Ninety percent of emotional communication is nonverbal. Gestures are an unconscious language that we use to express not only our feelings but to generate them as well. By making a gesture, we help produce an internal state. Amy Cuddy, a… Read More »Gesture is one of the languages of high-stakes presenting
Calvin Coolidge, the 30th President of the United States, was called “Silent Cal” because he was a true “man of few words.” His predecessor in the White House, Warren Harding, was an expansive orator, who described his own style of… Read More »The champion of brevity: A man of few words
In the idyllic vision of the uninitiated, a scientific presentation tells a story, starting with a clear description of a problem, then outlining a series of steps taken to address that problem, and ending with a special reward: a glistening… Read More »How science presentations should work, but don’t
We all know speaking too fast during our high stakes moments is not good, for us or our listeners. It makes us sound nervous, disorganized and hard to understand. So what can we do in private to teach ourselves to… Read More »How to stop speaking too fast during your high stakes presentation
He was late arriving and slow getting past the hand-shakers and back-slappers, but President Obama’s State of the Union Address was a new slant on an old trope, at times uplifting (“we do big things”) and at other times evasive… Read More »The State of the Union: Style has substance in public speaking
Harvard and Google got married (NY Times article, Fri Dec 17) and have given birth to a database containing all the words in all the books published between 1500 and 2008 in English, German, French, Spanish, Chinese and Russian. You—yes… Read More »Counting the words that count in high stakes presentations