There is a good, brief article by Amanda Connelly at Forbes on November 18, 2024 titled Master Public Speaking With The PRESENT Method. She discusses seven essential steps:
P: Prepare Thoroughly
R: Research Your Audience
E: Engage From The Start
S: Simplify Your Visuals
E: Express With Body Language
N: Nurture Your Nerves
T: Tailor Your Conclusion
There is an article by Sonja Bonin on pages 26 to 28 of the June 2021 issue of Toastmaster magazine titled Speak the Language, Speak the Culture. The second paragraph of her section on Talking to a Non-Native Audience says:
“ ‘Most native English speakers think they are communicating, where in fact, they aren’t,’ says John Zimmer, a professional speaker and speaking coach from Canada who has worked for the United Nations and has been living in the French -speaking part of Switzerland for more than 20 years. His experience has taught him to speak ‘a different English’ when he’s talking to non-native speakers. ‘Back in Canada, I speak faster, and I use more slang and colloquialisms; I also allow for fewer pauses.’ Here are some of his tips for English speakers talking to a non-native audience:
Talk slowly, enunciate well, and use more pauses.
Avoid jargon, filler words (such as ‘like’ or ‘actually’), an colloquialisms (‘We’d’ve come’ is far more difficult to process than ‘We would have come’; don’t say ‘we need to up our game’ – instead, say ‘we need to improve.’).
Beware of phrasal verbs, where the meaning is different than the combined meanings of the individual words, such as ‘I’ll see to it’ or ‘he turned me down.’
Use the active voice over the passive voice and the affirmative over the negative (say ‘often’ instead of ‘not uncommon’).
Use short words and short sentences and avoid unnecessary flourishes. Zimmer’s recommendation is ‘Value clarity over creativity.’ “
John Zimmer presents similar advice in a detailed 24-minute YouTube video from the European Speechwriter Network on May 15, 2024 titled Why native English speakers can’t speak English! At twelve minutes he says:
“…don’t initiate when you can begin. Don’t terminate when you can end. Don’t transmit if you can send, and please, please don’t utilize when you can just use.”
The same advice as for non-native speakers also applies to children.
The cartoon audience was adapted from an image at Openclipart.
There is a relatively brief article by Diane Windingland on pages 10 and 11 of the November 2024 issue of Toastmaster magazine titled Exploring 5 types of speeches. She discusses informative, persuasive, entertaining, demonstrative, and ceremonial ones, and which is the best type for your goal.
What is missing? There is no link to educational material from Toastmasters. But at Toastmasters NZ you can find a .pdf file of the current Pathways Level 3 Project on Persuasive Speaking. And elsewhere from the former Advanced Communication Series you can download .pdf files of The Entertaining Speaker, Speaking to Inform, and Special Occasion Speeches. There is an article about the Special Occasion Speeches manual by Maureen Zappala on pages 22 to 25 of the December 2016 issue of Toastmaster magazine titled It’s a Special Occasion.
Also, at the APSU Writing Center for Austin Peay State University you can download .pdf files for Informative Speech, Persuasive Speech, and Demonstrative Speech.
Of course, as I blogged about on October 5, 2024 in a post titled Free 2023 e-book on Public Speaking as Performance you can download an e-book with entire chapters on informative, persuasive, and special occasion speeches.
There is an excellent brief article by Jim Mandelaro at the University of Rochester on November 21, 2024 titled Fear of public speaking? This Rochester professor has you covered. It presents these six tips:
Know your audience!
Be yourself.
Find your perfect pace.
Work up to eye contact.
Focus on getting started.
Practice, practice, practice.
And it links to a five-minute YouTube video by Amy Arbogast titled 6 Tips for better public speaking. Under Know Your Audience she says:
“Good speakers think about what they’re going to say. Great speakers think about who they’re saying it to. Ask yourself, ‘What do I want my audience to learn or take away from what I say? How do I want them to feel or respond?’ And think about who’s going to be there – what do they already know or not know? What kind of jargon is going to be familiar to them, or is going to make them feel a little left out? What’s important to them? And how can you make them care about what you are saying? Thinking through these questions will make it much easier and more intuitive to convey your message.”
The cartoon was adapted from one with six thinking hats at Openclipart.
On October 25, 2024 there was an xkcd cartoon titled Sandwich Helix with the following dialogue:
Cueball: Always remember the #1 rule of communication:
Sandwich Helix.
Ponytail: What does that mean?
Cueball: Unfortunately the context has been lost.
But we know the message,
and that’s the important part.
I’m not sure what a sandwich helix is or why the context got lost. Perhaps, as shown above, one is made on spiral-sliced bread. The web page at Explain xkcd suggests that it is about the long-used Compliment Sandwich. When I looked at Google Books, I found an article from 1964 – a Special Report from the University of Kansas Governmental Research Center (page 33):
“Use the Sandwich Method. Slip your criticism or suggestion between two hunks of praise or compliments.”
What other rules for communication are number one in books? In a 2020 book by Rebecca C. Thompson titled Fire, Ice, and Physics: The Science of Game of Thrones, on Page 254 she said:
“I’ve spent my life working as a science communicator, and the number one rule in communication is to tell a story.”
And in another 2022 book by Illana Raia titled The Epic Mentor Guide on Page 166 she instead said that:
“The number one rule of communication is to know your audience”
The sandwich helix was Photoshopped from this image at Wikimedia Commons.
Interpreters are people who explain natural or cultural resources for visitors at places like parks, nature centers, museums, zoos, botanical gardens, aquariums, and tour companies. Interpretation also includes writing and graphic design of exhibits and signs. The Idaho State Museum in Boise has excellent examples of exhibits. I visited it on November 16th.
The Origins exhibit on the ground floor introduces the state’s five federally recognized tribes. Permanent exhibits on the second floor include Idaho: The Land & Its People, divided into three regions as follows:
“Lakes and Forests: North Idaho
Learn the rich history of mining, forestry, and transportation and how some of Idaho’s natural resources are used around the world today. Watch a spark turn into the blaze that became the Big Burn of 1910, and how this historic fire continues to influence forest management today.
Mountains and Rivers: Central Idaho
Central Idaho’s mountains are a recreational paradise. Experience what it’s like to ride a chairlift up Mt. Baldy, or sit around a campfire where you’ll learn about the first group to urge protections for our wilderness areas.
Deserts and Canyons: South Idaho
Discover the hard road travelers faced on the Oregon Trail, the challenges of developing agriculture in the desert, and Idaho’s atomic past and high-tech future. Take a virtual bike ride through historic Pocatello or downtown Boise.”
Entrances for those three regions are shown above, as is the next sign explaining North Idaho.
In north Idaho there is an explanatory sign and display about Logging Camp Life as shown above.
A display case about mining with an ore cart is shown above, as is another display in an alcove.
Signs on the left and right sides of the alcove are shown above.These organized displays and accompanying signs should inspire carefully organized speechwriting.
Even though I am a seasoned citizen there always are things I have not noticed before. Recently I was watching a YouTube video of a Jim Gaffigan comedy routine telling a story about Pinecones scented with cinnamon. I’d never noticed them, but as shown above, I found bags of them on display outside of a Winco supermarket here in Boise. Jim started his monologue with:
“Occasionally I will perform in a city I’ve never been. I did a show recently in Bend, Oregon. Beautiful Bend, down there in the woods. And I had never been to Bend, Oregon, so I asked my Uber driver, I was like, ‘What is the industry? The industry here in Bend, Oregon’ He very quickly answered: ‘Pinecone Factory.’ Oh well, obviously he didn’t hear me. I don’t even know what question I’d have to ask to get Pinecone Factory as an answer.“
Then the driver tried to explain about around the holidays, when everyone buys their bags of pinecones. Jim replied that no, they don’t. But when he Googled, he found out about pinecones that smell of cinnamon. When I Googled, I found an article by Dylan J. Darling at the Bend Bulletin on January 31, 2020 titled Pine cone picking catching on. It explained that you could get a license for picking them in the Deschutes National Forest. Presumably scent gets added in the factory. You can also get them scented with vanilla! But I think pinecones just should smell like pine trees.
Yesterday’s Savage Chickens cartoon by Doug Savage (shown above) is titled The Award and is about surviving the most boring meeting ever.
How can you plan to not have a boring meeting? There is a brief article by Mithun A. Sridharan on page 6 of the January 2024 issue of Toastmaster magazine titled The 4Ps of Effective Meetings. Those four Ps are Purpose, Product, People, and Process.
And there is a 17-page pdf article at Northern Illinois University titled Planning a Great Meeting that originated at The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation but is no longer on their website.
A blog post by David Murray at Writing Boots on October 31, 2024 titled You Don’t Know the Gettysburg Address begins:
“The Gettysburg Address was not a ceremonial speech, inevitably bound for a marble wall. It was a strategy speech, designed to ‘convince a very skeptical public in the north that they should keep dying’ despite their doubts about a cause ‘that they didn’t particularly believe in,’ says legendary University of Chicago writing professor Larry McEnerney.”
There is a YouTube video of professor Larry McEnerney’s excellent lecture at the World Conference of the Professional Speechwriters Association titled The Gettysburg Address, as You’ve Never Considered It Before. It is an hour and fifteen minutes long – and well worth watching for learning about that great speech. If you can’t spare all that time right now, I suggest you watch the last fifteen minutes which I have bookmarked here.
At 35 minutes he talks about Lincoln’s use of coherence as shown above – going more specific: continent, nation, battlefield, portion, resting place.
At an hour and eight minutes he discusses how dedicate yourself (the call to action) solves three problems.
The plaque of the address text came from here at Wikimedia Commons.
At the Food Network on October 25, 2024 there is an article by Christine Byrne titled Why you might want to throw away your black plastic kitchen utensils and takeout containers. And there is another article by Kristin Toussaint at Fast Company on November 1, 2024 more emphatically titled Why you should get rid of your black plastic spatula immediately. But there is still another article by Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz at Slate on November 4, 2024 titled I’m not throwing away my black plastic spatula. Potentially toxic flame retardants are a possible problem.
I agree with Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz. The problem here is a difference between a hazard (a potential problem) and a risk (a real problem). Getting bit by a rabid unicorn is a hazard, but the risk is negligible. There is yet another article by Steven Novella at Science-Based Medicine on July 5, 2023 titled Aspartame and Cancer that explains how these two concepts differ:
“The difference between hazard and risk is important to understand in terms of this research. A good analogy I often go to is – a shark in a tank is a hazard, meaning that it can potentially cause harm in the right circumstance. But as long as you don’t swim in the tank with the shark, the risk is zero. Something happening chemically may be a hazard, but we need to know how the substance is metabolized, will it get to the target tissue and in what dose, and what compensatory mechanisms are there? A potential hazard can be of zero risk depending on exposure.”
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In spring 1972 I enlisted in the Air Force Reserve to be a medic - before the Army could draft me. That meant I would first be on active duty, and then have reserve duty for six years: one weekend every month and two weeks during the summer. So, I spent the second half of that year on active duty. First was basic training in San Antonio. Early one morning the son of a Chief Master Sergeant (the highest enlisted rank) told me his father’s favorite joke:
“What is the difference between the Air Force and the Boy Scouts? The Boy Scouts have adult leadership.”
Then I had tech school in Wichita Falls. Finally, I had on the job training in a hospital near St. Louis.
In 1973 I started graduate school at Carnegie Mellon University. I also was working for one weekend a month as a reserve medic in the clinic out at the Greater Pittsburgh Airport that was part of the 911th Tactical Airlift Group. Most of my job was helping do the annual flight physicals. That meant I did tasks like eye tests, hearing tests, blood pressures, pulse rates, electrocardiograms, and even footprints.
From 1973 until 1975 on paper I belonged to a unit called the 911th Mobility Support Squadron. It is jargon meaning replacement troops, and had the acronym MSS. No vowel you add to make it pronounceable looks good. I vote for mess. You may remember the 1988 movie Bull Durham about a minor league baseball team. Kevin Costner plays the veteran catcher Crash Davis who just has been sent to the Durham Bulls to balance out a trade. When he walks into the team manager’s office the manager scowls and asks, Who are you? He introduces himself by replying that he is just the player to be named later. My reserve unit felt like that. We were only a minor league team. Morale always was near zero. If I did not have to be there, I would have preferred to be somewhere else.
In July 1975 I was told I had been reassigned. Now I belonged to the 758th Tactical Airlift Squadron. I walked up the hill to the base operations building to sign in with my new unit before going to work. When I went in, I noticed that everyone was smiling. They all were happy to be there. Their Admin sergeant welcomed me. His first five words were that: we are all professionals here.
Before I headed down the hill to work at the clinic, I needed to stop and use the bathroom. What I saw there amazed me. Inside the toilet stall door, under a clear plastic cover, was a sheet of paper listing exactly what each aircrewman (pilot, copilot, and flight mechanic) had to do to handle an in-flight nightmare – having one of the two piston engines on the plane fail. The title read Don’t just sit there; have an accident. As I washed my hands I looked around and saw that the same emergency procedures also were posted on the wall above every urinal. I thought, wow, these guys are really serious.
The 758th flew a twenty-year-old cargo plane called the C123K. If you saw the movie Con Air then you have seen one. It looks like the one shown above. It has a high straight wing with two piston engines, and a fuselage shaped like a pig. It carries 15 tons of cargo or up to sixty troops The C123K was not pressurized, and wasn’t really even watertight. It has a wimpy official name - the Provider.
But the C123K had a secret. Under the wings there also were a pair of auxiliary jet engines. Their added thrust could get the plane into the air from a very short dirt runway. It also could keep the plane flying normally with one piston engine completely shut off. The Air Force had a series of jet fighters whose names started with the powerful word Thunder: the F-84 Thunderjet and Thunderstreak, and the F-105 Thunderchief. So the 758th renamed their plane the mighty Thunderpig.
The 758th had adult leadership. They believed in personal empowerment. Treat all your people like adults and give them room to blossom. Tell them what needs to be done, and let them work as a team to get it done. Other than emergency procedures you don’t need to spell out exactly how.
Now, that was not the typical attitude in Pittsburgh back then. Mostly you got arrogant management butting heads with powerful unions like the United Steelworkers, the USW. Loadmasters in the 758th were a burly, boisterous, bunch of Polish-American sergeants who worked as hammersmiths over at a USW forge shop. Most were almost in the same shape as back when they had played high school football. They were proud of their reserve unit and treated it like it was their football team.
Eighteen months later I watched the 758th accept an award – the Grover Loening Trophy for best flying unit in the Air Force Reserve. Here is one reason why. One of their planes was flying low at night with a full load of Army Rangers getting ready for a paratroop drop. The ramp and door on the back of the plane already were wide open when one engine sputtered and then quit. They began to lose altitude rapidly. The crew feathered the propeller, started up the auxiliary jets and the mighty Thunderpig climbed and got them home safely. A less skilled crew probably would have crashed and killed all 45 people aboard.
Personal empowerment comes in all sorts of places. I found it in an Air Force Reserve unit. Which unit does your workplace resemble more, the Mobility Support Squadron (a mess) or that Tactical Airlift Squadron? Could you help change it?
An image of a C123K came from Wikimedia Commons.
On October 24, 2024 I blogged about how In the tenth Chapman Survey of American Fears for 2024, public speaking only was ranked #59 of 85 fears at 29.0% There is a pdf article titled Chapman Survey of American Fears 2024 – Key Findings that contains the following statement:
“ ‘More interesting, really, than what is in the top 10 list, is how the overall level of fear changes. For example, in the 2015 survey, only the top one, Corrupt Government Officials, had more than 50% reported afraid or very afraid. By the time you get to 2018, all 10 are over 50%. Americans are more afraid of everything,’ said Ed Day, Associate Professor of Sociology.”
The above statement refers to percent and thus to more Americans being afraid, NOT Americans being more afraid. But, as shown above in 2018 there were 12 fears ranked at 50% or above. In 2019 there were 17. The number of fears rises sharply from 2016 to 2019. Then for 2020/2021 there only were 9, in 2022 there were 11, in 2023 there were only 7, and in 2024 there were 15. Similar trends (also shown above) appear when we look either at 40% or above, and 30% or above.
Their discussion of Corruption says:
“Since the inception of the Chapman Survey of American Fears, Fear of Corrupt Government Officials (hereafter, FOC) has been the leading fear Americans reported. That is a striking fact because the surveys have spanned a decade and three presidential administrations. In the tenth wave of the survey conducted in 2024, 65.2% of Americans said that they were afraid or very afraid of corrupt government officials up more than 5% since 2023. FOC peaked at 79.6% in 2020/2021 and then declined to current levels.”
See their graphic, to which I have added about the Trump administration.
Another article by Andre Mouchard (of the Orange County Register) published at MedicalExpress on October 28, 2024 is incorrectly titled Survey finds Americans more afraid today than at any time in history. It contains the following quotes:
“ ‘Fear is taking a larger and larger role in American life,’ said Chistopher Bader, a sociology professor at Chapman who has been involved in ‘American Fears’ since the beginning.
‘They’re afraid of more things than they used to be,’ he said.
‘And they’re more afraid of those things than they used to be.’….
But the overall number of fears (shown above) has ranged from 79 on 2016 to 97 in 2023. That number of questions asked is a choice made by investigators which varies, as does the sample size from about 1000 to 1500 (also shown above).
Also:
“ ‘Stranger danger is growing,’ Bader said, referring to data that shows Americans – once viewed as optimistic and welcoming – are increasingly afraid of people they don’t know.”
But strangers were ranked between 73rd and 91st in the surveys, as shown above. Further, the percent very afraid or afraid of strangers only ranged from 7% in 2018 to 16.7% in 2024.
What are Americans really more afraid of? To evaluate that we need to look at Fear Scores on a scale from one to four, where 1 = Not Afraid, 2 = Slightly Afraid, 3 = Afraid, and 4 = Very Afraid. I blogged about this back on October 30, 2015 in a post titled According to the 2015 Chapman Survey of American Fears, adults are slightly less than Afraid of federal government corruption and only Slightly Afraid of Public Speaking.
As shown above, the Fear Score for Corrupt Government Officials ranged from 2.611 in 2015 to 3.175 (more than Afraid) in 2020/21. The Fear Score for Public Speaking ranged from 1.909 in 2017 to 2.172 in 2022 (more than Slightly Afraid). And the Fear Score for Strangers only ranged from 1.488 in 2018 to 1.750 in 2024.
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