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Notes from Washington University class

Week 1

Objectives to focus

  • Skills and experience: The course introduces the concepts and the skills necessary to become a good speaker, but only experience and practice lead to mastery.
  • Design and deliver: Situation judgment, presentation planning, and content selection make the design part. Techniques to gain the audience’s attention are going to be presented.
  • Clarity and engagement: Short phrases, the right choice of words, prosody.

Some types of speeches

  • Introductory speech: Short, superficial and motivational.
  • Elevator speech: Raise interest into a ressource (person, product) in a short time.
  • Key point speech: Swiss knife of speech models.

Rhetoric and rhetoric cannons

Rhetoric is the art of identifying communication needs and strategically responding to them.

Factors to evaluate

  • Topic: What to talk
  • Setting: Theater, conference room, video
  • Audience: Experts, general, children, practitioners
  • Occasion: Is there a frame? What does the audience expect?
  • Credibility: Do they know me? How to show off my ethos?
Note

Rhetoric is about judging rhetorical situations accurately; devising smart responses and performing them well.

Components of a speech

  • Invention: Content
  • Arrangement: Split up the speech; sequence; format; organization
  • Style: Fancy, plan, serious, dramatic, ironic
  • Memory
  • Delivery: Putting the plan into action. Acting.
For a good delivery
  • Context: What, why, how and what next?
  • Prosody: Pitch, rate, intonation, pause, stress.

Speak versus writing:

Speech is a natural medium of sound. Language is acquired; writing is taught.

Writing needs language: half of the 7000 living languages do not have a writing system We should be aware not to treat speaking as writing and vice versa. They work in different mediums and should be crafted accordingly.

Important

Reading is a decoding process. Word -> Meaning (Decoding; fishing)

Writing an speaking are a encoding process. Meaning -> Word (Encoding; Recollecting; Crosswords). The speaking, however, has a faster pace than writing.

Examples of speakers

  • Robert Reich
  • James Ogoola
  • Doris Kevans Geodwin
  • Bobby Jindal
  • Steven Spielberg (commencement speech Harvard 2016)

Exercise

  • Pick a theme and write a speech.
  • Record the speech.
  • Repeat the process with the same theme, but for a different audience.
Note

You can pick a theme from a news article, for example.

Week 2

Key-point speech

A key point speech is a speech model. It is the swiss knife of speeche models because it fits well in several occasions and the reason for that is that the key point speech is structured in chunks of information, which is exactly the way our brains like to consume information.

Key-point speech restrictions

  • It should be between 3 and 7 minutes long.
  • It should have one of the following goals:
    • Summary: General overview of something
    • Persuade: Convincing the public of a thesis
    • Inform: Give factual information
Important

For the persuade mode, be careful about controversial themes. People get really defensive about those A possible strategy is to easy humor.

How to evaluate yourself and others (the rubric)

  • Invention: Did the speaker give enough information?
  • Arrangement: The main points followed smoothly? It was easy to follow?
  • Style: The phrases were concise or too long? The chosen examples were clear and elucidating?
  • Delivery: The speaker was confident and animated? Did he breathe correctly. What about the signs he projected, the gestual? Was the rate, pitch and prosody cues helpful?
  • Memory: Did the speaker seem to know the subject deeply?

What makes a memorable point

We can break an argument as a sequence of claims. Claims are assertions that you want to convince your audience are valid. To accomplish this goal, we should better use warranted supported claims. That means that we are going to support the claims with examples and we are going to explain how the example gives us evidence of the claim (warranty). Support can be given in the form of statistics, facts, studies, figures, etc. A good speech is based on skills, judgement and experience. Use your discretion to adapt your speech to the audience and eventual restrictions such as time limit. A helpful guiding rule is: Make sure to choose key points such that your audience will remember after. Those key points, make sure to repeat them along the speech. Repeat them again in the conclusion. Do not list too many key points. If you have many things to talk, group them in 3-5 group key points and make sure that those group key points will be remembered and that your speech gives a easy link and a smooth flow to the subkey points.

Creating points and support

Here it follows a small list of key point generators. Those generators can be used to create key points in your speech. They can be characterized as an argument line, and if is a good fit to your thesis, gives us support for one or more of your claims.

  • Short term/Long term: Consequences.
  • Past/Present/Future: Analogy and generalization
  • Increase/Decrease: Counter effects
  • Cause/Effect:
  • Division: Break a long statement in small parts
  • Definition: Break your factual claims in small definition chunks

Outline and Flowing

Outline is a hierarchical representation of your speech. Use this if you are going to give a speech using some notes. A flowing is the notes you take when following the speech of some other person. It is like creating an outline online, with streaming information.

Transition phrases

  • My first point concerns...
  • I’ll begin/start off by... Then I’ll move on to... Then/Next/After that, I’ll be looking at...First/First of all, I’d like to give you an overview of...
  • Secondly/Then/Next, I’ll focus on...
  • Thirdly/And then, we’ll consider...
  • Finally/Lastly/Last of all, I’ll deal with...
  • So, I’ll begin by filling you in on the background to/ bringing you up-to-date on/ giving you an overview of the history of/ making a few observations about/ outlining...
  • And then, I’ll go on to highlight what I see as the main points of/ put the situation into some kind of perspective/discuss in more depth the implications of/ take you through/make detailed recommendations regarding...
  • One thing I’ll be dealing with is the issue of...
  • I’ll end with...
  • And finally, I’d like to address the problem of/to raise briefly the issue of...
Induction versus Deduction

In general terms, a deduction is a sequence of logical steps starting from a set of premises that lead to a conclusion that is sure to be valid given that no logical errors are committed. An induction appears in the forms of generalization, analogy and causal inference. All forms lead to a probably valid conclusion, but with no guarantees at all. It is the source of some fallacies. Check the wikipedia link on inductive reasoning.

Handling Q&A sections

Among the three ways to deal with audience (logos, pathos and ethos), the Q&A section is a good opportunity to enhance your ethos. Remember that it is not sufficient to be an expert. You should also sound like one.

Important

There is a simple hint here: Prepare some basic questions. As the master of your content, you know very well the weakest points of your argument. Be prepared to answer questions about it.

Each question is a mini speech. Again, the key point model is useful. Keep it simple and brief. One warrant supported claim should be enough to make your point. Do not go in details unless asked for. That avoids wandering off the topic.

Hostility questions

Keep a calm tone and do not respond with hostility.

  • Question: So, the university is getting rid of its unfair admissions policy?
  • Answer: The admissions procedure wasn’t unfair. That’s not why we’re changing our policy. The new admissions protocol is focused on getting a more holistic sense of the student.

Rephrase the question to the audience

I get what he’s concerned with. I do. I want to be very clear about this issue…. Acknowledge the questioner and suggest to discuss the issue in a Post Q&A.

Week 3

Give concrete support

In the best scenario, you want to give solid evidence to support your claim. Nothing beats a fact, but statistics and testimonials are also very valuable and concrete. If you do not have this kind of support, you can reccur to an example. It could be a fictional example or non-fictional, but it should be believable.

A third option is to give metaphors or analogies. That requires some ingenuity and creativity, but has as much value as concrete support. A claim is well supported if you can use one or more of those. Remember, we want the audience to understand our message. We need to be concrete.

Keep the focus

You have limited time and the audience has limited attention. You should choose a few points and focus on them. Remember that you need to be concrete in each of those points, and it requires time to give examples and concrete support.

Prefer clarity over comprehensiveness

It is better to make a point clear instead of wandering off tiny details (even if these details are important for the correctness of your thesis).

Performing your key points

For each key point, make sure to do the following:

  • State it
  • Explain it
  • Show it
  • Conclude it

Get the attention of the audience

You should mark that you are starting. That will depend on where you are presenting. In a conference you may already have the attention of everyone; in a classroom you may need to be more emphatic.

Secondly, you should orient your audience. The first thing after marking your opening is to state what you are going to talk about. Next, you should give a preview of the talk with its respective outline.

To keep your audience attention, a good tip is to give them material to craft a mental image of what you are talking about. That will make them understand faster and recover their attention.

Transitions

Transitions stress the distinctness of each key point and help the audience to know where you are. It will be useful to have some general sentences to make transitions.

Conclusions

Use it to reinforce the key points. It is recommended to use prosody cues. For example, you can put a longer pause between words and for the very last word you could state it in a descending tone.

Revising the speech

The key to write a good speech is the rewriting. Our brains work better after the content we planned rests in our mind for a while. Then, when you rewrite it, you come over with better ideas and with an improved mastery of the content.

To memorize or not memorize

It depends on the density of the speech. If you have too much to say in a very short time, it will be better to memorize everything. On the other hand, if the topic is not that difficult and time is not a constraint, just memorize the outline of your speech. For all the other cases, bear in mind that it is not a good idea to memorize everything. You are susceptible to blank out and not sound natural.

Week 4

Public speaking apprehension

Public speaking apprehension is a communication-based anxiety where speakers, in response to an actual or expected presentation, experience physiological, cognitive and behavioral responses. It can manifest as a trait (person) or a state (situation).

Internal causes (during presentation)

  • Misinterpretation of body signals;
  • Misremember what happened;
  • Misperceive what the audience saw.

External causes

  • Novelty of the situation;
  • Formality of the situation;
  • Status;
  • Am I going to be evaluated?
  • Conspicuousness (visibility)
  • Prior history

Scientifically proven techniques

Systematic desensitization

Go to a comfortable chair and relax to the point that you are almost sleeping. Then, picture yourself in a public speaking situation. It should be one with no much pressure, such as chill talk with friends or family.

Next, imagine an informal presentation to your colleagues. Go on and increase the level of stress in each situation.

Visualization

Picture all the steps of the speech.

  • Anticipation: The moment just before the beginning of the speech.
  • Confrontation: The first two minutes of the speech
  • Adaptation: When you start to develop your arguments
  • Release: After the speech is over
  • Cognitive modification
  • Think about your previous experience and identify your fears. Try to understand why this is causing you fear.
  • Practicing

Breathing and projection

Breathing is the most important physiological function in a speech. Your speech delivery is directly affected by your type of breathing. It can cause difficulties in your articulation, but also could hurt the audience. We become anxious if we see someone with an anxious breathing.

Projection relates to working your voice such that it sounds clear and clean. One aspect of it is its power and reach. In order to delivery a good projection, think about

  • Standing straight in a solid basis;
  • To support your voice in the diaphragma;
  • Expand the larynx cavity
  • Pay attention to articulation. Open your mouth.

Pitch and prosody units

A prosody unit in speech is the correspondent of a sentence in writing. During speech, we can make use of prosody cues such as pitch variation (highness and lowness of a voice); intonation or word stress variation; rate and speed of the speech. The goal of that is to avoid monotonous speech.

A good exercise to deliver prosody units well is to do a warm up before your speeches.

  • Mi mi ma ma mu
  • Sirenes
  • Up and down scale

Rate, repetition and pause

Imagine your audience taking notes. Make sure to slow down in important parts (for example, when you enunciate your key points).

Use pauses to direct the audience's attention. You can use longer pauses to stress a transition or the end of a section.

Gestures and movements

Not a general rule here. Just be aware of them. Try to have controlled movement and gestures and give a purpose to all of them. Use them as an extra tool to stress a point, to indicate a transition or to reinforce a claim.

Glossary: