Don’t start an article with a tired old statistic and joke

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

At Training on March 7, 2022 there is a decent article by Sheryl Lindsell-Roberts titled From Stage Fright to Stage Might and subtitled 9 tips to keep in mind before your next foray into the presentation spotlight. Those tips are:

 

Know your audience

Use presentation aids sparingly

Engage your audience from the start

Practice, then practice some more

Bring notes

Use pauses to your advantage

Avoid distractions

Get in the zone

Look them in the eyes and “listen’

 

Under the third tip, to engage your audience from the start, she says to get your audience’s attention with something like a shocking statistic or headline. But the first two sentences of her article, don’t follow her advice. They are:

 

“Would you believe that speaking in public is the No. 1 human fear of people, while death is No. 7? So at a funeral, would you rather be lying in the casket than delivering the eulogy? – Jerry Seinfeld”

 

The survey and joke both are very old news, as shown above via a time line. That ranking comes from a survey almost five decades old. Back on October 27, 2009 I blogged about the 1973 Bruskin survey in a post titled The 14 Worst Human Fears in the 1977 Book of Lists: where did this data really come from? And the Seinfeld joke is from 1993, almost three decades ago. I blogged about it in an April 8, 2018 post titled Misquoting Jerry Seinfeld and inflating fear five times. What would be startling instead? On September 26, 2021 I blogged about how Fear of public speaking was only ranked #54 of 95 fears in the 2020/2021 Chapman Survey of American Fears.