Visual thinking

Going for Laughs in a Speech is no Joke

18.05.2010

A joke is a blunt instrument. If it works, there’s laughter; if it flops, there’s an embarrassed silence. A misfiring joke can can spell disaster for the rest of your speech. The public persona – or ethos – created by your speech can also be compromised by the use of jokes. After all, jokes aren’t [...]

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Obama’s Rhetoric – The Art That Conceals Art

30.03.2010

Something shocking happened to Barack Obama on Thursday the 5th of June, 2008. He was addressing a meeting of the local community in Bristol, Virginia, when in the midst of his usual rhetorical flow, the wheels of his speech suddenly flew off and he ground to an inarticulate halt. Here’s a transcript of Obama’s slip [...]

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Drowning your story in a sea of detail

17.02.2010

Talking is a very ineffectual way of communicating detailed information – it’s like trying to collect water from a well with a colander. When you give a speech or presentation always imagine yourself writing with a thick waxy crayon, not a slender mapping pen. If you choose to make a point with a story, make [...]

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How Martin Luther King’s words inspire us

18.01.2010

The words of a skilled speaker or writer create light in the minds of others. We instantly ‘see’ what they mean, we are enlightened. Their words grab our attention by stimulating our imaginations and touching our hearts. How is it that some people can do this while others leave us stumbling about in the dark [...]

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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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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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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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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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