Don’t torpedo your credibility with the very first sentence!

I read an article titled Writers and public speaking from July 9, 2018 by Olivia Rana at the online magazine writing.ie which opened by claiming:

“In 2012 researchers at Nebraska University carried out a study, which found that public speaking was the most common fear amongst students, ranking higher than hundreds of other fears, including death!“

The only thing Olivia got right was that public speaking was reported as the most common fear. There really were 815 students, but only 14 fears. The article about that study was by Karen K. Dwyer and Martina M. Davidson of the University of Nebraska-Omaha. It was titled Is Public Speaking Really More Feared Than Death? You can read that article here. I blogged about it on May 17, 2012 in a post titled More university students in the U.S. fear public speaking than fear death, but death is their top fear.

On May 23, 2018 at writing.ie Olivia had another article titled Where do writers get their ideas from? For her July 9th article the answer is via superficial research.

The image of a torpedoed ship was adapted from this poster at the Library of Congress.

 

Don’t just carp about networking

Today on her Speechwriter-Ghostwriter blog Jane Genova superficially posted about Networking – so many victims of bad career advice. She began by whining:

“In good career times and bad career times, the supposed experts tell professionals to network. That simplistic advice is often useless. It can be counterproductive – positioning and packaging the eager networkers as pests or worse.

….Until parties have something to trade, they better not approach the network.

….Takeaway: Beware of off-the-shelf career advice. Each professional’s situation is unique.”

That’s just carping – complaining about what is wrong without suggesting a useful alternative. For almost two decades the pay-it-forward alternative to networking has been netweaving. I blogged about it in a December 28, 2014 post titled Netweaving versus just networking.

Brad Gruber also had an article at LinkedIn Pulse on April 22, 2016 titled Move over traditional networking – make way for netweaving.

Don’t forget about flip charts

Flip charts are useful visual aids before, during, and after presentations.

One upon a time the agenda for one of our Toastmasters club meetings almost fell apart. People who had volunteered for roles were out sick, including speakers. Previously I had stepped up as Toastmaster. In the first few minutes of the meeting I wrote the list of roles on a flip chart, and then the few of us present volunteered to fill multiple ones. Our improvised meeting went smoothly, with a long Table Topics section where everyone spoke twice. That flip chart instantly replaced the normal preprinted agenda.  

A flip chart can be very effective during a presentation, as was discussed by Ray Anthony and Barbara Boyd on pages 235 to 237 in their 2014 book Innovative Presentations for Dummies. The same advice appears in an article at the Dummies web site. Older but still useful advice from 1992 on How to prepare effective flip charts is in another article at the Educational Research Information Center (ERIC) web site.

  

And after a presentation a flip chart can be used to record questions.

I didn’t just fall off the turnip truck

In communication details like spelling and grammar are important. This week I received another pair of phishing emails that immediately revealed their fraud via simple mistakes in spelling or grammar.

One was a bogus ‘PayPal’ alert, with a salutation that misspelled customer!

The other was a 'Microsoft’ account update with an extra "will’ – a glaring departure from English grammar.

The 1939 turnip truck image for illustrating that idiom came from the Library of Congress.

UPDATE July 14, 2018

I got another phony PayPal email warning me "your account was opened form another devices." LOL!

What should you do if a Toastmasters club member signs up to speak at every one of your meetings for the next 25 weeks?

In a Toastmasters club one important position is that of the Vice President Education (VPE):

“As vice president education, you schedule members’ speeches and projects and serve as a resource for questions about education awards, speech contests, and the mentor program. You are an important source of Toastmasters knowledge for club members, and it is your job to become familiar with all aspects of the Toastmasters education program.” 

The Toastmasters fiscal year starts on July 1st. Typically the VPE has a mechanism for planning meetings for the next quarter or six months, like a manual sign-up sheet, an Excel spreadsheet emailed to the club, or software like easySPEAK. Over at LinkedIn, on the Official Toastmasters International Members Group, someone had an unusual sign-up problem:

What should you do if one member has signed up to speak at EVERY meeting until the end of the year, and is unwilling to back down? Does the Vice President-Education have the authority to remove their name?

Yes, you do have that authority when someone is being emotionally tone deaf, and behaving like a spoiled child. Often each meeting has three speakers, so by asking to speak at each meeting that inconsiderate person is demanding to use a third (0.333) of those slots. Their fair share would be a much smaller proportion, one divided by the number of club members. For example, if there are 21 people in the club the fair share would be 1/21 or 0.0476. They are trying to be 0.333/0.0476 = 7 times as important as others. The VPE could tell that person to give a persuasive speech to the club at the very next meeting, with the subject being Why I Am Seven Times As Important As The Rest of You. After that speech the club could immediately vote YES or NO on whether they were persuaded. Problem solved.

A decade ago I was VPE for a club two years in a row. I never had that problem. Instead it was hard to fill all the speaker slots for the summer because members were gone on vacation. But in late spring all the slots would be filled. People were trying to finish up whatever program (CC, ACB, etc.) they were working on, so the club could get credit for and recognition as a Distinguished Club.  Some members might contact other clubs to find an open slot where they could be a guest speaker. My club, Saint Al’s, is small enough that we almost always can add a guest to our meeting program.    

The easySPEAK software has a person request a speech. Then the VPE replies by scheduling them in an opening.  

Being VPE is a balancing act. There may be some enthusiastic members who want to speak often, and have several speeches already prepared. They could be designated as back-up speakers, to fill openings that become open at the last minute due to others with illness or work conflicts. (I did that myself a decade ago). There also may be nervous new members who have to be reminded that they should schedule to speak or fill other roles. One of the rewards of being VPE is watching members gain confidence, grow, and blossom.   

How to torpedo your credibility in the very first paragraph

At the CollegeInfoGeek web site on June 29, 2018 Roxine Kee had a blog post titled 5 Tips for Crafting Great Speeches and Presentations which opened with:

“If you’re like most people, you would probably rather die than present in front of a classroom. I’m not exaggerating: in this Gallup poll from 2001, the fear of public speaking is ranked #2, ahead of the fear of death (#6).”

But death is not mentioned at all in that poll. The #6 fear really is of Needles and Getting Shots. Oops!

The torpedoed ship image was adapted from this poster at the Library of Congress.

Accents - rhoticity or rotisserie?

Your accent marks you either as belonging where you speak - or as an outsider. Rhoticity and rotisserie are words that almost sound alike (homophones).  But a rotisserie is an apparatus for roasting food (like the chicken shown above) on a spit. And rhoticity refers to an accent or dialect of English where an /r/ sound is retained before consonants and finally in a word at the end of an utterance. In a rhotic dialect you would say to ‘park the car in Harvard Yard,’ not to ‘pahk the cah in Hahvad Yahd.’ At ThoughtCo. on March 26, 2018 there is an article by Richard Nordquist giving a Definition and examples of rhotic and not-rhotic speech.

Folks in the Midwestern U.S. don’t think they have an accent, but of course they do. My parents both grew up there, so that became my accent. There was another article by Edward McClelland in the January 3, 2017 issue of Belt Magazine titled Introduction to How to Speak Midwestern. He shows a map and explains that there are three Midwestern dialect regions: Inland North, Midland, and North Central. Mr. McClelland said:

“The steel mills and auto plants drew millions of Southern and Eastern European immigrants who adopted Inland North as their dialect model. Perhaps most importantly, the nation’s leading pronunciation expert was John S. Kenyon, a philologist at Ohio’s Hiram College, which is just east of Cleveland. Kenyon was the author of two books, American Pronunciation (1924) and A Pronouncing Dictionary of American English (1944), and was pronunciation editor of Webster’s New International Dictionary of the English Language. In these roles, Kenyon championed rhoticity, the pronunciation of r’s wherever they appear in words: he preferred ‘war’ to the Transatlantic ‘waugh.’ Kenyon also favored pronouncing ‘not’ like ‘naht,’ instead of ‘nawt.’ These were both features of the Inland North speech he heard in northeastern Ohio.”

Dialect regions also have different idioms. After about five years of living in Ann Arbor, Michigan (Inland North), I was visiting my mother (Midland) and gave her some driving directions, that included the phrase ‘hang a right’ (meaning to make a right turn). She glared at me and asked why a change in direction had to be suspended in midair!