Here is a guest post from ‘The Ubiquitous Librarian’, someone who has guest posted on here before, about one of the talks they attended at the Hay Festival yesterday. It’s an excellent article and although different from some of the usual fare served up on this blog, it is one that will be incredibly useful for those who may find themselves called to talk about something. Communicating your ideas is not something to be scared of and learning this skill will help you get your point across. Those of us who have been writing for a while will also appreciate the sage advice given by The Ubiquitous Librarian, whose trade is words, to keep sentences short, punchy and indeed ‘Shakespearean’ in length where possible. This is something that the observant among you will have noticed I failed at in the previous sentence LOL. This is a worthwhile read for anyone who is scared or nervous about transforming the ideas in their heads into words in their mouths.
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A talk about talking.
The Ubiquitous Librarian went to a master class yesterday in how to give a talk, given by the linguist David Crystal. There’s a lot of talking at Hay and even more printed words, David is promoting his new book “The gift of the gab : how eloquence works” published by Yale University Press, 2016. He used notes to show us a way of using notes, he warned us about PowerPoint Karaoke and encouraged us to use triples, the power of threes. He advised and demonstrated a rate of speech which suits most people and warned us not to say anything important in the first few moments. Attention span is really crucial and frequent breaks help both speaker and listener.
Certain other writers are guilty of over-complex sentences, 8-10 words per sentence or half-sentence is good. Get to the verb, too many sub-clauses confuse people. There’s a reason Shakespeare used iambic pentameters, 5 is an easy number of words for an actor to remember, and his actors often had to learn a new play quickly. Rhetoric is not the same as eloquence, rhetoric aims to persuade whereas most of the time we are not doing that.
Don’t think that you can’t speak in public, but do plan what you are going to say and rehearse it. The main thing you need to practise is the amount of time you are taking, we all lose track of time when we are speaking and it really annoys organisers if you speak for too long or short a time. Impromptu speaking takes about a week of preparation according to such luminaries as Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, so try to think about situations that may require you to say a few words.
The very best time to say what you want your audience to remember is 5 minutes before the end of the talk, after a recapitulation of what you’ve said. I’m sure a lot of this applies to written matter as well as spoken words, I took notes and bought the book. There are cultural variations to consider too, some people don’t like laughing in public, so don’t put any jokes in for those audiences. Engage with the listeners by telling a story about yourself, narrativum as the late great Terry Pratchett called it, is a universal interest.
If you get the chance to hear David Crystal speak, take it, he’s great on semicolons too. I heard him on punctuation earlier in the day, even he didn’t realise how much there was to say on it till he wrote about it. Everyone has an opinion, Oxford University Press takes a different view from Cambridge on the humble comma, people can get very heated about it, and so can exam boards, so be guided as to what is accepted as correct if you have to take an exam. Feel free to start arguments at dinner parties though.
Words are my trade, Hay has something for everyone over 3 years old, though the ice cream and playhouse went down well with the under-threes too. A talk about talking is an excellent way of thinking about how we say what we do.
