Best Public Speaking Articles: Weekly Review [2009-01-31]

On Saturdays, we survey the best public speaking articles from throughout the public speaking blogosphere.

This week’s review features topics including:

• marketing yourself as a speaker;
• presentation lessons from storyboarding;
• editing your presentation;
• involving your audience;
• challenging yourself;
• the expectation of preparation; and
• techniques to memorize your speech.

Week in Review: Six Minutes

Our series of book reviews continued with one more this week:

• Make Money Speaking – Book Review: Rain Making (Ford Harding)
  Review of practical marketing guide which shows professional speakers how to grow their client base, and all professionals how to use speaking to complement their marketing efforts.

Week in Review: Public Speaking Blogosphere

Speechwriting

• Garr Reynolds summarizes the key points from “The Art of Storyboarding”, many of which can be applied by skilled presenters.

Storyboarding is a great way to begin to visualize the story of your content. (In animation) storyboards are used to develop the story. A great storyboard artist is a great communicator. […]

How can you visualize your presentation like a comic? […] You can do this on a whiteboard, but one of the best analog ways is with sticky notes […]

• Olivia Mitchell lists 9 ways to edit your presentation.

1. Ensure your presentation has only one focus.
2. Cut anything from your presentation which does not relate to that core message.
3. Have no more than 3 main points in your presentation.
4. Chunk items together.
5. Restrict the number of items in a list.
6. Cut secondary stories or examples.
7. Tighten your explanations.
8. Rehearse your stories.
9. Create a handout.

Delivery Techniques

• Ian Griffin lists 10 tips for involving an audience.

1. Engage the audience’s emotions.
2. Get physical.
3. Make the speech compelling.
4. Be aware of different learning styles.
5. Move beyond PowerPoint.
6. Make eye contact.
7. Avoid reading a verbatim script.
8. Listen to the audience.
9. Challenge the audience.
10. Use humor.

Visual Aids

• Dave Paradi draws a parallel between slide presentations and movie DVDs with “special feature” deleted scenes:

Why don’t presenters do the editing that a movie director does and end up with a Deleted Slides special feature? I think it is due to two reasons. First, they don’t budget the time for editing. […]

The second reason that presenters don’t edit their presentations is that they are under the mistaken belief that the audience wants to see and hear every small detail. Most audiences, especially decision-makers, don’t want every detail.

Speaker Habits

• Nick R Thomas details key events in his 14 years as a public speaker which is, as in all of his posts, capped with an important lesson about challenging yourself:

However well you are progressing as a speaker, you need a constant flow of new challenges in terms of types of audiences, events and presentations if you are to keep developing your potential.

• Lisa Braithwaite argues that you owe it to your audience to prepare your presentation.

Think about yourself and your own goals. Do you hope to advance in your career? Do you hope to make more money, get a better job, have the respect of your peers and supervisors?

Well, doing a half-ass job on your presentation isn’t going to help you in any of these areas. So now you’re letting the audience down, your co-workers, your boss and yourself.

• Jason Peck outlines his memory method for learning a speech in 24 hours.

1. Get your speech written.
2. Record your speech.
3. Relax.
4. Sleep… then learn.
5. Wake up… then learn.