“One of the hardest things to do when we’re simultaneously dealing with our nerves AND delivering our speech is to actually have the presence of mind to communicate with ourselves. We’ve quit counting the number of times students have asked us immediately after a speech, ‘What just happened?’ and ‘What did I just say?’ It’s almost like we’ve just experienced a six-minute cognitive blackout. Some sort of robotic doppelganger embodies us behind the podium and departs only once we return to our seats. Don’t fret: it’s happened to us, too. What is likely happening to us when this occurs is that we’ve given in to panic. And when we panic, as Malcolm Gladwell notes, we tend to think too little; in fact, we seem to quit thinking altogether! But thinking is precisely the response we need in such situations.”

“We could fill a few hard drives just with new terms associated with the computer/Internet/social media revolution: tweeting, texting, sexting, friending, IM’ing, blogging, trending, and Googling populate our daily talk. Viral videos circulate in cyberspace, and Internet trolls don’t live under bridges. URLs, HTML, PDFs, JPEGs, RSSs, and ISPs proliferate in our virtual worlds. Smart phones and their data plans have all but replaced land lines and long-distance phone calls–to say nothing of the increasingly obsolete busy signal. And live streaming does not refer to fly-fishing or salmon migrations. Is it any wonder that some just a bit older than us find this whole bizarre edifice rather frightening and decidedly alien?”

“Your campus, too, has many interesting and important stories waiting to be told. Go and find them. A great place to start is in your university library where units of ‘archives’ and ‘special collections’ are often housed. Of course check your library out virtually first. Who was your university’s first president? Who helped form the first Black Student Union? Who was the first female faculty member? Who are some famous alumni? Was the mascot always the same? What important event happened at a location on campus? How did the student newspaper editorialize about an important subject? You see where we’re going with this advice: what we can see and touch daily can offer an added importance and urgency to our speechmaking; moreover, in sharing an identity as a Seminole, a Buckeye, or even a Banana Slug (go U.C. Santa Cruz!), you share something very important. So go ahead: add a new layer to that identity.”

“In the summer of 1998, my grandmother Eila Lee Coffeen passed away at the age of eighty-two. Over the preceding ten years she and I had gotten to be pretty good friends. She was funny in ways that I never expected a grandmother to be: she was quick with a retort, could role play in telling her own stories, and just had a fun and mischievous way about her. So when she died, I wanted to offer something of a eulogy (literally eu [good] logos [words]), a brief speech commemorating her long and interesting life, and our shared past.

Let’s just say the speech did not go over very well with the gathered mourners at First United Methodist.”

“From the Homeric epics, Aesop’s Fables, and the parables of Jesus to our seemingly insatiable desire for Harry Potter, Breaking Bad, The Bachelorette, Flavor of Love, Game of Thrones, and of course A Shot at Love with Tila Tequila, we crave stories—high and low. We homo narrans so desire the narrative form that we get hooked on comic books, Manga, and even scrapbooking. So hooked are we that we’re even willing to watch the same season of Downton Abbey several times. And if you think your Facebook page doesn’t offer its own story, you’re kidding yourself.”

“Spatial ordering is also very useful when it comes to showing parts and their relationships. Let’s say, for example, that you’re a biology major and want to share some of the basics of cellular structure and function with your classmates. Again, you’re probably going to want a really detailed visual aid to do this (and some great analogies to reduce the complexity), but in thinking about how best to organize the speech, it seems logical to move from the outer cell wall (the cellular membrane) inward to the cytoplasm and then to the nuclear membrane and finally to the nucleolus. Sure, the cell functions as a unified organism, but for the sake of your speech, you need to divide the cell into its key components. But that division allows us to learn about the important parts and how each part, in turn, functions within the larger whole.”

“But, dare we say it, Google does have its limits—even as it attempts to scan every book that’s ever been published, its Praying Mantis–looking cars prowl our local streets, and its glasses change how and what we see. These limits will become more obvious in this chapter, but it’s enough for now to simply state that Google hasn’t colonized the entire information world—not yet anyway. But as we noted in an earlier chapter, it’s a perfectly smart thing to do a bit of ‘Googling’ in finding a speech topic or in researching one. We just don’t want you to end there.”

“As a dedicated reformer, you might also consider ‘nibbling away’ at the very large category called capital punishment. How so? A careful reading of the recent literature reveals that DNA is in the news but so is mental ability. Why is it ethical and legal for certain states to execute a low-medium IQ inmate but not a low IQ one? A few points on a test determine life or death? The point is many big, loud, controversial, and entrenched subjects are best approached from the edges rather than straight on. Persuasion researchers call this general strategy the ‘Foot-in-the-Door’ approach in which a slightly open door can lead to a more fully open one.”

“In an age of high-tech projection, snazzy visual software packages, and an eye toward information exchange efficiency, the public speaker, it seems, is increasingly obsolete. While we’re not quite as vehement as Katrin Park, we understand where she’s coming from. Instead, as audience members we’re left to passively spectate slide after slide, chocked full of information that we’re supposed to write down and then regurgitate for the next exam/quiz/assignment. Even the really accomplished user of PowerPoint or Prezi often becomes something of a carni-barker, entertaining us with the next hand-held mouse click as we watch something swoosh-swerve-explode-jiggle-twerk or whistle onto a projected screen. What was once eye-candy has increasingly become eye-gouging.”

“A favorite acceptance speech was delivered in a remarkably impromptu way by actor Tom Hanks upon receiving the Best Actor Oscar for his role in the moving drama Philadelphia. Watch how he graciously thanks many, humbles himself, and still manages to powerfully address those who’ve died from AIDS, people living as HIV-positive, and gay Americans in an emotion-packed mere three minutes.”

“The principles that we’ve highlighted and explained in Public Speaking in the 21st Century provide you with a template for thinking strategically and intelligently about your speechmaking. In saying as much, we’d remind you that a shiny new Lamborghini and an old clunky Ford share four wheels and a combustion engine. In other words, crafting the eloquent, the exquisite, the beautiful and the sublime are possible only once you’ve carefully grasped the foundations. And those foundations will often lead speakers in different directions. A ‘paint-by-the-numbers’ approach to public speaking greatness simply doesn’t exist. And despite Plato and Aristotle’s search, it never will. But those moments of insight, those flashes of brilliance, those bursts of creative energy, facilitate the magic of invention—the elusive magic that Gorgias glimpsed and described more than 2,400 years ago, and the same magic that animates our public discourse in a Democratic society.”