Mehrabian Nights – an informative tale about (mis)communication

31.12.2009

A happy, healthy and prosperous New Year to all our readers, Twitter followers and clients. We’re ending 2009 with some good news: we’ve just found out that the TrainingZone community have voted my Mehrabian article the best feature of 2009 – and it has been read 20,564 times, so far. This is the article that [...]

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A Gift for Speakers and Would-be Speakers

17.12.2009

The holiday period is a time to relax and recharge your batteries for the challenges to come. If you’re a professional speaker, it’s an opportunity to think about what you do and how to do it even better. And if you’re someone who’s new to public speaking, it’s a time to seek advice about how [...]

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Saving A Speaker From The Death Sentence

10.12.2009

The professional speechwriter needs many skills, and chief among them is the ability to turn a sow’s ear into a silk purse. In this post I want to share a few ideas on what to do when the first draft of a client’s speech is so impenetrable, it makes your eyes water. It’s all too [...]

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Synaesthesia is the Communicator’s Greatest Ally

11.11.2009

Sometimes it’s possible to do the right thing for the wrong reasons. Take, for instance, the discredited theory of learning styles. It may have no basis in science, but its influence on communicators and teachers has surely been a positive one, hasn’t it? After all, doesn’t the theory ultimately boil down to the very useful [...]

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The Dangers of Co-opting Scientific Explanation

28.10.2009

As non-scientists plying our trade, I believe we should be wary of justifying our practice on the basis of scientific research. Don’t get me wrong, science intrigues me as much as it does the next layperson. But the problem for laypeople like us is that all our scientific knowledge necessarily comes predigested – usually second, [...]

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What PowerPoint can’t show you

18.10.2009

Why does PowerPoint Presentations that Changed the World rank so high on the list of books that will never be written? Perhaps the clue’s in the title. PowerPoint has been with us for over twenty years but during that time it has gained more of a reputation for sending the world to sleep than changing [...]

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UK Speechwriters’ Guild inaugural conference video

15.10.2009

Here’s a video of the UK Speechwriters’ Guild inaugural conference. It was filmed last month in Bournemouth by talented film maker and producer Tim Clague – who’s done a superb job in capturing the flavour, and excitement, of the event. Martha and I were invited to show our ‘Busting the Mehrabian Myth’ video and give [...]

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Why David Cameron is a better speaker than Gordon Brown

09.10.2009

Here’s an interesting – and visual – way of looking at the recent conference speeches by Gordon Brown and David Cameron. I visited the Wordle website and pasted the text of each speech into the Wordle “word cloud” generator. The word clouds it creates give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the [...]

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How not using PowerPoint can make you a better presenter

06.10.2009

This morning I began writing a response to a comment posted on yesterday’s blog by Olivia Mitchell but as I did it slowly evolved into a post – so here it is. Olivia’s comment can be seen on yesterday’s post – Warning: PowerPoint may cause template thinking syndrome. Olivia – thanks for some really good [...]

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Warning: PowerPoint may cause template thinking syndrome

05.10.2009

PowerPoint users – and I know there are many of you – don’t be alarmed, but there is a growing body of evidence that many of you run the risk of developing a condition known as template thinking syndrome. The main symptom of template thinking syndrome is an overwhelming tendency to begin the preparation for [...]

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