How to speak publicly

[Sean]

Any thoughts on good strategies for public speaking welcome.

Also a few lines below on the Chinese trend for memorizing verbatim instead of just the content of notes. And a file of instruction of mine also here  https://app.box.com/s/ntdcogdx0rytnnj0i246

Six ways to give a speech

The free speech from images

You prepare a set of powerpoint images, as many as several slides per minute, and an interesting and usually factual set of notes against each; then practise remembering them, their content only not word for word, just from clicking through the slides. Have only a few sentences for each image so then they're fairly easy to remember with the slides providing regular cues- this makes an engaging, fast moving talk for the audience.

The free speech from notes

For talks with more depth of content glance down at the notes, to be said in any number of ways, after having put key phrases in bold as prompts; then practise remembering the content from the phrases. Ideally however still have some slides for the audience, even though they're not enough for regular prompts.

The free speech without images or notes

Only do this when you're thoroughly familiar with both your notes and the talk's entire structure to be able to recall them throughout; again some images are still good. It may be fine for very short talks, but probably not in the present case.

The read speech

This is either for formal occasions where accuracy is important such as political announcements or academic conferences, or where the speaker isn't familiar enough with the language spoken for freely speaking. Hence this is a useful alternative for lower level foreign language speakers, keeping eye contact best they can and reading with spontaneity best they can. Moreover reading aloud is a sophisticated skill that also needs practise, not an easy way out.

The verbatim recitation

It's not a speech, just a stressful abdication of personality and completely wrong. No training groups, no books and no experienced speakers will tell you to do this. It's bonkers and arises from a confusion about the need to memorize something to say.

The waffle

Also not a speech, you talk about which stairs you took to walk to the room, what you had for breakfast and people can see you haven't prepared any interesting content to say.

Thoughts on the Chinese verbatim speech

Verbatim memorization instead of breaking the text down into its constituent information to memorize more simply relates to Chinese character memorization in place of breaking words down into their constituent phonetics to memorize more simply.

Thousands of Chinese characters as word sounds have to be laboriously learnt instead of only 26 letters that can be phonetically read as necessary. Rote memorization and verbatim copying then perhaps displaces some critical thought and reasoning in the Chinese education system: if Western students are any more critical it's certainly not by much at all, yet critical thought is at least more established for them on the normative cultural level.

Endless characters making Chinese literacy more difficult aligns with the information and people control concerns, and also with traditions in political settings of getting presentations word perfect and free of errors for the ruling elites.

However memorization further parallels oral literary traditions in developing countries, which are fine in their own context. For instance I'm interested in the Indian oral techniques that passed down vast sacred texts for millennia in ways that prevented errors of transmission which instead arise in writing.