How to Speak in Public

After an email conversation he and I had, Graham offers some thoughts on the best way to give talks. Here was my original off-the-cuff thought:

One of the lessons Iâ??ve learned in the past five years is that there is no right way to give a talk. There are, however, right ways to give particular talks in particular circumstances. Unfortunately, people usually only learn one way of presenting (be it paper reading or PowerPoint summarizing). Which is too bad.

As someone who moves back and forth between a lot of different styles of and contexts for presentations, I agree with Harman’s lament,

Sometimes one encounters snobbery against the formal paper method, along the lines of “you canâ??t even speak about your own work without a prepared text?” And occasionally, though less often, I even hear snobbery directed against impromptu talks, in the spirit of “you mean you didnâ??t even prepare anything and youâ??re just going to wing it?”

He offers a useful list of rough guidelines for when to use a prepared text versus speaking extemporaneously, which I’ll let you click over to his post to read.

Overall, I agree with his suggestions, although there are always exceptions. For example, Graham suggests using prepared texts when young, which makes sense. But it’s also sometimes sensible to be more extemporaneous when young, in order to make good on that youthful energy and to really electrify a room.

But perhaps the most important addition I’d make to Graham’s list is to suggest an entirely different category of presentation: the prepared extemporaneous talk.

This can take many forms, from a paper that one has read through many times in order to practice it as a talk rather than just a reading, to a set of slides with detailed notes that allow one to move between paper (or screen), and audience fluidly, making adjustments and changes as needed.

It’s worth noting that most public figures never give extemporaneous talks, even though they appear to do. Usually, they read a prepared speech (with which they are already quite familiar) from a TelePrompTer. But one doesn’t need such a setup to appear really fluent in front of an audience; instead one just needs a lot of practice.

Perhaps that’s most important lesson for talks of any format—they all require practice. Not just practice doing lots of different talks (that’s also good) but practice giving a particular talk. Humanists tend to think that lectures are just orated versions of written arguments, and scientists tend to think that they are just perfunctory summaries of findings. The truth is, presentations are always different in form than any written matter that anticipates or follows them, and a speaker should remember that preparing one does not automatically entail preparing the other.

But public lectures are always performances. Performances come in many varieties, from stage improv to formal debate, and one must take great care to understand (or to predict) what sort of context a talk deserves, or demands.

There are many more things to say here, but here’s one final tip for now: in a context where everyone is doing more or less the same thing (for example, the Modern Language Association (MLA) conference, where nearly everyone drones over a paper), it’s often a good idea to do something totally different. Standing out is risky, but it can often pay off.