Public Speaking Book(s) Review - The Presentation Coach, Lend Me Your Ears, & The Elements of Eloquence

The single most important thing you can do to make a speech successful is to prepare for it. Think about it: why do people get afraid? Because they fear that something bad will happen. If you are in control of a situation, then nothing bad can happen. If you prepare for a speech, then you are in control because you are up speaking by yourself. This isn’t combat. So prepare deeply to have a good speech and alleviate the fear.

Three books will help you do just that: The Presentation Coach, by Graham G. Davies; Lend me Your Ears, by Max Atkinson; and The Elements of Eloquence, by Mark Forsyth.

Davies says that giving a talk and presenting are not the same thing. Giving a talk is a subset of presenting. Whenever you are trying to convince someone verbally of something, you are presenting. Thus, these skills can be used for any of those situations. Job interviews, asking someone on a date, your father’s eulogy.

Long before you start speaking you should consider what exactly your goal is in giving this presentation. Then, think deeper. Is your goal achievable with the people in the audience? More specifically, is the timing right, the audience/goal alignment right, is the information you’re giving them right?

Atkinson goes farther and says that “the key to effective speaking” is to really know your listeners.

Thinking through this goal, you want to come up with what the author of The Presentation Coach calls the “micro-statement.” If you only had a few seconds to impress your idea upon your audience, what exactly would you say? This should both sum up what you’re trying to say, and be memorable. It should be a challenge to come up with this because it is so important. But once you have it, you’ll know.

Need help crafting the micro-statement? Use these steps:

1. Create one sentence that the audience should take away if they only take away one thing.
2. Ask yourself: is it significant to the audience?
3. Does the statement convince the audience to adopt your finishing statement?
4. Work on phrasing so that it is both tight and memorable
5. Reflect on whether it’s good enough that the audience can take away just that and you’d be satisfied.

Use this micro-statement as a filter for your speech. Ask yourself and be ruthless: “does this need to be in here?” If not, cut it.

You must remove every bit of cruft from your presentation. Listeners are only there for what they can leverage and what improves their lives. You should approach it from that angle: is what you are currently saying at any given time useful for the audience? Is it useful to advance your goals?

This is doubly true for the beginning and the end of your speech. Davies calls this “spiking,” as it is your best chance to make an impact upon your audience. Fail to make an impact at the beginning and they won’t listen to the rest. Don’t make an impact at the end and they won’t remember. This means no more: “Well, I guess that’s it, thank you.”

Ultimately, you want your presentation tight, crisp, and memorable. Keep it short, with three points at most. Because, as the authors say: it’s not the length of the speech that matters, it’s how long it seems.

And what’s the biggest thing to keep your presentation from seeming crisp? What makes a speech drag on?

It’s slides.

Too often presenters use slides as speaking notes, as a crutch. You never want to do this. First, why are you turning your back to the audience? Second, if they can read the slides, why are they listening to you?

They won’t. They will instead read the slides then think about what you’re going to talk about. This is true even if you are not repeating the slides word for word (which, of course, you would never do). Like ‘em or hate ‘em, people go to listen to politicians speak. When’s the last time you saw a politician with a slide deck?

There’s another thing that politicians try to avoid. You probably can’t, but you want to manage it anyway. Question time.

Do what you can to have questions at the end and not interspersed throughout your presentation. Remember that you should be in control of what you are presenting.

Questions are inherently uncontrollable. That doesn’t mean you should cede all control during question time. Just as you prepare for your presentation, so too should you prepare for questions.

Says Davies: “This is the core question to constantly ask yourself: ‘What would I be asking if I were them?’”

Try to dig deep and think of which questions you would hate to be asked, which you’d love to answer, and how someone could try and challenge you. Come up with good answers.

A good answer has a lot in common with your presentation. It should be brief and memorable, and it should support your point.

Davies provides two approaches to answering a question:

“Face up. Illustrate. Round off.”

• Headline view of the response to the question (face up to the question)
• Respond in-depth (illustrate)
• Restate without repeating the headline. Make it clear that you’ve ended the answer. (round-off)

Alternatively, there’s “Say it, support it, shut it.” when you want to provide a briefer answer.

Questions might come after the “main” presentation, but it’s not the end of the presentation. If you want to be a strong presenter, avoid doing what everyone else does. You’ve heard it:

“Okay, so I guess there’re no more questions. In that case, thanks for coming out.”

What are you thinking? You really want this to be the last thing they hear you say? Once again “spike” the ending: leave them with your main point and make it memorable above all else.

Okay, you know how to structure the presentation. How do you present?

All that you do in a presentation should be in the service of keeping attention from wandering.

Here are some quick tips from the books:

If you don’t need slides, don’t use them. If you don’t need a slide for this part of your talk, go to a blank screen. (Davies)

Speak with your normal intensity, plus an extra 10%. This is also true if you have a microphone. There’s no opportunity for cross-talk and asking for clarification in a presentation, so you must speak firmly and enunciate clearly. Nonetheless, vary your intensity and your speed. (Davies)

Take breaks longer than you are comfortable with. This gives your audience time to digest the information and lets you catch your breath. Plus, well-placed pauses can change the meaning of a speech. (Atkinson)¹

An example that immediately jumps to mind of this is Bill Clinton:

“But I want to say one thing to the American people.” Said with a normal speed and intensity.

”I want you to listen to me, I’m going to say this again.” Speed stays the same but with increased intensity.

”I. Did not. Have. Sexual. Relations with that woman.” Speed slows down significantly with each word nearly making up an entire sentence on its own. The first part of the sentence is also very pointed and emphatic. Clinton is trying to make a point. He’s trying to “spike” it and this is clearly what he wants people to take away.

A lot of people struggle with eye contact during a speech. But you must do it. According to Davies, in groups of less than 20 you should shoot for making eye contact with everyone for around three seconds each. In groups larger than this, divide the room into three sections and switch from section to section.

Atkinson agrees on the need for sustained eye contact. This says to them: “I see you and am speaking to you, in return I appreciate your attention.” ²

The need for attention makes a conversational style of speech attractive. Resist: this is not a conversation. In a conversation, people must pay attention (or at least pretend to) so that they know when it is time their speak. In a presentation it is never their time to speak so you must keep their attention in other ways.

One thing that will be banished immediately when you move from a conversation style to a presentation style is the use of filler words. “Uh” and “umm” are the leading offenders, but so, too, are “like…” and “so…” Even “and” can be a filler word when abused.

Keep in mind this: filler words are used in conversations to say “I am not yet finished speaking, so do not interrupt me.” In a presentation there is again no one to interrupt you.

All of these done poorly will show a lack of confidence. Done well, will exude confidence. And, simply, a confident presenter is more trusted and more listened to.

Not only must you be confident, so must you be excited about what you’re presenting. Reciprocity again comes into play: if you’re not excited about what you’re presenting, how can you expect your audience to be?

Atkins points out something else interesting about presenting with a lack of enthusiasm: it may lead the audience to believe that you don’t really believe what you are presenting. This is because a flat presentation is the preferred approach of any spokesperson who is presenting an official memo. Consider any press conference with a spokesperson explaining how something bad happened and what this means. How often do you see them really display interest in what they’re saying?

If you have the methods of presentation down, what kind of language should you use?

We’ve already seen to avoid using conversational language. Avoid, too, written language presented through speaking.

We speak in a very different manner than we write. Unless you’re someone like William F. Buckley or Christopher Hitchens, in which case you speak more intelligently than most people write and write even better, so it still holds true.

The easiest way to ensure that you are speaking like you write, and thus speaking in a stilted, wooden manner, is to write your presentation first. Atkins highlights a few issues. Two of the largest: an overabundance of the passive and too much information in too many words.

This second one is particularly pernicious. Speakers try to show off by cramming detail after detail into a presentation. Here’s the thing. The details do not matter nearly as much as the big picture. They are great in the written word where the reader can go back and read again. But, as Atkins says, “the spoken word evaporates the moment it comes out of our mouth.”

This applies to the short attention span that a listener has, though in fact Atkins was talking about simplifying a subject matter to a point where the speaker feels somewhat uncomfortable. There are nearly no absolutes in the world, but when we are first learning about a topic, it is useful to learn the generalized case before we learn the situations where it does not work.

Think of a map zoomed far out. The coastline looks generally smooth. Zoom in, and it looks less so, and even less the closer we come. Does that make the smooth view from far away any less useful? No.

Using rhetoric to your disposal will assist in getting your point across. To this end, The Elements of Eloquence is a useful reference guide for different tools. Not all will work in a presentation. For example, a “transferred epithet” is too subtle and clever for this purpose. This device transfers an adjective to the wrong noun: “The man smoked a nervous cigarette.” It purposefully causes us to take a second look, and we remember that spoken words disappear once they are spoken. But others, like anaphora and antanaclasis, are staples of good speakers.

Do be careful: using rhetorical devices before you have a firm grip on everything we just saw is like trying to do a wheelie with training wheels. It may very well be possible, but you’re more likely to crash. And even well-trained speakers should be wary of forcing in too many of these tools.

Let’s look at a famous speech and see how it leveraged what we’ve discussed.

From the beginning, we have an example of a litotes: a negation to emphasize and affirm the next part of the phrase. Here we have, “We observe today not a victory of a party, but a celebration of freedom…”

This could also be seen as Kennedy knowing, and addressing, his audience. There’s generally a surge of goodwill after an election for the victor (likely for the loser, as well, though that’s obviously not as consequential) as everyone cools down from a tough-fought campaign. But the 1960 Presidential Election had the potential to leave lingering frustrations. Kennedy in the end won fewer states overall and only 0.17% more votes nationwide then Republican Nixon.

By starting out by negating the importance of the day to a single party, Kennedy is saying: “This is not a day for gloating, but is for those who didn’t vote for me, too.” It’s a bromide, but a useful one.

Later he calls again for solidarity, though this time with the Communist Bloc, with a leveraging of anaphora, or the repetition of a single word, or in this case a phrase, at the beginning of several sentences.

Here we have “let both sides” used five times in a row.

”Let both sides explore…"

"Let both sides… formulate…"

"Let both sides seek…"

"Let both sides unite…"

"Let both sides join…”

What this usage does here is signal to the listener: “pay attention and keep a thread running, because this is all connected.”³

Kennedy also leverages pauses well to make clear and emphasize every single thing that the US will do “to assure the survival and success of liberty.”

(This would also be a good area to point out that presentations can have multiple audiences including those that aren’t present. In this case, the audience wasn’t just the immediate audience in Washington. It was also those allies who wondered if a new administration would support them and enemies who wondered if the White House would continue to oppose them.)

The most famous use of a rhetorical device in this speech is the use of chiasmus: switching around words in an X and Y plus Y and X format. You likely already know it:

“Ask not what your country can do for you–ask what you can do for your country.”

And Kennedy saves it for the second-to-last sentence, displaying the importance of always leaving a powerful ending.

I was lucky that my first ever class in high school was a year-long public speaking workshop. That was the one class, more than any other, that has had the biggest impact on my post-academic career. And yet there’s always more to learn, and more to improve. I picked these books up nearly a decade ago, and they helped tighten up my presentations: my wedding speech, a case I argued in front of the tribunal de justice, and in job interviews. I think they’ll help you, too.

The preachers that I remember were soft-spoken and, more than most other speakers I’ve viewed, leveraged well-placed pauses. When talking about scripture, these moments of silence let the information linger and be digestible.

In 1992, Bush was running against Clinton and Ross Perot in the general election. During a “town hall” style debate, Bush was asked a question about the recession and how it had affected him personally. While he was being asked the question, the President looked at his watch.

This didn’t necessarily mean that he was bored—he could have just as likely been wanting to see how much time he had for the question. But the impression and the narrative was set. Bush was too far removed from the common person.

Contrast that with Clinton’s response. He steps forward, asks the voter a question, and then keeps eye contact through his answer. This moment didn’t change the election on its own, but you couldn’t imagine a worse swing in perspective for the sitting President.