Confessions of a Public Speaker

Author: Scott Berkun

Rating: ⭐ 3/5

Date Read: 2014/02/26

Pages: 240

I find myself doing a lot of public speaking these days: presentations on my research, guest lectures in undergraduate courses, leading course sections, that sort of thing. I’m also one of those crazy people who actually enjoys public speaking: the bigger the audience, the better. Lecturing doesn’t leave me terrified or drained, not even a little bit. Put me in front of a crowd and I’ll feel energized, excited. It’s probably my favorite thing about graduate school.

Am I turning this review into a “me me me” kind of thing? Perhaps, but public speaking can be pretty me-tastic so I don’t mind too much. I do think that part of the reason why I love performing so much is because I’ve been doing it since before I could remember. I started out ice skating, and performed at shows, competitions, and evil USFSA moves in the field tests for over a decade. I cheered in front of my entire high school at pep rallies, in front of pretty much the entire town at football games (it was a small town, so football was all we had going on), in front of televised national audiences at competitions. In college, the NCAA basketball games I cheered at weekly were usually televised. I’m convinced that performance is something of a learned skill (although, note that I actively chose activities that involved performance, so there’s probably also a third variable at play here). I mean, once you fall on your ass on ESPN doing a stunt that didn’t work out the way you expected it to, lecturing in front of a couple hundred undergrads who are probably too hungover or too busy playing candy crush to listen to you is totally cake.

Anyway, I expected this book to be a compendium of tips for public speaking, and it wasn’t, not really. Instead, it was one part memoir, one part non-narrative tips, which ended up a bit awkward. I would have liked the appendices at the end to be in narrative form, like the rest of the book, because the illustrative stories do lend a sense of concreteness to Berkun’s advice.

Berkun’s major point about public speaking is a good one: you need to organize your thoughts, and you need to practice (especially when it comes to the transitions between points). There’s no use giving a talk that’s not well thought-out: your audience is not going to learn something if you’re only presenting them with a half-baked idea. Academics don’t really have a problem with the thinking (when it comes to thinking, we’re pros), but I’m as guilty as anyone of not thinking about how my argument can be summarized in talk form. I’ve definitely over-planned and given talks that had way too much information, because I didn’t want to be accused of simplifying or leaving things out. And I’ve also seriously messed up transitions. I put those in my notes now, so that I can see them in presenter view. It works for me.

Another good piece of advice: talks are about the audience, not the speaker. Sometimes, speakers (especially less experienced speakers) want to make sure they come off as smart, so they give these sesquipedalian talks that only serve to obfuscate their topic. Here’s the thing: the audience doesn’t care if you’re smart. The audience wants to feel like they’re smart. It’s more effective to give your points simply and clearly. Be to the point. Once you start throwing in huge words and double negatives, you’ve lost the audience.

The biggest takeaway is that, regardless of what happens, you really can’t screw your talk up too badly. Even though everyone (or, at least, the attentive subset of everyone) is looking at you, they’re not paying as much attention to you as you are. Think back to all the talks you’ve been to, and I bet you won’t be able to remember that many mishaps. A typo on a slide might become a thorn in a speaker’s side, but the audience probably won’t remember it the next day.

Here’s an anecdote from me, and then I’ll quit talking (I promise!). Back in high school, we had these pep rallies where the entire school would gather (separated by class level, naturally. Us ‘04 kids wouldn’t be caught dead talking to those ‘05 losers or smug ‘03 bitches), watch the cheerleaders perform, and generally get stoked for whatever “big game” was upon us. At one of these rallies (I think sophomore year) I somehow landed flat on my ass doing a high kick. And everyone noticed. Seriously, that whole week I got stopped in the hall and asked if I was “that girl that fell.” I was mortified. Remember, in high school the stakes are high, and mortification is frequent (if the embarrassing stories from Seventeen magazine can be taken as a source, young women can’t even purchase tampons without extreme mortification). Luckily, this incident didn’t stop me from making varsity the next year, or from getting into college, or from earning a masters degree. The only lasting impact is that I now have a good story to tell at cocktail parties. And we all need good stories to tell at cocktail parties, right? So the next time you have to give a big speech, just remind yourself that, worse case scenario, you’ll be laughing about this over manhattans in the very near future.