sample) we don’t know who answered, where they were, how old they were, etc. It’s just an amusing set of factoids.
At his Manner of Speaking blog on February 5, 2021 John Zimmer has an excellent post titled Should you speak in public? He shows a flowchart for answering that question. On further reflection I decided that I liked his idea much better than his graphic, and produced the PowerPoint alternative (titled Are you ready to speak?) that is shown above. In mine all the yes answers are in a straight line.
Here is his original for comparison. I didn’t like that he linked twice from a ‘No’ to his ‘Think some more’ box. I recolored the ‘Yes’ arrows from red to green to show how their path wanders. Also, he didn’t use the usual flowchart diamond for a decision box. My three yellow round-cornered rectangles illustrate the mythical computer opcode called Branch and Hang.
But recently congresswoman Mary Miller did:
“…Hitler was right on one thing. He said, 'Whoever has the youth has the future.' Our children are being propagandized,’ Miller had said, appearing to read from prepared remarks.”
as was reported by Veronica Stracqualursi in an article at CNN Politics on January 9, 2021 titled Illinois Republican congresswoman apologizes for invoking Hitler as she faces calls to resign.
That situation prompted Nathan Heller to write a bitingly satirical article in the February 8, 2021 issue of The New Yorker titled Tips for Public Speakers which includes the following items to not do:
“Most important: be a problem solver. At some point in your talk, look audience members in the eye and say, ‘I have a solution for you.’ Try not to look audience members in the eye and say, ‘I have a final solution for you.’
Speak in simple language. Say ‘use' instead of ‘utilize,’ and ‘detailed’ instead of ‘granular.’ Try not to refer to your growth plan as an ‘Anschluss.’
Hand gestures are your friend. Good ones involve open palms, joined fingertips, or spread arms. Do your best to avoid a ‘Sieg heil’ salute, or pointing at a member of your audience with the words ‘This one, ja – step aside, please.’ “
Back before Twitter there were usenet discussion newsgroups. Godwin’s Law about them says that when an online discussion goes on long enough, Hitler eventually gets brought up. That ends the discussion, and whoever brought up Hitler loses the argument.
The image from Wikimedia Commons isn’t Hitler, it is Charlie Chaplin in a publicity still from his 1940 film The Great Dictator.
In this pandemic year it seems everybody and his brother now is a Zoom ‘expert.’ Much advice just is tactics (specific tips), like an article by Mike Koenigs at Entrepreneur on April 24, 2020 titled 25 Ways to make your Zoom meetings awesome. Every now and then we glimpse the bigger picture and get strategies, like in another article by Mike Koenigs at Forbes Coaches Council on May 6, 2020 titled Avoid the Top Five mistakes people make in Zoom meetings, which advised they were:
Ignoring or failing to leverage technology
Failing to connect with your audience
Failing to represent your brand
Failing to optimize for modern attention spans
Failing to observe online etiquette
But there are some real, capital E – Experts who have analyzed online meetings. One is Nick Morgan, who in 2018 wrote a 288-page book titled Can You Hear Me? How to connect with people in a virtual world. A third article by Nick Morgan at his Public Words blog on October 28, 2020 discusses Three ways to make video conferencing more bearable, which I describe as follows:
The Rule of Predictability
Provide an agenda (link to it as the very first item in the chat) and have a Master of Ceremonies.
The Rule of Transparency
Begin by checking for local issues. People may be too polite to bring them up. Take a break in the middle of the meeting for some casual chat.
The Rule of Visibility
Create a formal mechanism, like a hand raise, for passing the conversation to the next participant. At an in-person meeting you can see who is standing behind the lectern.
The person who finishes speaking on Zoom could acknowledge being done with the TADA reaction.
A fourth article by Nick Morgan at his Public Words blog on November 24, 2020 titled Making video conferences work for you describes five more specific things to do:
Don’t hang back
Do give back
Don’t hold back
Do feed back
Don’t sit back
Ignore that advice and you may find that Zoom meetings are just modern seances.
Cartoons of speakers were adapted from those at Wikimedia Commons.
The Zoom virtual meetings software has controls for turning audio and video on or off, and a chat feature. All of these can be misused, as is discussed by Janani Sekar in an article at Harvard Crimson on September 24, 2020 titled How to: Deal with Zoom disasters.
Speaking while you’re muted (but didn’t mean to be)
This is minor. You just unmute, say oops, and then say what you wanted to convey. “You’re still on mute” is a common cry at the online Toastmasters club meetings I attend.
Speaking while you’re not muted (but meant to be)
This can be a major ‘hot mic’ downfall moment. There is an article at Snopes titled Did Uncle Don call kids ‘little b#st#rds’ on the air? describing a debunked urban legend about a radio host. Later something similar showed up in the 1957 movie A Face in the Crowd.
Video off when it should have been on
This is minor, and easily fixed.
Video on when it should have been off
This either could be minor or major. You can gross people out by picking your nose, using your camera as a makeup mirror, or full frontal nudity.
Video filter cat-astrophes (Updated February 9)
An article by Aaron Feis in the New York Post on February 9, 2021describes how a Zoom filter transforms lawyer into cat during court hearing.
Zoom chat
An article by Sarah Gershman at the Harvard Business Review on November 4, 2020 titled Yes, virtual presenting is weird explains how:
“The chat function is a great way to get immediate audience response. You could begin with a relevant question and ask people to type the answer in the chat. For example, you might ask everyone to write one thing they hope to learn from the presentation. The chat is especially helpful to introverts who may not want to speak up. Make sure to read aloud at least some of the answers (and use first names if you can). When you engage the audience immediately, you feel as though people are listening, which raises your confidence for the rest of the presentation.”
Zoom chat (with the wrong private person)
This might be minor. Just one person thinks you are creepy. But that person might also be creepy as in this 20-second video clip from Taxi Driver (with very bad language).
Zoom chat (with everyone instead of a private person)
This can be major, depending on what you inadvertently said.
Images of a cartoon monkey, microphone and webcam came from Wikimedia Commons. Cartoons of men with upset and horrified faces both came from the 1912 book The Cartoonist’s Art by J. Campbell Cory at the Internet Archive.
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