The Year I Stopped to Notice is a delightful little book by Miranda Keeling

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

By interlibrary loan from the Twin Falls Public Library I obtained and read a delightful little 2022 book by Miranda Keeling titled The Year I Stopped to Notice. It could have been subtitled The Joy of Noticing Little Things - which are what can make a speech memorable.  That book has 177 pages and is just 4-7/8’ wide by 6-1/2” high. There is a Google Books preview through page 32. Her introduction begins:

 

“You might be reading this because the cover looked cheerful, or you’re frantically searching for a present for a friend. You might just be marking time in a shop because it’s raining outside and you don’t want to leave yet. Whichever way you found yourself here, hello.

 

It’s the small moments, like the one you’re having right now, that make up this book: a woman in a shop opens a book and reads the introduction. Perhaps she is wearing a yellow dress. Her brown hair is curly. It is swept up with a silver clip in the shape of a shark. It is chilly in the shop, and she places the book down to take a knitted green cardigan out of her bag and put it on. The wool is thin at her right elbow. Perhaps a man reads this page. He sits at his laptop in a café, looking at the book online. He has dark red hair. His hands on the keyboard are freckled. He is avoiding work. Underneath the café table a small elderly dog sleeps across the man’s foot – the dog makes short whining noises at something in its dream, Perhaps one of these people is you. Perhaps you are completely different.

 

Days can feel long, and years fast. Our lives are full, yet at the end of the day when someone asks us what we did, we can barely remember. This book is the result of me stopping to notice the details and finding that ordinary life is extraordinary in its own way. If you’re someone who can find the big picture a little overwhelming and need moments of peace in the storm, or who loves the busy, layered fabric of life and just wants some of it captured to enjoy over coffee, read on.

 

Everywhere I go, I record what I notice: snippets of conversation, images, an atmosphere. I have been captivated by the everyday since I was very small. I grew up in Yorkshire, the Netherlands, America, and London. As my mum and I walked around these places, she would often interrupt a sentence to say: ‘Did you see that?’ I loved the times it turned out that we had spotted the same, small thing. At art college I studied glassmaking. I made miniature sculptures – if you looked closely at them, you could see worlds of colour inside. I carried a notebook everywhere, Then, about seven years ago, I began writing them down instead. Not everything I see is lovely. I live in the world. But that is not what this book is for. You will find the melancholy and the surreal here, but that’s as far as it goes.”

 

 Here are a half-dozen examples from the book:

 

Page 9 from January:

"Little boy on the train: Mama?

His mum: Yes?

Little boy: I never see you brush your hair.

His mum: I do a lot of things you don’t see.

(Pause)

Little boy: Like flying?"

 

Page 44 from March:

“A man on the train sighs as, having meticulously arranged his lunch on his little fold-down table, the woman from the window seat beside him needs the loo.”

 

Page 65 from May:

“A man has stopped on Oxford Street and stands in his socks, as he pours what appears to be green and pink confetti out of his shoes.”

 

Page 117 from August:

“A man outside a yet-to-open piano shop signals frantically to the woman inside to let him in. This is clearly a musical emergency.”

 

Page 137 from October:

“A little girl on a doorstep manages to negotiate eating an entire piece of toast while having her coat put on by her mum.”

 

Page 164 from December:

“Like an opening fan, five people at a bus stop lean sequentially to the left as they try to read the number of the bus coming up the road.

 

There is a 24-minute YouTube video at Carers UK on August 26, 2022 titled Stopping to notice with Miranda Keeling. And there is another newer book (I have not read) from June 2025 by Miranda Keeling titled The Place I’m In: What I see when I stop to notice, which again has a preview at Google Books. Miranda also has a podcast titled Stopping to Notice.

 

Back on February 28, 2014 I blogged about Speech topics from near your neighborhood, and paying attention to things - like a gold Buddha statue sitting on a white concrete bench next to the driveway of a home.

 

The train sign came from here at Wikimedia Commons.

 

Give people a picture to teach them about health

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There is a brief and useful article by Pernilla Garmy in the Journal of Research in Nursing on October 23, 2025 titled Reaching beyond words: supporting self-care through visual health education. She says that:

 

“From my own experience as a nurse and educator, I know that there is no single educational format that works for all patients. Some people benefit from verbal dialogue, others prefer detailed written materials. But for many, visual aids are a crucial complement. Pictures can clarify, engage and motivate – especially when literacy is limited or when energy and focus are low due to illness, stress, or comorbidities.

The fact that this resource is printed – not digital – also matters. A physical object can be held, browsed at one’s own pace, and brought along to consultations. It does not require a smartphone, internet access, or digital skills; which may be barriers for some groups. At the same time, digital tools may be more effective in other contexts. The point is: healthcare professionals need a flexible set of educational tools, adapted to the needs, abilities, and preferences of each individual.”

 My PowerPoint cartoon was assembled from those of a nurse and a pain scale at OpenClipArt.  

 

 

A joyous Book of Delights by Ross Gay

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On October 25, 2025 I had blogged about An intriguing book by Ross Gay with 14 essays about inciting joy. Before that, in 2019, he had published another little 274-page book with 102 essays titled The Book of Delights. There is a preview through page 24 at Google Books. His preface says:

 

“One day last July, feeling delighted and compelled to both wonder about and share that delight, I decided that it might feel nice, even useful, to write a daily essay about something delightful. I remember laughing to myself how obvious it was. I could call it something like The Book of Delights.

 

I came up with a handful of rules: write a delight every day for a year; begin and end on my birthday, August 1; draft them quickly; and write them by hand. The rules mad it a discipline for me. A practice. Spend time thinking and writing about delight every day. 

 

Because I was writing these essayettes pretty much daily (confession: I skipped some days), patterns and themes and concerns show up. For instance, I traveled quite a bit this year. I often write in cafes. My mother is often on my mind. Racism is often on my mind. Politics. Pop music. Books. Dreams. Public space. My garden is often on my mind.

 

It didn’t take me long to learn that the discipline or practice of writing these essays occasioned a kind of delight radar. Or maybe it was more like the development of a delight muscle. Something that implies that the more you study delight, the more delight there is to study. A month or two into this project delights were calling to me: Write about me! Write about me! Because it is rude not to acknowledge your delights. I’d tell them that though they might not become essayettes, they were still important, and I was grateful to them. Which is to say, I felt my life to be more full of delight. Not without sorrow or fear or pain or loss. But more full of delight. I also learned this year that my delight grows – much like love and joy – when I share it.”

 

There is an article by Christina Cala at npr codeswitch on August 19, 2021 titled How Ross Gay Finds Joy in the Smallest of ‘Delights’. And there also is a four-minute YouTube video at AlgonquinBooksTV on November 6, 2018 titled The Book of Delights by Ross Gay where he reads from #80 Tomato on Board and #96 The Marfa Lights.

 

The very brief Essay #56 on page 154 is titled My Life, My Life, My Life, My Life in the Sunshine. It is about the 1976 Roy Ayers song Everybody Loves the Sunshine, which you can listen to here (and find the lyrics). Ross says:

 

“Which delight landed in my lap from the open window of a passing car, and is simply (although the plaintive synth chords and watery triplets betray somewhat the simplicity) an argument for the sunshine, which, true, maybe I am the choir, but I like the argument for its simplicity, which is that everybody loves it , and everybody loves it, and folks get brown in it, and folks get down in it, and most convincingly to me, and that which elevates it to the metaphysical, even the holy: just bees and things and flowers.”

 

The 1974 mural by Dieter M. Weidenbach came from here at Wikimedia Commons. 

 

An article busting ten myths about charismatic speech

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On October 29, 2025 I blogged about What makes a speaker charismatic? There is a long, detailed 31-page pdf article by Jan Michalsky and Oliver Niebuhr at Acta Universitasis Carolinae in 2019 which is titled Myth Busted? Challenging What We Think We Know About Charismatic Speech. It has over a hundred references! That article discusses the following ten myths:

 

Myth 1: Charisma makes a difference.

 

Myth 2: Charisma is a divine talent of a few gifted people that only surfaces during a crisis.

 

Myth 3: Charismatic communication is the expression of a charismatic personality.

 

Myth 4: How we say something is more important than what we say.

 

Myth 5: Lower voices are more charismatic.

 

Myth 6: A clear pronunciation supports perceived speaker charisma.

 

Myth 7: Filled pauses are bad for perceived charisma.

 

Myth 8: Belly breathing and an upright posture support speaker charisma.

 

Myth 9: A charismatic performance requires intensive training on the part of the speaker.

 

Myth 10: Engineers are less charismatic.

 

My image was assembled by repeating and modifying one of a carved figure at the Museum of Anthropology in Vancouver, British Columbia.

 

 

What makes a speaker charismatic?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines charisma as:

 

“a personal magic of leadership arousing special popular loyalty or enthusiasm for a public figure (such as a political leader)”

 

An article by Nick Morgan at Public Words on May 25, 2021 titled What is Charisma? says that:

 

“It is the expression of strong emotion, emotion directed outward, not inward.  It is focus – focused emotional meaning.  It is awareness of your audience, not obliviousness to it.  And it is energy in service to the moment, the message, and the audience in front of you.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A blog post by Clark Masterson on September 9, 2023 titled A Formula for Charisma says it is Presence + Power + Warmth (as shown above via a Venn diagram). Another blog post by Gary Genard at his The Genard Method on November 17, 2024 is titled Six Easy Ways to be a Speaker with Charisma. He advises to:

 

Make eye contact to gain trust with listeners.

Smile to increase everyone’s enjoyment.

Tell personal stories that listeners can relate to.

Talk to one person, then to that one person [at a time]…

Energize your voice so you reach every listener.

Enjoy yourself.

 

An article by Caren Schnur Neile on pages 16 to 18 of the July 2010 issue of Toastmaster magazine is titled Charisma: The Magic and the Menace. There also is an article by Richard Reid titled Charismatic Public Speaking: Techniques for Delivering Powerful Speeches and Presentations that Captivate Audiences. And there is another 18-page pdf article by Richard Reid at Pinnacle Wellbeing titled Become a More Charismatic You.

 

My cartoon of a speaker was adapted from this one at Wikimedia Commons – with an eagle from OpenClipArt.

 

Stephen Krupin talks with Dan Heath about what it’s like to be a speechwriter

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

There is a brief article at BENNETTink titled Friday Flashback – an Obama speechwriter speaks with an example from a Memorial Day speech. It was written by Stephen Krupin.    

 

And there is a 33-min interview (and a transcript) with Dan Heath at BEHAVIORAL scientist on September 10, 2025 titled What It’s Like to Be…a Speechwriter. There is more about Josh Wheeler in that Memorial Day speech at 13:05. And at 27:40 he mentions using text-to-speech software to check whether the spoken words sound right.

 

My cartoon was adapted from this one at OpenClipArt.

 

An intriguing book by Ross Gay with 14 essays about inciting joy

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Because the title for this blog begins with Joyful, I sometimes look up book or articles about the topics of joy and delight. There is an intriguing book from 2022 written by Ross Gay titled Inciting Joy: Essays. Google Books has a preview of just the first two essays. The first essay ends:

 

“Now that we’ve defined joy, and concluded it is important, there are two guiding inquiries in this book. First, I mean to investigate what practices, habits, rituals, understandings -you know, the stuff we do and think and believe – make joy more available to us. What in our lives prepares the ground for joy. I mean to try to find out, in other words, what incites joy. And second, I intend to wonder what the feeling of joy makes us do, or how it makes us be. I will wonder how joy makes us act and feel. That’s to say, I wonder what joy incites.

 

Per the first question – what incites joy? This book is a profoundly incomplete effort, and though I talk about pickup basketball and skateboarding and school and time and gardening and Luther Vandross’s cover of the Dionne Warwick hit ‘A House is Not a Home,’ I thought about but didn’t have time to dig all the way into joy and architecture, or joy and sex, or joy and the amateur, or joy and play or memory or foraging or parenting or libraries, etc. I offer them to you.

 

Per the second question – what does joy incite? – I should say, I have a hunch, and that’s why I think this discussion of joy is so important. My hunch is that joy is an ember for or precursor to wild and unpredictable and transgressive and unbounded solidarity. And that that solidarity might incite further joy. Which might incite further solidarity. And on and on. My hunch is that joy, emerging from our common sorrow – which does not necessarily mean we have the same sorrows, but that we, in common, sorrow – might draw us together. It might depolarize us and de-atomize us enough that we can consider what, in common, we love. And though attending to what we hate in common is too often all the rage (and it happens also to be very big business), noticing what we love in common, and studying that, might help us survive. It’s why I think of joy, which gets us to love, as being a practice of survival.

 

And it’s why I’ve written this book.”

 

 Titles for his essays and their starting page numbers are:

 

The First Incitement [1]

 

Through My Tears I Saw

(Death: The Second Incitement) [11]

 

We Kin

(The Garden: The Third Incitement) [28]

 

Out of Time

(Time: The Fourth Incitement) [43]

 

Share Yor Bucket!

(Skateboarding: The Fifth Incitement) [57]

 

Baby, This Might Be You.

(Laughter: The Sixth Incitement) [66]

 

(Dis)alienation Machinery

(Losing Your Phone: The Seventh Incitement) [82]

 

Free Fruit for All!

(The Orchard: The Eighth Incitement) [94]

 

Insurgent Hoop

(Pickup Basketball: The Ninth Incitement) [112]

 

How Big the Boat

(The Cover: The Tenth Incitement) [137]

 

Went Free

(Dancing: The Twelfth Incitement) [171]

 

Grief Suite

(Falling Apart: The Thirteenth Incitement [176]

 

Oh, My Heart

(Gratitude: The Fourteenth Incitement) [230]

 

There is a 19-minute interview (and transcript) by Brittany Luse at NPR It’s Been a Minute on February 21, 2023 titled Ross Gay on inciting joy while dining with sorrow.

 

My cartoon was adapted from this one at OpenClipArt.

 

 

An article about key findings from the 11th Chapman Survey of American Fears for 2025 has stumbling student graphics with significant errors

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On October 23, 2025 I blogged about how In the eleventh Chapman Survey of American Fears for 2025, public speaking only was ranked #46 of 67 fears at 33.7%. Those results from the 2025 survey first were reported in a news release by Robert Hitchcock on October 21 mistitled What Americans Fear Most in 2025: Chapman University’s Annual Survey Reveals Top Fears and the Psychology Behind Them. And their detailed results are in a methods report pdf file.

 

There also is an 8-page pdf article titled Chapman University Survey of American Fears 2025 Key Findings. It includes five graphics that were prepared by students. The first one, by Madeline Southern, titled TOP 10 FEARS 2025 is correct.

 

But the other four are not. The third graphic, also by Madeline Southern, is a chart titled FEAR OF DRINKING WATER POLLUTION AND POLLUTION OF OCEANS, RIVERS, AND LAKES. It plots those two fears for years ranging from 2017 to 2025. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

But that chart has four incorrect entries for those two fears because, as shown above in a pair of tables, it claims to include results for 2020. Actually there was no survey done in 2020 – just one identified as 2020/21. Those four entries are offset from where they belong.    

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The fifth graphic is a bar chart by Yasmine Hourie, which is titled FEAR OF MURDER AND PROPERTY CRIME. What she calls Property Crime in the 2021 to 2025 surveys is identified as Theft of Property. As shown above in a table, four of five entries are correct but the one for 2022 says 30.0% when the detailed results say 34.5%.   

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And, the bar chart for Murder is completely incorrect because it lists just one item while the detailed results show both Murder by a Stranger and (somewhat lower) Murder by Someone You Know. I show those results above in a table. Her Murder result also does not match the average for by a Stranger and by Someone You Know.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The second graphic is a pie chart by Emma Boyd titled OPINIONS OF HOMELESSNESS POLICY and has a caption claiming it presents results for % Strongly Agree or Agree. But, as is shown above via a table, none of those percentages are correct. They instead were rescaled to add up to a hundred percent.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The fourth graphic, by Gabriella Bartsch, is a bar chart titled CONSPIRACY BELIEFS IN AMERICA which claims to show percentages for seven items at the level Strongly Agree or Agree. But, as is shown above in my replot, all of her numbers are smaller by an average of 3.6% than those in the detailed results (and curiously are shown with two decimal places rather than one).  

 

Chapman University obviously stumbled when preparing this article. No one bothered to carefully edit these graphics and remove the errors.

 

The cartoon was adapted from one at OpenClipArt.

 

 

In the eleventh Chapman Survey of American Fears for 2025, public speaking only was ranked #46 of 67 fears at 33.7%

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Results from the 2025 Chapman Survey of American Fears were first reported in a news release by Robert Hitchcock on October 21 mistitled What Americans Fear Most in 2025: Chapman University’s Annual Survey Reveals Top Fears and the Psychology Behind Them. Detailed results are in a 101-page methods report pdf file. They really discussed what most people fear rather than the completely different question of what people fear most.

 

They surveyed a random sample of 1,015 adults for a margin of error of 3.6%. The survey was done by SSRS between March 24 and April 8, 2025. For each of 67 fears, people were asked about four levels: Very Afraid, Afraid, Slightly Afraid, or Not Afraid. For 27 fears there also was a negligibly small Web Blank (Don’t know), at 0.1% for 22 of them, 0.2% for 4 of them, and 0.3% for one of them.   

 

And there is a two-page article titled The Chapman Survey of American Fears, Wave 11: The Complete List of Fears 2025. As usual, they ranked fears via the sum of the percentages for Very Afraid and Afraid. The top five were Corrupt Government Officials at 69.1%, People I love Becoming Seriously Ill at 58.9%, Economic/Financial Collapse at 58.2%, Cyber-Terrorism at 55.9% and a tie between People I Love Dying and the U.S. Becoming Involved in Another World War at 55.3%. Public speaking was only ranked #46 at 33.7% - slightly more than a third.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

When I compared the Complete List of Fears with the methods report, I was surprised to find four fears that had yet another survey answer listed – Does not apply to me. Percentages for that one are shown above in a table. Note that in one case (Question 10B ranked #31 - Not Being Able to Pay Off College Debt of Myself or a Family Member) more than half (51.5%) gave that answer. In the table I listed how the answers for those four fears had been rescaled (fiddled with) to ignore ‘does not apply to me’ – and for that extreme case the fear went up from 19.4% to 43.1%. I was appalled to find rescaling had been done without any mention in the articles. But the first 25 fears on the list were not affected by the rescaling.

 

Another way to discuss fears is to put them on a scale from 1 to 4 where 1 = Not Afraid, 2 = Slightly Afraid, 3 = Afraid, and 4 = Very Afraid. The Fear Score for Corrupt Government Officials is 2.989 or almost exactly Afraid, while for Public Speaking it is 2.175 (a bit more than Slightly Afraid). On November 9, 2024 I blogged about Overblown claims about fears from investigators for the 2024 Chapman Survey of American Fears, and showed all the previous Fear Scores for Public Speaking, which are:

 

2014     1.920

2015     1.956

2016     1.933

2017     1.909

2018     1.947

2019     2.081

2020/1  2.023

2022     2.172

2023     2.041

2024     2.067

2025     2.175

 

My cartoon was adapted from this one at OpenClipArt.

 

 

Writing as bushwhacking

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In the Merriam-Webster dictionary the second meanings for bushwhack are:

 

 “to travel by foot through uncleared terrain; to clear a path or advance through thick woods especially by chopping down bushes and low branches”

 

There is an intriguing 2023 book by Jennifer McGaha titled Bushwhacking: How to Get Lost in the Woods and Write Your Way Out. There is a preview of the first 41 pages at Google Books.

 

Her chapter titles and their starting page numbers are:

Why We Write: Searching for Beauty [1]

The Thrill of Discovery: Writing Your Way into Knowing [12]

In the Weeds: Discovering Courage on the Page [27]

Coming in Hot: Zipping out of Your Comfort Zone [40]

Back in the Saddle: Cultivating Resilience [50]

Echoes in the Mountains: Honoring the Voices Within [67]

Rallying Your People (or Your Canines): Creating a Writing Community [76]

A Lighter Load: Unpacking the Writing Life [92]

Lost in the Woods: Writing Your Way Home [101]

Bushwhacking: Digging for Deeper Truths [118]

Finding Your Stride: Toning Your Writing Muscles [127]

Running Uphill: Surviving the Tough Climbs [136]

You Can Do Anything for a Mile: Channeling Your Inner Stallion [154]

The Beauty of the Question: Embracing the Wilderness Within [168]

Questions for Further Exploration [187]

Bibliography [190]

Acknowledgements [191]

 

At the end she has a list of nine long, deep questions, each of which could make a speech topic:

  

Questions for Further Exploration

1] Discuss your relationship with fear. When do your fears serve you well, and when do they get in your way? What is your greatest fear? Where does it come from? What strategies do you have for keeping it at bay? What does it feel like in your body? When/where/how does it overwhelm you? Now, imagine for a moment that you weren’t afraid. How might your life be different? How might you be different?

 

2] Discuss the nature of truth as you see it. Are there different degrees of honesty, and, if so, what are the gray areas? What makes a story true or untrue? Can a memoir contain both lies and deeper truths? In what ways?

 

3] What is the most daring thing you have ever done as an adult? Why did you do it? What did you learn about yourself? In what ways have you carried that knowledge with you since? 

 

4] Discuss your relationship with physical strength/stamina. When in your life have you felt strongest? When have you felt most vulnerable? Why and how were you shaped by these experiences?

 

5] Discuss the role of imagination in your life. What did you dream (literally or metaphorically) when you were a young child? What is the most imaginative thing you have done in your waking life as an adult? What other things do you dream about doing? What, if anything, is holding you back? 

 

6] Describe a moment in your life when you were lost (again, literally or metaphorically). Where were you? Who was with you? How did you come to be lost? How did you come to be found? And what did you learn along the way?

 

7] Make a list of questions you have about any topic. These can be ridiculous or serious. They can focus on one area, or they can be wide-ranging. The only requirement is that you cannot currently know the answers Try to get ten or twenty questions. When you are finished, trade questions with someone you know. Now, take their list of questions and see what new questions arise for you from those. In other words, what questions do you have about their questions? You can do this on and on, in an endless game of round-robin with questions.

8]  Do you agree with Brian Doyle’s assertion that, no matter how hard we try to communicate effectively, we invariably fail in our attempts to express the depth and breadth of our emotions and experiences? Why or why not? How might acknowledging the inherent shortcomings of language change both our relationships with others and what we bring to the page. 

9]  Drawing inspiration from Ross Gay, vow to spend every day for the next week noticing things that delight you. Each day, make a note of one simple thing – a box turtle in your flower bed, a blackberry patch you came upon while hiking, a new song you discovered, a phone call with an old friend, a batch of freezer jam you made that turned out especially well. Freewrite about this for no more than one page. The point here is to capture the mood and the tone, the essence of delight. Do not attempt to make a cohesive story. Do not use a thesaurus or run a grammar check. Do not go back and edit old entries. This is not a stepping stone to anything else. Think of each entry, each delight, as whole and complete, as worthy in and of itself. The goal here is not a polished final product. The value is in the practice, the practice of noticing, of cultivating and expressing gratitude for all those quietly astounding moments that fill your life with meaning. At the end of the week, share your responses with at least one other person. Notice how your delights multiply when you share them.”

 

On October 18, 2025 I blogged about 15 excellent Table Topics questions from the end of a 2024 book by Jennifer McGaha titled The Joy Document.

 

An image where you might need to take your machete was adapted from Wikimedia Commons.

 

 

Gem paper clips have been around for a century and a quarter

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

How did we fasten sheets of paper together before there were easy-to-use paper clips? We took a straight pin, poked a hole through them, arched the papers, and poked a second hole, as shown above. When handling those joined papers, you could easily puncture your skin with the pin point.    

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

That changed after about 1900 when the Gem paper clip (five of which are shown above) appeared. There is a 1992 book by Henry Petroski titled The Evolution of Useful Things: How everyday artifacts – from forks and pins to paper clips and zippers – came to be as they are. A Gem clip even is shown on the book cover. (There also is an archived free e-book). His Chapter 4, starting on page 46 is titled From Pins to Paper Clips. On page 69 he says:

 

“The Gem paper clip seems to have had its real origin in Great Britain, and the name is said by one international firm to have been ‘derived from the original parent company, Gem Limited.’ This is supported by the Army and Navy Co-operative society’s 1907 catalogue of the ‘very best English goods,’ which pictures only one style of modern paper clip – a perfectly proportioned Gem, which is described as the ‘slide on’ paper clip that ‘will hold securely your letters, documents or memoranda without perforation or mutilation until you wish to release them,’ As early as 1908, the clip was being advertised in America as the ‘most popular clip’ and ‘the only satisfactory device for temporary attachment of papers. The ad copy went on to warn paper clip users against the use of other existing devices, whose shortcomings the Gem naturally did not share. ‘Don’t mutilate your papers with pins or fasteners.’

 

Even though the Gem itself never seems to have been patented in its classic form, nor to have been so perfectly functioning a paper clip that inventors did not try to improve upon it, it does appear to have long ago won the hearts and minds of designers and critics as the epitome of possible solutions to the design problems of fastening papers together….”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A figure caption on page 69 says:

 

“Although the 1899 patent [636,272 and shown above] issued to William Middlebrook of Waterbury, Connecticut was for a machine for making wire clips rather than for the clip design itself, Middlebrook’s drawings showed clearly (especially in his Fig. 8) that what came to be known as a Gem was being formed. This style of paper clip, which seems never to have been explicitly patented, came to be the standard to be improved upon. While functionally deficient as myriad other styles, its aesthetic qualities appear to have raised it to the status of artifactual icon.”   

 

Brian Jenner discusses the state of speechwriting

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There is an interesting blog post by Brian Jenner at The Speechwriter on October 14, 2025 titled The State of Speechwriting. He says that what we need is:

 

“public meetings

  choices

  a concept of society

  emotion

  borders

  to see both sides

  a vision of the future”

 

On December 20, 2023 I blogged about Getting better at speechwriting by learning from professsional organizations. In that post I described how Brian had started both the U. K. Speechwriters Guild and the European Speechwriter Network.

 

The cartoon was adapted from one at OpenClipArt.

 

 

15 excellent Table Topics questions from the end of a 2024 book by Jennifer McGaha titled The Joy Document

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Table Topics is an impromptu speaking section in a Toastmasters club meeting. Members (and perhaps guests) are asked a question and then answer it via a one-to-two minute off-the-cuff speech.    

 

I have been skimming through a 198-page book from 2024 by Jennifer McGaha titled The Joy Document: Creating a Midlife of Surprise and Delight. There is a Google Books preview ending on page 13. At the end, on pages 195 and 196, there is a section titled Guiding Questions: Creating Your Own Joy Document. These are writing prompts or Table Topics questions. The second paragraph begins:

 

"….Finding joy is a lot like that – a waiting game. A watching game. A smidgeon-of-this-and-a-sprinkling-of-that game. Still, you have to start somewhere, so below are some questions designed to help you begin your own Joy Document. Of course, this is not an exhaustive list of questions to consider, but perhaps these can serve as starting points. And who knows? You may begin with something small, a song you love, a saying you find intriguing, an awkward interaction with a man on a trail or at a produce stand or along a canal, and one joyful moment will inspire another and another until you have a whole Joy Dissertation, a Joy Treatise, a Joy Manifesto, a Joy Declaration.

 

Feast for a moment on that.

 

  1] What song(s) do you associate with pivotal times in your life, and why?

 

  2] Think about a favorite family recipe. Whom do you associate with the recipe? What events? What feelings? When do you make this food? Have you changed the recipe at all from the original? Why or why not?

 

  3] When in your life has a surprise risen to the level of a surprisement?

 

  4] Consider a time when an encounter with someone else caused you to think more deeply about a social/cultural/political issue that matters to you.

 

  5] Discuss a strange/awkward/unexpected interaction with a stranger that led you to consider something in a new way.

 

  6] In what way have your beliefs served as a source of joy/comfort for you?

 

  7] Point to a moment when something you once deeply believed changed irrevocably.

 

  8] How have your interactions with animals and/or the natural world shaped what you believe?

 

  9] Discuss a time when you learned something you didn’t know you needed to learn.

 

10] Discuss a time when you said literally or in spirit) ‘fuck it’ to something, when you let go of something that was interfering with your happiness.

 

11] Discuss a time when you took a chance you’re now glad you took.

 

12] What are some stories you have told yourself about your life that might not be fully true? How might revising those stories change you?

 

13] If you considered your body a sacred space, how might that change how you move in the world?

 

14] What big questions seem most pressing to you in this season of your life? What is it you most want to know?

 

15] In what way might wondering (the verb – i.e., wanting to know something) lead to wonder (the noun – i.e., a sense of awe)?"

 

If you are wondering what a surprisement is (Question 3), that is explained in the first paragraph of the 21st essay, Suprisement, beginning on page 77:

 

 “One evening, READING a student essay, I came across the phrase ‘much to my surprisement,’ which naturally surprised me, what with grammar-check and spell-check and all, but the more I thought about it, the more I came to appreciate the writer’s intent. After all, surprise is akin to amaze and astonish and bewilder and excite and wonder, all which could be amended with ‘ment’ to indicate not just a transitory sensation or static thing but a whole state of being. Why should surprise be any different? The more I considered it, the more sense it made, and the more sense it made, the more shortsighted my blue-inked circle around the word appeared.”

 

The cartoon was adapted from one at OpenClipArt.