Give Your Speech, Change the World. Nick Morgan
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after the intimacy of Oprah.
We’re left today with some clumsy disparities in public oratory. There is the disjunction between the trappings of traditional public speaking—the podium, the large auditorium, the stage, the lighting—and a style of discourse that is now more conversational than declamatory. Even more significant, a yawning gap exists between an audience’s ingrained expectations, shaped by a half-century of watching television, and the behavior of most business, educational, and governmental speakers. Even in the relatively intimate setting of a small conference room, the typical speaker is kinesthetically disconnected, though he or she isn’t physically distanced from the audience. Instead of occasionally moving toward the audience to establish a personal connection, speakers usually move back and forth between the podium or projector and the screen in a weirdly hypnotic, solipsistic form of what could be called presentational dance. They might as well be talking to themselves. The audience sits watching in suspended animation through this faux-kinesthetic routine until the question-and-answer session at the end, when attendees are offered a brief chance to move and perhaps to speak.
Also, while the speaker’s tone may be more conversational these days, the audience’s intuitive expectation of a personal message delivered at close range usually goes unfulfilled. With the lights turned low so that slides can be seen, with little kinesthetic stimulation from the speaker, and with little opportunity for the audience to respond in turn, the crowd will gradually tune out. The overall, if unintended, effect is to disconnect the speaker from the message, the message from the audience, and the audience from action—the main reason for the oratorical effort in the first place.
In a word, it’s boring. And it’s boring because medium, style, and message no longer connect. We expect intimacy, like what we see on television, and instead we get poorly structured, unemotional corporate-speak.
Indeed, given the skewed evolution of public-speaking content and delivery against the backdrop of the enforced intimacy of modern media, the wonder is that speeches are ever interesting at all. The few speeches that do manage to ignite an audience’s passion are exceptions to a dismal rule of mediocrity.
How can we change this sorry dynamic? By learning (from, first of all, the Greeks) to develop content that is appropriate to the aural genre of the presentation, by rehearsing it to find the kinesthetic moments—the opportunities for connection with the audience—and by learning how to deliver it in a kinesthetic style that is compelling for audiences today. By developing, in short, the audience-centered rhetoric needed for the twenty-first century.
Remember
The Ancient Greeks invented public speaking out of a need to argue legal cases.
Public speaking is a mixed genre of human activity—it involves both head and heart, theory and practice, understanding and performance.
Through the Victorian era, public speaking drew inspiration from the ancients.
In the twentieth century, technology, including radio and television, changed public speaking permanently and profoundly.
Today we have a mismatch between public-speaking custom and audience expectation.
We need a new rhetoric for the twenty-first century—an audience-centered rhetoric.
CHAPTER 2
What to Do? The Audience-Centered Presentation Process
WE ENDED CHAPTER 1 WITH A call for an audience-centered rhetoric for the twenty-first century, one that would respect the audience’s need to come to a decision in real time. We’ll begin at the most important place: the content.
How do you shape the content of an audience-centered speech? Much that is useful has been lost in our evolution to casual, conversational speakers. Public speaking must be more than merely conversation on your hind legs. Have you ever listened hard to a real conversation between two other people? If you’re not looking directly at both parties, it can be almost impossible to follow. Conversations are full of stops and starts, incomplete thoughts and utterances, and references to body language such as gestures, facial expressions, and what the nonverbal communications researchers call emblems, or gestures that have specific coded meaning in particular cultures. It’s a messy business.
Public speaking is structured conversation.
Content must be given to the audience in a way that recognizes the audience’s need to absorb information through an aural genre with limited opportunities for feedback of the kind that conversation provides. That is not to say that there is no feedback in public speaking—there’s actually plenty. But because most public speaking is more or less scripted, the speaker is limited in the amount of attention he can give to feedback, and limited in the ways in which he can respond.
Think of a presentation as a train journey. It’s linear—on a particular track—unlike conversation. You don’t get the opportunity to stop the train very often. If you get off the train, you quickly get left behind. So you don’t get the next idea, because you’re floundering around trying to get back on the train.
Thus, the content needs to proceed logically, in complete thoughts, with stops along the way for the audience to check its comprehension.
Listening is exhausting work, and people don’t retain much of what they hear. How can you improve on the low retention rate? First, it’s a matter of structuring the content so that it is organized and delivered the way the audience needs to hear it.
Second, it’s a matter of ruthless focus. Think in terms of getting one idea across to the audience; if your audience will only remember one thing, what would you tell them? Throw everything else away.
Third, what is your emotional content? You should give just as much thought to preparing an emotional story line as an intellectual one.
Take your audience on a journey from why to how.
We’ll get into more detail later, but for now, imagine that your speech will take the audience on a journey. The audience comes into a talk wanting to have a key question answered: Why? Why am I here? Why is this topic important? Why should I pay attention to the speaker for the next hour or so?
This is a key difference between conversation and public speaking. People engage in conversation by and large for mutual pleasure, the exchange of information, or storytelling—or some mix of the three. You don’t need to answer the “Why?” question, typically, for your friend to talk with you.
But public speaking is different. You need to orient the audience and prepare the way for the information you have to give them. To do that, you need to set them at ease and give them a context for your presentation. Sometimes a good introduction can do some of that work, but most of it still must be done by the speaker.
Once you’ve answered the “Why?” question, you take your audience on the journey that reveals your answer. If you’ve done your job well, the audience will be asking “How?” by the end of the talk. How do I implement this idea? How do I take this vision and make it my own? And perhaps the most important one, as we’ll see: How do I get started right now?
Move the audience from why to how. That’s your goal. That’s a successful speech, whether to five people, or fifty, or five thousand.
Don’t tell them all you know.
The audience provisionally grants you authority by becoming an audience—sitting down and preparing to listen to you. The audience bestows a mantle of trust and credibility upon you at the beginning of a speech. It’s up to you to wear it successfully. Don’t betray that trust. Stick to the point, and make it possible for your audience to continue to allow you to be its expert.
The essence of successful public speaking is focus—focusing on the emotional content, focusing on the one key idea you want to get across, and focusing on the audience.
Connect with your audience by telling them stories.
Recent research