Best Public Speaking Articles: Weekly Review [2008-05-31]

Every Saturday, we survey the best public speaking articles from throughout the public speaking blogosphere.

Topics featured this week include:

• learning from Steve Jobs;
• conferences, charisma, and confidence (3 separate articles);
• speechwriting tips;
• PowerPoint and slide design; and
• Toastmasters tips.

Week in Review: Six Minutes

This week featured two articles on Six Minutes:

• You Can Learn to Present Like Steve Jobs
  Video analysis by Carmine Gallo which gives 7 techniques used by Steve Jobs to make his presentations memorable.
• Toastmasters Speech 3: Get to the Point
  This article continues the Toastmasters Speech series by investigating the importance of sharp focus to make your point clear to the audience.

Week in Review: Public Speaking Blogosphere

• Max Kalehoff provides 10 recommendations to make conferences great.

Be authoritative

Define your community

Halt PowerPoint abuse

Enforce points of view

Pay the presenters

Showcase more new smart faces

Tap into audience wisdom

Serve good food

Provide reliable WiFi

Remember that less is more

• Gavin Meikle questions whether charisma can be learned.

Everyone agrees that is an important and desirable characteristic whether you are a salesperson, a team leader, a presenter or a teacher but it seems such an intangible thing.

• James Feudo ponders the cause-effect relationship between speaking success and confidence.

So the next time you’re faced with having to give a speech and pondering whether it’ll affect your life if you skip out of it, consider what you stand to gain by giving a great presentation.

Speechwriting Advice

• Mary Jaksch provides three tips for integrating dialogue for maximum impact into your writing.
  (Note: Although this article is aimed at non-fiction writers, the advice translates wonderfully to public speaking as well, just as many other writing lessons do.)

Use dialogue as a hook.

Use direct quotes for emotional impact.

Set the stage for quotes.

• Olivia Mitchell extracts lessons from an evaluation of Seth Godin’s TED talk.

So here’s what you can learn from Seth’s presentation:

• state your key message early in your presentation
• link back and repeat your key message at every opportunity
• use evidence to back up your points
• ensure you link each example to the point you’re making
• have one or two well-chosen examples for each point

• Nick Morgan reflects on three objectives that storytelling can satisfy.

Stories can explain origins. Did your vision begin with personal computers in a garage, nerdy and high-tech, or did you have an idea about saving money? Don’t give us the facts, give us the story.

• Ron Bland links to a video which encourages specific, concrete, and familiar words to communicate clearly.

PowerPoint and Slide Design

• Dave Paradi narrates a slide makeover video where he converts a single loaded text slide into a set of five slides with visual elements.
• Ellen Finkelstein provides 5 Steps to Slide Design for Non-Designers.

Create a custom color scheme

Format the slide master

Choose a background

Tell ‘n’ show

Use simple layouts

• Garr Reynolds reports the recent news that Toyota CEO Katsuaki Watanabe urged his employees to refrain from using PowerPoint.

He is reminding employees to be cost conscious and he used the practice of using PowerPoint as an example of waste. Watanabe said that (in the good old days?) they used to use one piece of paper to make a clear point or proposal, or to summarize an issue, but now everything is in PowerPoint, he says, which uses many sheets of paper and expensive colors…but it’s a waste.

Toastmasters Articles

• Craig Strachan is doing a series of screencasts to help members navigate online reports available from Toastmasters.org.
• John Spaith passionately argues that the VP-Education should create a schedule manually.

Auto-scheduling doesn’t provide the vast time savings it’s supposed to, it establishes bad habits in members, it doesn’t give members the freedom to set their own pace of development, and it robs the VPE of a really great growth opportunity.