The Ripple Effect
The ripple effect is a powerful phenomenon. Have you ever tossed a pebble into a lake when the water was completely calm? I used to do it all the time when I was a kid growing up in Canada in a small town on the shores of Lake Erie. Although the pebble is small, the effect […]
Quotes for Public Speakers (No. 81) – Garr Reynolds
“Professional entertainers know that you want to end on a high note and leave the audience yearning for just a bit more from you. We want to leave our audiences satisfied (motivated, inspired, more knowledgeable, etc.), but not feeling that they could have done with just a little less. “We can apply this spirit to […]
Analysis of a Speech by Mark Bezos
I recently came across this TED Talk by Mark Bezos, the Senior Vice-President of Development, Communications and Events at Robin Hood, a leading poverty-fighting charity in New York City. He is also the Assistant Captain of a volunteer fire company in Westchester County, New York, where he lives with his wife and four children. Firefighters are bona […]
Quotes for Public Speakers (No. 80) – Molière
“If you make yourself understood, you’re always speaking well.” Molière
Ten Commandments for Writing and Speaking
I spent some time yesterday going through a box of old papers, filing some and recycling the rest. As I worked my way through the documents, I discovered an old photocopy entitled “Ten Commandments for Plain Language Documents”. It came from the Canadian Bar Association and is dated October 1990. There’s a lot of wisdom in […]
Quotes for Public Speakers (No. 79) – Tom Peters
Tom Peters on public speaking.
Speeches from Film: Up in the Air
Analysis of George Clooney’s “What’s In Your Backpack?” speech in the movie, “Up In the Air”:
Quotes for Public Speakers (No. 78) – Peter Guber
“Story forms have evolved continually since the days of the shaman. Literary genres from epic poetry to drama to the novel use stories as political or social calls to action. “Technological breakthroughs — movable type, movies, radio, television, the internet — have provided new ways of recording, presenting, and disseminating stories. But it isn’t special […]
resonate: Present Visual Stories that Transform Audiences
It’s been said that there are no new stories; there are only new ways of telling the old stories. The same holds true for public speaking and presentation skills. After all, people have been writing about public speaking since Aristotle penned Art of Rhetoric in the 4th Century B.C. Yet every so often, a book […]
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