Tips for nailing your next presentation

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

At Medium on February 15, 2021 there is an article by Shawna Malvini Redden titled 5 Tips for Nailing Your Next Presentation. It also appeared at her blog. Those excellent tips are:

 

1]  Remember your audience is friendly.

2]  Don’t try to cram an entire book into 10 minutes.

3]  Give us the goods – YOUR analysis and ideas.

4]  Practice your timing.

5]  Remember, you’re the expert. But it’s okay not to know, too.

 

But she opened with some startling statistics:

“It turns out, Jerry Seinfeld’s old joke about public speaking is close to spot on. He said: ‘According to most studies, people’s number one fear is public speaking. Number two is death. Death is number two. Does that sound right? This means to the average person, if you go to a funeral, you’re better off in the casket than doing the eulogy.’

The 2014 Chapman University American fears study confirmed that America’s top phobia is public speaking. (More recent versions of the study seem to reflect the current times. The top 2020-21 fears revolved around government corruption, death, COVID, school shootings, and natural disasters, although public speaking apparently still ranks as more scary than getting murdered by a stranger or being sexually assaulted.)

As a communication professor and speech teacher, I’m baffled by these statistics but even I admit, I get the jitters before every public speaking event. EVERY public speaking event, including and especially, the first day of school and making presentations at conferences.”

I am not baffled by those statistics (and also am tired of hearing the Seinfeld joke). The 2014 Chapman survey did not ask its questions consistently. The later six surveys did, covered a larger number of fears, and the rank for fear of public speaking dropped. However, the percentage of people who were afraid or very afraid was relatively steady (a range from 23.3 to 31.2%). On January 10, 2022 I blogged about how The opening paragraph of an article on public speaking earns two pinocchios for telling us lies. And on December 6, 2021 I blogged about how Most Americans are not terrified by public speaking.

 

The image was adapted from this one at Wikimedia Commons.