A prep school in a Seattle suburb -- a town located close to Microsoft's headquarters -- brought in a group of high-level speakers to present a seminar.
One of them teaches entrepreneurship at the University of Washington in Seattle: Dr. Emer Dooley. She presents a useful message: start-up entrepreneurs who succeed usually attempt to minimize their losses, should the venture fail. In other words, their exit strategies do not involve a financial catastrophe. But she crippled her presentation with a useless, distracting image on a screen behind her. She turned what could have been a very good speech into a mediocre speech.
She is Irish. She has the gift of gab. Her words are good. Her points are good. No one goes to sleep. Yet the speech is a classic example of rubber-crutch communications. She makes herself dependent on a slide -- a nearly useless, minimal-information slide. It is like a barnacle on a boat's bottom. But, unlike owners of boats, she deliberately attaches the barnacle.
She presents the image 9 minutes into the speech. The image immediately takes over her speech. She becomes its appendage.
She says it's a "nifty" slide. No, it isn't. It's a stupid slide. A stupid slide is a slide that takes more time to explain than it conveys crucial information. Worse, she does not bother to explain it. She does not have a laser pointer. She illustrates nothing as she talks. The image conveys almost zero information.
She announces that it's a three-dimensional slide. No, it isn't. No slide is. It's a two-dimensional slide that she has attempted to turn into a three-dimensional slide, which is close to impossible, and which almost always confuses viewers.
It's like a globe of the world that is turned into a two-dimensional Mercator projection. It inevitably distorts. The closer you get to Greenland, the more it distorts.
She gave a speech on "Greenland." She never explained the "map."
In a world of digital globes that can be made to look as if they spin -- tablet computers and digital cursors -- she is still using a flat map. She is using the functional equivalent of a digital overhead projector. It's still 1990 for her.
Then, having placed this distracting, minimal-information image on the screen behind her, she becomes an extension of this slide. It traps her.
COLD SHOULDER
She needed a pointer. She needed it connected to a tablet placed on the podium, directly in front of her, so that she would not turn sideways. But she had no pointer. So, she kept looking over her shoulder at the screen, as if her body were a pointer. It wasn't.
It is as if she imagines that by turning sideways to her audience, she increases the flow of information. She does the opposite. It is distracting. In terms of rhetoric -- persuasion -- there is only one body movement worse than turning sideways to an audience: turning your back on an audience. I kept waiting for her to do this. She didn't.
This is what I call a cold shoulder speech. A cold shoulder speech is always the result of using a slide located behind the speaker. Cold shoulder lecturing is an almost irresistible temptation for any unskilled speaker who uses a slide. By unskilled, I mean rhetorically unskilled: completely unaware of the relatively simple techniques for relating body movements to the communication of verbal information. Her body's movements divert the flow of information from her mental/verbal script into her listeners' minds.
She needed her shoes nailed to the floor, right behind the podium. "Don't move. Just talk. Use a tablet if you use a slide. Use the tablet's cursor as a pointer. Use a digital pen."
Better yet, don't use a slide.
As you watch this, you will see just how inept she is -- not verbally, but bodily.
She is a low-tech speaker in a high-tech world. She needs to decide: either get rid of the high-tech tools or else learn how to use them.
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