This is the introduction to the study of basic public speaking. Like anything else we fear, success at public speaking is more a matter of unlearning what we think we know than of learning anything new. The purpose of Virtual Reality is to correct some commonly held misapprehensions and to replace them with a small set of fundamental assumptions on which the student can both rely and build.
Let's get the big one out of the way first. Ask anybody why he or she talks, and the answer will be to communicate with someone. Remind the person that he or she has provided a synonym not an answer, and you will hear something about getting your point across. Most of us assume this to be the case and plan our communication accordingly. That is why few of us communicate as efficiently as we might.
You needn't accept this as an item of scholarly wisdom, but in my view the mere expression of one's point of view is a somewhat hollow exercise. It is a confusion of means with ends. Most transmission media are better employed when they are conceived of not as modes of expression, but as modes of reception. If you are a struggling young musician, what could be better than having your music broadcast over the airwaves? How about having someone actually HEAR it? Better yet, how about HEAR it and ENJOY it? The purpose of radio is not to send sound; it is for sounds to be received and then employed. The same can be said for television, email and any other of the countless modes of expression. The point is not merely to express, but to have that expression matter to someone at the other end!
Talk is no different than any of the media through which talk travels. Talk matters little unless it is heard and responded to. Let's say you buy yourself one of those big brutish four-wheel drive station wagons, and you are out on a snowy, icy day being King of the Road! Well, Bigfoot, guess what. Your Wagoneer just hit a patch of ice and like all of those wimpy little econo-cars you mock did what the laws of physics commanded it to do--it slid! You are now hanging half over a thruway bridge, teetering between life and if not death at least substantially higher insurance rates, when you hear another vehicle approaching. I'll bet you're going to honk your horn. I'll also bet it won't be because you feel an urgency to express your thoughts about the meaning of life. I'm thinking your motive is to formulate and transmit a message to a particular audience that will result in a particular response--in this case pulling over and helping you (And if there is a God in Heaven its that '89 Volkswagen Rabbit you drenched in slush just a few miles back!).
The effective communicator differs from the less effective in that he or she appreciates that ALL messages are motivated by the same urgency--to have someone pull over and do something they would not have done had the message not been heard.
Allow me to put this more directly:
The Zen master said: "Say nothing that will not improve on silence."
To put it in a somewhat less Zen-like form, if I will be no different after you have talked than I was before...
DON'T TALK!
Alright, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to snap. Some of us are poets. We speak to put into words that which without poetry could never be materialized, to express our inner most feelings as a way of coming to terms with who we are . . . of reaching into the inner void and shedding some frail light.
Yeah, okay.
I'll tell you what. Get it out of your system. Below is what I call the
SELF-EXPRESSION BOX.
Take a moment to fight for idealism in this cold cruel world of manipulation and symbolic terror. Then send it to the world, and we'll proceed.
EXPRESS!
That pretty much says it all. Let's go on.
Since the purpose of speaking is to change an audience member in a specific and predictable way, the first thing one must do after deciding on a broad topic area is specify that response.
First, recognize that there exist four general categories of response, each of which contains certain expectations:
All of the material in a presentation may be information, but if the point of giving the audience the information is to persuade them to change their behavior, it is a speech to Actuate, not a speech to Inform!
Be careful not to confuse means with ends.
Attention! Go directly to the General Purpose Exercise! (Are you eyeballin' me, boy?)
The Specific Speech Purpose.
Now it is time to construct The Most Important Sentence of the Speech.
The Specific Speech Purpose is the sentence which describes how the audience member will respond. It signifies, in the most concrete terms possible, how we will be different when you are finished talking.
The Specific Speech Purpose is so important, because it is impossible for you to know how to get to your destination before you know what that destination is! I saw a magnetic sign in front of a church last week (I know . . . but hey, the Lord helps those who help themselves to magnetic signs.) on which was the aphorism: "He never gets lost who stays on a straight path (...or something like that. I was driving by.) ." That of course is nonsense. I was driving to Lincoln, Nebraska once and got off the highway at a gas station in Iowa. When I got back on the road, I accidentally took State Road 71 south instead of I-80 west. I travelled straight down 71 for about an hour until my crossing over the Missouri state line illuminated the error of my ways.
You have to know where you are going, before your path--straight or circuitous--can take you there!
The next broad misapprehension we have about Public Speaking is that the Speaker decides what the speech is about. Were this the case, life would be easy. Audience members would be willing receptacles into which we could dump our messages and in which our wisdom would percolate. But such is just simply not the case.
As you should learn to do with all communication matters, consider the speaking event from the point of view of the audience member--that single person sitting or standing within earshot of your words. Recognize that if he or she is the average American and this is the first "organized" event of his or her day, yours is still only in the third or fourth thousand of persuasive messages with which he or she has already been accosted. The acts of waking, dressing, eating, watching the morning news, reading the morning paper, commuting, etc. have all been laced with subtle and not so subtle attempts to get the individual to see the world in a way that benefits those around him or her.
You are just the next in line. You think your speech is about why people should contribute to the protection of endangered species, but by the time the audience member attends to it, he might think he is an endangered species.
"How am I (the audience member) doing right now?!"
What you say, no matter what the purpose and subject matter, has got to relate to the well-being of the audience member in some fundamental way, or he/she will elect to ignore it. This is not a matter of self-absorbtion, it is a matter of survival. we are all assualted by so many sensory inputs at any given moment that we must block most of them out if we have any chance to analyze and respond to the rest.
If yours is going to fall into that elite group of messages to which the audience member actually concedes a moment or two of concentration, you have to make it clear to him or her that the material has been crafted to appeal to his or her point of view, that it has been considered from his or her perspective, and that you have his or her best interests at heart. Whether such is actually the case matters little.
Quick, go crochet that into a throw pillow and meet me back here . . . . . okay.
That is a convoluted way of saying that all the receiver of a message ever gets is a bunch of words and a vague collection of nonverbal cues. The listener then goes into his or her own experience to decide what you said, how you said it and what you might have meant. Since we all "load" words differently--that is attach meanings, nuances, emotional attachments, etc to them--the likelihood of the listener "receiving" the exact message you sent is roughly zero!
To make matters worse, most if not all of us develop from the earliest stages of our lives sets of preconceptions about the situations in which we find ourselves. Preconceptions are assumptions about how things will be based on how things have been in the past. At a very early age, we start to develop conclusions about who the good guys are, who the bad guys are, and how to get what we want in the world. We basically spend the rest of our lives searching out evidence to support what we believe and fending off evidence that refutes it.
The point is that no matter how much you and I have in common, my experience will not be exactly yours, and if your speech development is confined to an organized presentation of your own point of view, it will not have much meaning for me.
The next element of the speech design is the Central Idea. During the discussion of the Specific Speech Purpose, I said that the reason why the listener should respond in the defined way goes somewhere else. The Central Idea is that somewhere else.
The Central Idea is the Main Theme or Reason Why the audience member should want to respond in the prescribed way.
The Central Idea Focuses the argument. It exists as evidence of the speaker's realization that one neither can nor should want to say everything about a subject. With the Central Idea, the speaker develops a specific theme that:
The Central Idea is a concrete, simple statement. It is the WHY, the conclusion to which the audience member will come at the end of the speech.
Go to the Central Idea Exercise.
That's what it looks like, but looks can deceive. The speaker benefits in various ways by learning to conceive of the speech as a conversation between himself or herself and a group of individual "others." Sure the volume is a little higher than it would be in conversation, you are a little more prepared and . . . okay . . . you do all of the talking! But the dynamics of any but the most formal speaking event are essentially those of a conversation.
Several times in the content ahead, I will refer to the Speaking Moment. Possibly more than any other human activity, talk is bound to its time and place. You can study and prepare. You can write you speech out word-for-word (You shouldn't, but you can.) But the event occurs at a particular time in a particular place which can never come again. The good speaker works in that moment. He or she puts off issues of self-examination, success or failure, and what to do after the speech is over to be in the moment. The speaking moment is an amazing place. Your senses are attentuated, your mind is working at peak efficiency (one hopes to your betterment and not your detriment), time slows down. If let yourself, you can feel what very few of us get to feel on any regular basis in this corporate, crowded, mass-mediated world--RELEVANT.
In the Speaking Moment you are pushing down the first few dominoes in the lives of your audience members. If you make them different than they were before you spoke, that difference no matter how trivial can echo into all other parts of their lives. To the extent that they turn left instead of right, go out instead of staying in, say yes instead of saying no, they will go down paths they had never intended (and that you had never intended for them).
This ability to completely screw up the lives of the people to whom you talk makes Public Speaking a profound responsibility. If you have to do it--and if you are going to be any sort of professional, or advocate, or educator in the coming years you will have to do it--you might as well do it right.
This is the End of "Virtual Reality."
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