Using carefully planned reduction, a world war can be reduced to a few key battles, a biography can be reduced to a small set of relationships and accomplishments, an issue can be reduced to a small set of influences and ramifications, and by doing so the speaker can make the essence of the complex whole available to the audience member.
Block One: mylovehastwigsandinsectsinherhairsheisaquitepatheticsighttoseesheneitherseemstoknownorknowstocareimaginehowthatmustreflectonme
Block Two: My love has twigs and insects in her hair. She is a quite pathetic sight to see. She neither seems to know nor knows to care. Imagine how that must reflect on me.
While it is certainly possible to decode the first block of text and arrive at the second, how many people would prefer to do so? Luckily, written text provides symbolic instructions called punctuation marks that instruct the reader on how to assemble the mass of collected mush into meaning.
Signposts are verbal punctuation marks. They tell the audience member where he or she is and to what he or she should be paying attention. When you say:
or any of the thousands of utterances you construct every day to make yourself understood, you are using signposts. The trick in Public Speaking is to use them strategically--to think a great deal about what needs to be emphasized and how to do it, to think about where confusion might arise and how to alleviate or avoid it. Signposts are very important. The beginning speaker almost cannot overuse them.
Technically, summaries are signposts, but they have sufficient value to the enterprise of public speaking that they deserve separate consideration (which, yes, is a signpost). A summary tells the audience, in truncated (dictionary) form what they have just heard or are about to hear. There are three self-evident kinds:
"My purpose today is to explain the hydrologic cycle. It includes three phases: precipitation, evaporation, and condensation."
"So, in summary, precipitation is water vapor that has condensed to the level where it is too heavy for the atmosphere to carry it. Depending on the weather conditions through which it falls, it can take the form of rain, sleet, hail or snow."
"In conclusion, I have tried to convince you that the evidence of recidivism among child molesters is staggering, that the safety of our children is more important than any abstract right of the convicted, and that the window of the public's willingness to act on issues such as this is small. So please write your congressional representative to support a national Meagan's Law."
The use of summaries is, of course, a strategic choice, but as a rule of thumb the more complex your material, the more necessary they are.
In the course of his one hour act, he will throw out almost ten one liners a minute. You do the math. Suffice to say, it must be difficult even in the least stressful of situations to remember so much material, let alone in the all-out, life in the fast lane, Darwinian bottom-feeding world of stand-up comedy.
So how do they do it? I asked a comic once, and he told me that professional comics almost never forget their material. Where they get into trouble is getting from one set of jokes--say airline food--to the next--say taxicabs.
The same is true in public speaking (obviously, or I would not have brought it up). Most speakers who have rehearsed at all will recall most of their points and evidence. It is getting between points that messes most of us up. And that is where Transitions come in.
Transitions are devices for getting between points. At the basic public speaking level, they should be direct Signposts indicating the intention to move on and clearly describing that to which you will be moving. We can, much as we did with summaries, separate them into three kinds:
These get you from the introduction to the body of the speech. Even if you employ an intro summary, you need a line to get you from it to the body.
"My purpose today is to explain the hydrologic cycle. It includes three phases: precipitation, evaporation, and condensation. Let's begin by talking about Precipitation, or--as we more commonly know it . . . rain."
These are transitions among parts of the body of the speech.
"So, in summary, precipitation is water vapor that has condensed to the level where it is too heavy for the atmosphere to carry it. Depending on the weather conditions through which it falls, it can take the form of rain, sleet, hail or snow. Of course, we all know what rain is, but it is what happens to rain after it falls that sets the whole hydrologic cycle in motion."
The Concluding Transition separates the body of the speech from the Conclusion.
"The image of that little girl is going to stay in my mind forever--as I hope it will in yours. Whether we can live with that image depends on what we choose to do next. In conclusion, I have tried to convince you that the evidence of recidivism among child molesters is staggering, that the safety of our children is more important than any abstract right of the convicted, and that the window of the public's willingness to act on issues such as this is small. So please write your congressional representative to support a national Meagan's Law."
I stongly advise you to write out a short, direct sentence of transition at the bottom of each of your note cards and practice them. These sentences can act as your reserve parachute. If you get close to the end of your idea and cannot remember what you were going to say, pull the rip cord and go on. It takes very little extra effort and practice, but it will make your job as a public commuicator significantly less nerve-wracking for you and significantly more fluid and understandable for your audience.
Some people say all of our new experiences exist only by analogy to our old ones. Whether that is true or not, it is definitely true that Analogy is a good way to enhance comprehension. Analogy is the clarification of the unknown by comparing it to the known. It is not a literal comparison, it is instead an artistic or figurative comparison which less explains than characterizes. The point is to help the audience member visualize the issue--the better we can see something, the more real and hence understandable it is. Analogy helps us see.
In the section on Bookending, I compare a speech to a roller coaster. That is an analogy. I used to give a speech to inform explaining how airplanes fly. In it, I would use analogies to ice skaters and marching bands to explain the effect of differential air pressure on the surface of a wing (You had to be there.).
Einstein used to use an analogy of a bug on a basketball to discuss the theory of relativity (You had to be there in relation to somewhere else.).
Imagine a bug walking on a basketball. The bug will live forever, and everywhere he walks he leaves little white footprints.
Now, will the bug ever hit the end of the basketball? The
edge? The wall?
How long can the bug walk without interference?
Yet, eventually, will not the entire surface of the ball change
color from its rather sickly basketball brown to a nice shiny
bugfoot white?
The basketball is like the universe, neverending yet finite in area. The bug is like matter and energy going on forever yet theoretically doomed to retrace itself at some point near infinity.
This is how analogy works. None of these devices informs the subject specifically; each only allows the listener to grasp an ephemeral concept a little more tightly, so that the ensuing material can be received more clearly.
Analogies have two other tactical advantages. Good ones are interesting, and their creative nature reflects well on the speaker. So if your mind works that way, I encourage you to use them. If it doesn't; try anyway. You only get better with practice.
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