Great post.
I used to often speak publicly. Last week I gave my first talk in years, to a large crowd. I was nervous because of how long has passed since I've last done it, but then I remembered my old habit. Before my talks I used to spend time with the conference goers in the hall, just chatting with them about whatever comes up. This seems to play a trick on the mind, making me feel like I'm speaking to friends rather than a faceless crowd. It worked last week as well. I highly recommend trying it out.
What They Don't Tell You About Public Speaking
31–40 of 64 posts
Re: What They Don't Tell You About Public Speaking
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
It will be awesome if your dad had a book on what happened in those 5 to 6 years. Of course I am in no position to provide as useful an advice, since I am still a student and the toughest audience I presented against are themselves students. However, I find the preparing by replaying the presentation to yourself a little daunting. I used to do that and there always seems to be something that goes wrong, especially th…
I wouldn't say you want to memorize the presentation. In fact I think the more you write out for yourself, write on your slides, or try to memorize, the more difficult the presentation becomes. The practice is more about stumbling a bunch of times. I hate when I repeat the same word or phrase within a few sentences of each other. If I notice that I say the same thing twice on one slide, maybe I'll stand there for a s…
I'd go so far as to say you absolutely don't want to memorize your speech, unless you're at the level of Important Remarks for Important People like the State of the Union.
Instead, you want to memorize all the key features, jokes, and wry remarks.
You can write out your speech, if it helps. But read it. Out loud. To a wall. About ten or fifteen times. Read it, without looking at the paper (except when you forget what goes next), and without trying to duplicate it verbatim. You'll learn what phrasings come naturally to your tongue rather than your hand, and it'll flow a lot better when you give the speech itself.
Re: What They Don't Tell You About Public Speaking
#33"Talks should always be reactionary rather than anticipatory: they’re going to come off as more natural, more interesting, and above all, more valuable."
I agree with the sentiment here. My presentations are all about science and bioinformatics, and I find they go best when I have a story to tell. The audience loves to hear stories, especially when they can experience the aha! moment themselves before I get to the end of the story. It's a much better story if the project is almost complete rather than mostly unfinished.
As a minor aside, being a grumpy old guy, I would suggest that rather than "reactionary" (which means something altogether different than what I understood Zach to be saying), the proper term might be "retrospective" and paired with "prospective". I misused "reactionary" myself in younger days and still cringe when I think about it. Strange word indeed.
Re: What They Don't Tell You About Public Speaking
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wouldn't say you want to memorize the presentation. In fact I think the more you write out for yourself, write on your slides, or try to memorize, the more difficult the presentation becomes. The practice is more about stumbling a bunch of times. I hate when I repeat the same word or phrase within a few sentences of each other. If I notice that I say the same thing twice on one slide, maybe I'll stand there for a s…
I'd go so far as to say you absolutely don't want to memorize your speech, unless you're at the level of Important Remarks for Important People like the State of the Union. Instead, you want to memorize all the key features, jokes, and wry remarks. You can write out your speech, if it helps. But read it. Out loud. To a wall. About ten or fifteen times. Read it, without looking at the paper (except when you forget wha…
To extend your point on key features: I think of it as memorizing the overall structure of your talk. You may have a dozen or so topics you want to hit in your presentation, and that is what you end of memorizing - not on purpose, but because if you're well prepared, you can't help but not memorize it.
If you know that you want to hit points A, B, C, ..., in your talk, and you know your material cold, then you don't have to memorize how you want to connect A and B, B and C, etc. That is what you re-create on the spot. The practice is important because sometimes you can't connect two points on-the-fly. Practicing your talk at least once will reveal those places, and you can either: figure out what the connecting bits are, or decide you don't want to cover that.
In addition to the jokes and wry remarks, I find that I also tend to replay the same body language in talks that I did in practice.
Re: What They Don't Tell You About Public Speaking
#35It's tougher to be a solid public speaker than it looks. I've given talks to big rooms, gyms and moderately sized conference rooms. I rarely get nervous but occasionally it hits us all. I do have some notes on watching great speakers in person and learning from my own mistakes. 1. Do NOT ask for a 'show of hands' from the audience. Even some practiced speakers do this. They think that it engages the audience, but it…
> Do NOT ask for a 'show of hands' from the audience.
I completely disagree. If you ask people to raise their hands 10 times on inane questions, then of course it's useless. But correctly used, it:
1) Wakes people up and gets everyone in the room focused
2) Gets people aware of the rest of the audience, and "on the same page"
3) Ideally provides a natural segue into how the point of the lecture directly connects to you
I taught English for years, which was basically public speaking every single day, and getting my students to tie an aspect of the theme/question of the day into their lives, and respond, in the first couple minutes was always key in terms of getting them all on the same page and relating to the material in the rest of the class. It would only occasionally be a show of hands, there are hundreds of other techniques as well (shouting words, asking the nearest person a question, writing a word on a piece of paper, etc.), but these are all fantastic public-speaking techniques. Of course, you need to have the personality to pull them all off, so the audience trusts you and wants to go along, but you can develop that.
Indeed, I think it's a real shame most public speakers don't interact more with the audience through these kinds of things. They boost attention levels and retention levels so much more.
Re: What They Don't Tell You About Public Speaking
#36It's tougher to be a solid public speaker than it looks. I've given talks to big rooms, gyms and moderately sized conference rooms. I rarely get nervous but occasionally it hits us all. I do have some notes on watching great speakers in person and learning from my own mistakes. 1. Do NOT ask for a 'show of hands' from the audience. Even some practiced speakers do this. They think that it engages the audience, but it…
I have asked for a "show of hands" before, and given the context, I would do it again. I really had no idea going into the talk who my audience was - I didn't know if I was going to be talking to programmers or theoreticians, engineers or researchers, or even technical people versus management. And I did modify what I said based on the feedback.
Re: What They Don't Tell You About Public Speaking
#37It's tougher to be a solid public speaker than it looks. I've given talks to big rooms, gyms and moderately sized conference rooms. I rarely get nervous but occasionally it hits us all. I do have some notes on watching great speakers in person and learning from my own mistakes. 1. Do NOT ask for a 'show of hands' from the audience. Even some practiced speakers do this. They think that it engages the audience, but it…
> Do NOT ask for a 'show of hands' from the audience. I completely disagree. If you ask people to raise their hands 10 times on inane questions, then of course it's useless. But correctly used, it: 1) Wakes people up and gets everyone in the room focused 2) Gets people aware of the rest of the audience, and "on the same page" 3) Ideally provides a natural segue into how the point of the lecture directly connects to y…
While I defended the practice below, I consider teaching to be a special case of public speaking. I have "presentation mode" and "lecture mode." There is a lot of overlap, but they're not exactly the same. In presentation mode, I will not stop everything and wait for someone to answer a question. When I'm presenting, I don't expect people to understand everything that I'm saying to the point that they can apply this new knowledge. I would like that, sure, but I think it's presumptuous to assume they would like it as well. Presentations are also often made to peers, and I don't like quizzing my peers in such a way.
In lecture mode, that's the entire purpose of my presentation, so I do it. I have no problem quizzing students in such a way - because if they can't answer the question, then I should change the focus of the lecture to make sure that everyone can before I move on.
Note that I am differentiating between quizzing and polling. I'll poll in both lecture and presentation mode.
Re: What They Don't Tell You About Public Speaking
#38It's tougher to be a solid public speaker than it looks. I've given talks to big rooms, gyms and moderately sized conference rooms. I rarely get nervous but occasionally it hits us all. I do have some notes on watching great speakers in person and learning from my own mistakes. 1. Do NOT ask for a 'show of hands' from the audience. Even some practiced speakers do this. They think that it engages the audience, but it…
Re: #2. Note cards are fine; the issue isn't "does the speaker have notes?" which no one minds but "is the speaker just reading his notes?"
A lot of great speakers will casually glance down at their notes and go, "Uhh.... oh yeah!" It's perfectly okay, because the point of a speech is not to look perfect, but to say something worth hearing.
Re: What They Don't Tell You About Public Speaking
#39Yesterday's episode of "Back to Work" went over public speaking and confidence as well -- it's definitely worth a listen: http://5by5.tv/b2w/72
It may have been worth a listen for you, but I think YMMV applies very strongly to podcasts.
in general, I'd agree, but if you're interested in the subject matter of the article here, the podcast does cover some good tid bits about public speaking.
I guess I should have mentioned that the real meat of this show doesn't usually kick in until about 30% of the way through (which I could understand might annoy some people)...
Re: What They Don't Tell You About Public Speaking
#40"Most conferences are a crap shoot when it comes to video. Half the time they won’t record your talk, and the other half of the time it may take months before your talk is published.
Something I’ve been doing recently is making a screen recording of my talks using QuickTime on my Mac."
This is really true, and really good advice. Organizers have a lot on their hands leading up to a conference, and, after, getting recordings posted languishes until they manage to recover enough of their personal lives to start ramping up for the next.
I've had several instances where I've given a talk, been very happy with the response, and then realized that I had no way to share it with a wider audience except trundling off to the next conference. Next time, I'm making my peace with a screen recording app.