Five tips for building an informative speech

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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.