PowerPoint and the demise of Chalk & Talk: (1) The beginning of the end

A warm welcome to anyone who's arrived here via the BBC website - in which case you're probably interested in speaking and presentation. If so, that's what this blog is mostly about, and you can see a list of (and link to) everything that's been posted here since Gordon Brown's party conference speech last year by clicking HERE.

We may have reached the 25th anniversary of PowerPoint, but how many of us will be celebrating?

This is the first in a series of three posts on one particularly destructive part of its legacy of collateral damage to our ability to communicate with each other.

When new universities were being built during the 1960s, there were arguments at some of them about whether to install blackboards or whiteboards in the lecture theatres. The pro-blackboard lobby opposed change because, they claimed, it would spell the end of tax relief for damage to clothes from chalk dust. Advocates of white boards thought them trendy, modern and more in keeping with the architecture of the new universities.

But one thing that was never questioned by either side was that writing or drawing on boards, whether black or white, was an indispensable part of the presentational process.

Today, the debate would be about what kind of computer and projection systems should be installed, and what would never be questioned would be the effectiveness of PowerPoint presentations – even though there remain serious questions about whether this dramatic technological shift in the way visual aids are used was a change for the better.

Like a 20th century Pandora’s box, the computer, aided and abetted by Microsoft, has unleashed new and previously unheard of maladies on millions of unwary victims. Chronic slide-dependency has reached pandemic proportions, its main symptoms being a compulsive urge by speakers to put up one boring slide after another, and an inability to say anything without reading from prompts on the screen. It has inhibited the ability of presenters to convey enthusiasm for their subjects and infects those on the receiving end with confusion and self-doubt as they slip quietly into a coma, blaming themselves for their inability to absorb so much information in so short a space of time.

Ask people how they like listening to the modern slide-driven style of delivery, and you’ll soon discover a deep groundswell of dissatisfaction. Go a step further and ask how they rate the slide-dependent majority as compared with the eccentric And tiny minority who still use chalk and talk, and the verdict invariably comes down against the new orthodoxy.

As for how a style of speaking that audiences don’t much like became the norm I’ve discussed in more detail elsewhere (along with the relative merits of other types of visual aid). Part of the story is that it probably all come about because of a terrible accident.

AN UNEXPECTED RESULT OF TECHNOLOGICAL INNOVATION

Slide-dependency can be seen as the legacy of a change in the way the overhead projector – PowerPoint’s immediate ancestor – was originally intended to be used. The invention of the OHP, if anyone can remember that far back, was designed to overcome a problem with using chalk and talk when speaking to large audiences, namely that people couldn’t see what was being put on the board from a long distance away. So the original natural habitat of the OHP was the large auditorium, where speakers used them in much the same way as they’d used blackboards, writing on a roll of acetate and winding it forward whenever they ran out of space.

Then came what must surely be the darkest day in the history of the modern presentation: the arrival of a new breed of photocopiers in the 1970s that was no longer limited to copying on to paper, but could print directly on to sheets of acetate. What seemed rather a small technological step turned out to be a giant leap into completely new way of presenting. More and more speakers stopped writing and drawing as they went along and started using pre-prepared slides made up of lists that were, in effect, their notes.

This new style of delivery not only survived the replacement of OHPs by computerised graphics, but was also implicitly encouraged by assumptions built into programs like PowerPoint.

Most of the initial templates it offers to users are for producing lists of bullet points. What’s more, a fairly recent version came equipped with the added bonus of a set of 23 ‘model’ presentations to make your life easier. They were made up of 214 slides, 94% of which – yes, more than nine out of ten of them – consisted entirely of written words and sentences.

In the light of this, there’s something very strange to hear a Microsoft executive announcing that one of the best PowerPoint presentations he ever heard had no slides with bullet points on them, or when Bill Gates himself didn’t use them in his TED presenation.

Perhaps the most extraordinary thing of all about the PowerPoint revolution was that no one seemed to notice what was happening, let alone stop and ask whether anything important was being lost by the sudden death of chalk and talk.

But, having continued to advocate the effectiveness of using blackboards, whiteboards and flipcharts, I can report that none of my pupils who has tried it out has ever regretted it, and most say that they achieved better rapport with their audiences than they had ever experienced when using slides. This, together with other evidence accumulated over the past twenty years, has convinced me that a wider discussion of its forgotten benefits is long overdue.

(To be continued in Part 2: 'The lost art').

PREVIOUS POSTS ON POWERPOINT INCLUDE:
• PowerPoint program on BBC Radio 4
• BBC Television News slideshow quiz
• How NOT to use PowerPoint
• If Bill Gates doesn’t read bullet points from PowerPoint slides …
• An imaginative innovation in a PowerPoint presentation
• PowerPoint presentation continues to dominate BBC News – courtesy Robert Peston (again)
• Slidomania contaminates another BBC channel
• There’s nothing wrong with PowerPoint – until there’s an audience
• BBC Television News: produced by of for morons?
• PowerPoint comes to church

Body language news from Germany

Followers of previous discussions of body language and non-verbal communication may be interested to know that the news from Germany about Angela Merkel's recent election poster might be about to force me to revise some of my previously expressed views on the subject.

After earlier posts on baldness, height, folded arms and dark glasses (see below), it now looks as though I might have to address the delicate issue of breasts.

I've already written about femininity and charisma in the case of Margaret Thatcher, Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin, but the question of breasts had obviously escaped me completely. Looks like a case for further research!

Anyone interested in catching up on previous posts on body language and non-verbal communication can do so by clicking on any of the following:

• Body language and non-verbal communication
• Another body language & non-verbal communication cartoon
• Non-verbal communication
• Body language, non-verbal communication and the myth about folded arms and defensiveness
• Margaret Thatcher, body language and non-verbal communication
• Non-verbal communication and height
• Presidential heights
• Impersonators as masterful analysts of non-verbal communication
• Eye contact, public speaking and the case of President Zuma’s dark glasses
• Hair today, win tomorrow: baldness and charisma?
• Body language and non-verbal communication video

Dreaming of sex costs the nation £7.8bn a year: the cost of boring presentations

Having just been asked to write a short piece on PowerPoint (on which more in due course), I had a look through some old files for any stuff than might be worth recycling.

One thing I'd forgotten about was a press release I'd issued not long after the publication of Lend Me Your Ears back in 2004.

I'd heard some PR guru say that one of the surest ways of getting stories into the media was to start off with 'research shows ...'

So I did one of the simplest pieces of research I'd ever done in my life to see if it worked. And it didn't do too badly either: it was picked up by the BBC website and the Sunday Times (though I hasten to add that the claim about sex in the title had nothing to do with me).

All that was five years before this blog started, so it's highly unlikely that any of you will have seen or heard anything about this gripping tale.

To quote the key words in the royal charter of the BBC, I hope it 'informs, educates and entertains'. And, if anyone can be bothered to work out how much is going down the drain each year in your company, organisation or country, do let us know - and maybe we could get the story going again.

The unedited verbatim press release, complete with its official-sounding (but completely pointless) 'embargo' went as follows:

PRESS RELEASE FROM ATKINSON COMMUNICATIONS

BORING PRESENTATIONS COST BRITISH INDUSTRY £8 BILLION A YEAR: NEW RESEARCH BY BUSINESS SCHOOL PROFESSOR AS CBI CONFERENCE STARTS

Embargo: 00.01 a.m. on Monday 8th November 2004

Research into audience reactions to business presentations by Max Atkinson, visiting professor at the Henley Management College, has discovered that boring presentations are costing British industry at least £8bn a year.

It reveals widespread dissatisfaction among managers with the slide-dependent style of presentation that is standard practice in most companies.

"The extraordinary thing is that even people who don't like being on the receiving end when they're sitting in an audience still use the same slide-dependent approach when making presentations themselves," says Atkinson.

"If a company employs 200 managers at an average salary of £30,000 p.a., and each of them spends an average of one hour per week at presentations," he says, "the annual cost to the company will be £178,000.00. Grossed up, the estimated cost to British industry as a whole comes to a massive £7.8 billion a year."

Atkinson emphasises that this is a conservative estimate, as it's based solely on the average salary per hour of audiences attending presentations. Factors not included are the opportunity cost of managers spending time away from their primary duties, the cost per hour of time spent by presenters preparing their slides, travel expenses, venue and equipment hire or refreshments.

According to Atkinson, "The modern business presentation has lost its way. Every day, thousands of managers are attending presentations, from which they are getting little or no benefit. Companies seem agreed that the customer is always right, but when it comes to presentations they don't seem to realise that the audience is the only customer that matters.

"It's high time industry started to face up to the scale and cost of the problem," he says. "We know from listening to what audiences have to say that there are better ways of communicating than ploughing through an endless succession of bullet points projected on to a screen."

No smoke without ire

I’ve been thinking of writing something along these lines since I first heard that there’s a campaign to amend the smoking ban, and I do so in the full knowledge that about three out of four of you are quite likely to disapprove of it.

Apart from Gordon Brown’s disgraceful attack on pension funds after becoming Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1997, there are two other reasons why I hope Labour is voted out of office at the next election: one is the extremism of their total ban smoking in public places and the other is their ill-intentioned banning of hunting with hounds (which is not my topic for today).

As far as smoking is concerned, I don’t have any objection at all to banning it in restaurants. But I can see no rational justification for banning pubs, clubs, hotels, airport terminals, etc. from providing specially allocated smoking rooms (fitted, of course, with state of the art extractor fans and located a ‘safe’ distance away from non-smoking rooms).

The irrationality of the total ban has been highlighted, unsurprisingly, by market forces, as the rate at which pubs are closing down continues at a relentless and unprecedented rate.

NAPA NONSENSE

My first encounter with the kind of draconian discrimination against smokers we now suffer in the UK came when I was trying to find somewhere to stay in California’s Napa Valley.

One hotel’s website announced that a $500 surcharge would be added to the credit card of anyone found smoking not just inside the building, but anywhere within its grounds. My response was to send them an email pointing out that I’d obviously been completely misled by some of America’s core PR boasts on its own behalf, most notably:

(1) the USA’s oft-repeated claim to be the world’s leading example of individual freedom and liberty (for more on which, see also HERE) and

(2) the USA’s related claim to be the world’s leading proponent of market economics – which is hardly consistent with rational entrepreneurs voluntarily opting to reduce their sales by excluding (or deterring) 25% of the potential market.

Needless to say, they didn’t reply, and we made the economically rational decision to stay at another hotel in the Napa Valley, where smoking was permitted on a terrace in the garden.

A few days later, we signed in at a hotel in San Francisco, self-proclaimed and widely recognized as the most liberal of all American cities. But the only sign of it being any more liberal than the Napa Valley hoteliers was the lower credit charge surcharge of a mere $250 for smoking inside the building.

HUMIDORS FOR SALE

Several years later, and a day or two after the smoking ban came into force in the UK, we stayed at a hotel on the Dorset coast, where there was a large humidor displaying a fine range of Cuban cigars that could have kept Winston Churchill going for a quite a few weeks.

Fortunately, the August weather was mild enough for me to indulge in one with a glass of Cognac after dinner – outside on the terrace. But what if it had been raining and what if had been in December?

The full force of our government’s enlightened legislation began to strike home. The long-standing tradition of rounding off dinner with a relaxing and luxurious treat had been consigned to the past. It was now illegal, except when the weather’s fine enough to sit outside (or unless you're one of the privileged few who can drink in a bar in the Houses of Parliament).

So hotels like this will presumably have put their humidors and their valuable contents on E-bay, as the time it takes to enjoy a good cigar means that a quick puff or two in the car park is a pointless and irrationally expensive exercise (market forces strike again).

A PUFFIN ROOM

Last week, however, we stayed at a delightful hotel that had come up with as good a compromise as I’ve seen so far. Although I very much hope that their imaginative investment will bring them the financial rewards they deserve, I’m not going to reveal its name or where it is – for the simple reason that, if their local district council’s ‘smoking solutions officer’ (sic) is anything like ours, this particular smoking shelter would almost certainly be written off for being far too comfortable, not draughty enough and therefore illegal.

Next to the terrace they had built a tastefully designed summerhouse equipped with comfortable chairs, heating, lighting, tables and ashtrays. At first sight, the notice on the door saying ‘PRIVATE PROPERTY’ suggested it was off-limits to guests.

But it wasn’t, and I presume that the point of the notice was to define anyone in there as a private guest who had been invited into this particular piece of private property by its owners, who also happened to be the private owners of the hotel.

Whether or not it was technically ‘legal’ under existing legislation, I have my doubts. But I don’t know and don’t care – because it was such a welcome blast from the past to be able puff away, have a gin and tonic and inspect the menu at the same time – and, thanks to the heating arrangements, it would have been just as comfortable in December as it was in August.

What’s more, and this really is the point, the solution was as acceptable to me as it presumably was to other guests who chose not to sit in the Puffin room.

The Campaign to Amend the Smoking Ban is not campaigning to abolish the smoking ban. It is not campaigning to return things to where they were before the Act. Nor is it campaigning for the right to inflict smoke on recipients who have no choice in the matter.

It is, however, campaigning for arrangements that would allow greater freedom of choice for everyone, a by-product of which might actually help to preserve another long standing British tradition by slowing down the alarming rate of pub closures.

For more details, visit the Amend the Smoking Ban website, where there is complete freedom of choice as to whether or not to sign up.

Mrs Clinton's gem for interview collectors

A number of previous posts have featured classic interviews with top politicians, including
• A labour leader with no interest in spin
• A prime minister who openly refused to answer a question
• A Tory leader’s three evasive answers to the same question

Whether or not Hillary Clinton’s reply to a Congolese student who seemed to have asked her what her husband’s opinion was (though apparently the translator had mistakenly said ‘Mr Clinton’ instead of 'Obama’) qualifies as another classic remains to be seen.

But it's already had more than 50,000 views on YouTube and generated a good deal of heated debate.

In case you missed it, here it is, followed by a sample of positive and negative reactions from YouTube viewers.

See what you think:



SELECTED REACTIONS FROM YOUTUBE

FOR:

Hillary, it's about time these sexist assholes got a piece of American common sense. WHAT THE HELL DOES BILL CLINTON THINK? WHO GIVES A SHIT? what assholes! GREAT RESPONSE!

Are these students STUPID?she is right why should she answer for Mutombo or mr clinton, she said the record straight

Hillary has lots of good reasons to be pissed. A philandering husband who has humiliated her, a wet behind the ears newcomer who took the presidency from her, and the fact that even though she is Sec of State, Obama has severely crippled her authority by naming others to diplomatically handle other parts of the world.

if i asked a question that was so disrespectful of her intellect and position, yes. but i also wouldn't consider an honest answer a problem. she said, directly, i'm not going to tell you what my husband thinks. I work i a professional and public capacity and people are publicly direct all the time. This is nothing new. But when Hillary does it, everyone changes the standard and caps on her for it. I don't get why CBS has to frame that as a "snap." It's not and CBS is being sexist by doing so.

AGAINST:

"Rude" question or not (and I do not think the question was rude), Hill is representing the our nation. She should sit up straight, behave in a gracious manner and answer the question with a touch of class and humor versus arrogance and bitchiness. Ugh.

what a bitch! does she even stop to think about difference of culture??

Her true colors continue to shine through that fake 'serve our country' attitude she cultivates for show. If anyone can't handle a simple provocative question from a student without looking like a nasty villain, they don't need to be our head Diplomat. What is she doing, trying to start another world war with her attitudes?
Can you imagine her in the White House with all the pressures of the first 200 days? She can't even handle a student. We need to keep her far away from our Capitol.

what am embarrassment to the USA!

OTHER POSTS ON MRS CLINTON'S COMMUNICATION PROBLEMS:

• Clinton, Palin and the legacy of Margaret Thatcher
• Does Mrs Clinton really know someone everywhere she goes?
• Clinton on North Korea: "There are consequences to such actions"
• The ‘delicacy’ of Mrs Clinton’s ‘consequences’ for North Korea

Observing England’s cricket team in the face of defeat

The late great Erving Goffman’s studies of the minutiae of everyday life inspired thousands of researchers from the 1960s onwards and his books reached a much wider audience than most academics can ever dream of.

But, with the notable exception of two of his graduate students (Harvey Sacks and Emanuel Schegloff) who founded conversation analysis, few other sociologists ever managed to emulate the perceptiveness of Goffman's observations about the workings of everyday social interaction.

When he was a visiting professor at Manchester University in the early 1970s, someone asked him how he managed to come up with so many astute observations. His reply was along the lines of:

“By not looking at the people everyone is focused on in any particular situation but by concentrating on watching the behavior of the ones that no one else is looking at.”

I had a go at following his advice at Headingley on Sunday during the dying moments of the test match against Australia, and have some rather worrying observations to report about the England cricket team.

While everyone in the crowd was watching tail end batsmen Broad and Swann showing the main batsmen how they should have dealt with the Australian bowling, I turned my binoculars away from the pitch towards the balcony where the rest of the England team were sitting, fully expecting to see a collection of depressed and dejected faces.

Given their dismal failures over the previous two days, what surprised me was to see so much chatting, grinning and laughing going on. From a distance, the atmosphere among them looked far more casual, jovial and relaxed than seemed appropriate in such dire circumstances.

But what really shocked me was their apparent lack of interest in or support for the temporary successes of their colleagues out on the pitch: when the crowd cheered and applauded, the rest of the team could hardly be bothered to join in.

What, I wondered, does that tell us about the team spirit of the current England squad?

Then, not long after Australia had won the match, we went for a walk around the back of the stadium, and stumbled across some supporting evidence for a comment in Derek Pringle’s report on the match in yesterday’s Daily Telegraph, where he said:

‘A positive report on Andrew Flintoff would obviously be a good start but the process should have begun the moment they lost their last wicket yesterday, 33 balls after lunch, but didn’t. Instead of marching out onto the field to shake the Australians’ hands in public, all but the departing batsmen remained inside the dressing-room area leaving Strauss, their captain, to face the boos when he attended the post-match presentation’ [my italics].

It wasn’t just that the rest of the team had stayed hidden inside the pavilion, as Pringle noted, but they'd made an instant and hasty retreat. By the time we reached the players’ car park less than an hour after the game finished, the stewards told us that most of England team (except for Prior who was still massaging his ego by signing a few autographs) had already driven off – not in a team bus, but individually in their own cars.

Again, the same question arises: what does this tell us about England’s team spirit, let alone their management’s view of the urgent need for an extended team meeting?

Instead of biting that particular bullet there and then, England’s cricket leadership has apparently instructed the failures to go back to their counties and prepare for victory – which strikes me as worryingly reminiscent of former Liberal Party leader David Steel’s instruction to his members to “go back to your constituencies and prepare for government.”

England cricket fans can only hope for a bit more luck than the Liberals had in 1987, as recent performances suggest that 'luck' is the only chance left for regaining the Ashes.

Guardian ahead of record?

In a previous post, I’ve commented on the media’s peculiar preference for using the phrase ‘ahead of’ when they mean ‘before’ – even though it’s not in common usage among any other native speakers of English.

The record number of instances I’ve seen so far came in a Guardian website report on England’s pathetic performance in the 4th test match against Australia, where ‘ahead of’ appears in the headline, one of the sub-headlines and four more times in the article that follows.

Is this the 21st century version of longstanding proofreading problems at the Grauniad?

Or, given that the article is unsigned, could it be that it was written by a robot that’s been programmed to convert ‘before’ into ‘ahead of’ by another robot who can’t speak English either?

If you can bear it, here are the six specimens that that put the Graunaid ahead of everyone else in this particular race.

Ravi Bopara among five players sent back to counties ahead of fifth Test
• England No3 seeks form with Essex ahead of Ashes decider

'The England batsman Ravi Bopara, whose place in the side is under scrutiny after scoring 105 runs in seven innings, will receive an opportunity to rediscover some form with Essex ahead of the Ashes decider at The Oval.'

'.. managing director, Hugh Morris, said in a statement. "We are aware that we underperformed with bat and ball at Headingley and this decision is designed to give players an opportunity to spend time in the middle and get overs under their belt ahead of the decisive fifth Test at The Oval next week."

'Miller was also forced to defend the decision to omit Andrew Flintoff from the side for the fourth Test, insisting it was right to put the advice of England's medical team ahead of the all-rounder's wishes.'

'He will see a specialist today ahead of a decision on his fitness for the decisive Oval encounter ..'


As for which side comes out ahead of the other, we won't know before the final test match comes to an end.

PowerPoint program on BBC Radio 4

There was an excellent Word of Mouth programme about PowerPoint on BBC Radio 4 this afternoon (excellent because so many of the criticisms were the same as those in my books on speaking and presentation!).

You can listen to it again HERE for 7 more days as from today.

It included a Microsoft executive boasting about their program being a ‘blank canvas’ and saying that one of the best PowerPoint presentation he’d ever heard had no slides with bullet points on them (!) – which raises the question of why so many of their opening templates incite users to produce lists of bullet points.

The discussion also made me wonder why the producers of BBC Television News, who have become increasingly obsessed with PowerPoint style news reports (see HERE and HERE), don’t bother to listen to and take notice of the good advice coming from BBC Radio 4.

To be or not to be: a question for individuals or the state?

The Bloggers’ Circle is a new and interesting group aimed at helping bloggers to reach a wider audience. We receive regular links to other members’ posts and are invited to comment on anything that inspires us.

My first effort was about how to improve energy conservation, and this is my second, prompted by a posting by Liam Murray on the current debate about assisted suicide.

As the number Brits opting to die at the Dignitas clinic in Switzerland has increased, so too has the number of people with strong opinions on the subject, such as those in this recent posting on the subject.

One of the things that’s intrigued me about it all is that, for at least the first 40 years since the Suicide Act of 1961, no one took much notice of the second Clause of the Act, which is the one that deals with ‘any person who aids, abets, counsels or procures the suicide of another’, and is the one at the centre of the current debate. The lack of interest in it until recently is hardly surprising given that, as far as I know, the same period saw no prosecutions at all being brought under the said Clause 2.

What seems to have been forgotten about the 1961 Act is that the Clause that’s now causing so much legal and political hullabaloo, was little more than a postscript to the main purpose of the Act, which was to decriminalize suicide as set out in its first clause:

"1. The rule of law whereby it is a crime for a person to commit suicide is hereby abrogated. "

Clause 2 addressed a possible consequence of decriminalizing suicide and amounted to an ultra-cautious insurance policy to deter people from doing something that that hardly anyone ever did or had ever thought of doing in those days (i.e. helping someone else to commit suicide). And, as far as I know, no such cases were ever brought for at least 40 years after that – until, of course, people started looking for help in getting them to places like the Dignitas clinic.

The main aim of the Act was achieved by a crucial implication of its first Clause, namely to decriminalize attempted suicide

For hundreds of years before 1961, suicide had been a felony, which meant that attempted suicide was an attempted felony (i.e. a misdemeanor). But changing attitudes towards mental illness had increased the pressure on government to relieve suicide attempters and their families from the added misery of having to face prosecution, or the risk of prosecution, when what they really needed was treatment and support. And the easiest way do decriminalize attempted suicide was to decriminalize suicide.

If current debates reflect confusion arising from a subsidiary clause of the 1961 Suicide Act, it’s not really surprising - not only because definitions of suicide and attempted suicide are not as simple as they might seem, but also because there’s quite a long tradition of confusion and uncertainty, sometimes verging on skullduggery, in the history of English law on suicide.

I first became aware of this while doing my PhD research into how deaths get categorized as suicides and discovered that none of the experts I asked, including more than one coroner, could come up with a precise legal definition of suicide (see Discovering Suicide: Studies in the Social organization of Sudden Death, London: Macmillan Press; Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University Press, 1978).

As for the peculiar question of why suicide became a felony in the first place – and why people who killed themselves were posthumously branded as felons – the most obvious, but not entirely accurate, answer is that it must have reflected religious, ethical or cultural norms of a bygone era.

Although it may have suited medieval monarchs to cite religion as a rationalization for criminalizing suicide, they had a much more materialistic motive in the form of a vested interest in the property of all convicted felons – because, once you’d been convicted of a felony, all your property passed to the crown.

So, to thwart the crown and keep their property in the family, some who were accused of a felony took the simple and irreversible step of killing themselves before their trial had taken place.

The crown’s answer to this wheeze was an equally simple win-win solution: by making suicide a felony, the monarch would still get his hands on the property, whether the accused killed themselves or failed to prove their innocence at a trial.

But this had the side effect of turning attempted suicide into an attempted felony, and so it remained until 1961.

I’ve always thought that the decriminalization of attempted suicide was a humane and worthy thing to do, just as I don’t believe that people should be punished for helping loved ones to end their lives.

The trouble is that revising the law looks set to be so long and drawn out that, by the time it eventually happens, it will be too late to benefit hundreds and perhaps thousands of people who will be left wrestling with their consciences in the meantime.

BBC plug-a-book show slot for aging new left author

Readers of my previous comments on BBC plug-a-book shows won’t be surprised to hear that I didn’t last longer than about three minutes before turning one off last night.

This week’s lucky book-plugger on Laurie Taylor’s Thinking Allowed programme (BBC Radio 4) was Tariq Ali, veteran Trotskyist campaigner of the 1960s and 70s – or, in the slightly more sanitised description of himself that the BBC website reproduced verbatim from Mr Ali’s own website: ‘novelist, historian, political campaigner and one of the New Left Review’s editors.’

For those too young to remember, there were a lot of Trotsky fans around in the 60s and 70s organised around rival acronyms like IS, WRP, and IMG. Tariq Ali rose to the dizzy heights of becoming leader of IMG (International Marxist Group) which, roughly speaking, was run by and catered for middle class intellectuals.

One of my colleagues in the sociology department at Lancaster University, where I then worked, was also a member of the politburo (or whatever they called their committee) of IMG and, in between ortgainising strikes at local factories, arranged for his leader to convey their particular version of Trotskyist truth to a packed lecture theatre of potential disciples.

My mistake wasn’t just to attend, but to ask a really stupid question along the lines of ‘If Marxism is as accurate an analysis of how societies work as you say, how come things have worked out so badly in all the communist countries of the world.’

Mr Ali's answer was, of course obvious, namely that they hadn’t followed IMG’s version of Trotsky’s version of Marx’s version, and all would have been well if only the Russians, etc. had been as smart and clever as members of IMG were.

Needless to say, Mr Ali, like so many social theorists then and now, has never let facts stand in the way of whatever theory he happened to be espousing on any particular day (or in any particular book). But why should he when he was and is a very articulate and plausible speaker, as you’d expect from someone who’d been president of the Oxford Union debating society?

Three minutes of hearing him pontificate about his latest book last night was quite enough to hear that was as articulate and plausible as ever and just as unconstrained in his theorising as he ever was.

As for how he came to get one of these prime plug-a-book slots, it’s anyone’s guess. It’s just possible that the producers of this particular BBC show are also New Lefties grown old, but I don’t have any evidence of that. All I do know is that there were rumours going around in the 1970s that Laurie Taylor was either a member of or sympathised with one of the aforementioned acronyms.

But I don’t have any hard evidence of that either.

BLOG INDEX: Sept 2008-July 2009

This is a list of everything posted since the blog started in September 2008.

It's updated at the end of each month, and you can access direct links to each post by clicking HERE or from the monthly lists on the left.

JULY 2009
• Impersonators as masterful analysts of non-verbal communication
• Televised interviews and political communication
• Thatcher had more teleprompter troubles than Obama
• Jargon & gobbledygook refresher course
• How many numbers can you get into a minute?
• Will The Times be investigating Lord Rees-Mogg’s House of Lords expenses?
• Why is the MoD involved in planning Harry Patch’s funeral?
• Clarke has more to say about Brown than a few weeks ago
• Book plugging news
• Why doesn’t Amazon have a Spanish site?
• Media debilitated by swine flu news pandemic
• More standup comedy from Gordon Brown
• Standing ovation for Gordon Brown after anecdotes about Reagan, Cicero and Demosthenes
• Gordon Brown’s tough decisions and/or rehearsal for defeat
• White paint, red lights and fuel conservation
• Are you ahead of reading this post?
• Nudging in a more enlightened direction
• Moon rhetoric from Neil Armstrong, JFK & Werner von Braun
• Rhetoric revival?
• Book plugging
• How to stay awake during a repetitive ceremony
• BBC plug-a-book shows: how and why is so much offered to so few?
• Puzzle-Solution formats
• BBC rediscovers the 'Lost Art of Oratory' (again)
• Welcome to visitors from the BBC website
• D-Day memorabilia from Normandy to Lüneburg
• More on body language & non-verbal behavior
• Guinea pigs
• Non-verbal communication
• A commentator likely to keep his job
• Non-verbal communication and height
• Welcome to visitors from the BBC website
• How to use video to study body language, verbal & non-verbal communication
• Is the 'Daily Telegraph' borrowing from blogs?
• More bad news for Gordon Brown
• Translation and fantasies of global domination
• Pious and expensive twaddle from strong man Straw
• There’s no such thing as a boring subject

JUNE 2009 

• Monty Python, conversation and turn-taking

• Margaret Thatcher, body language and non-verbal communication

• NLP: No Linguistic Proof

• Body language and non-verbal communication video

• The 250 posts landmark
• Another body language & non-verbal communication cartoon

• 'Check against delivery'

• Body language, non-verbal communication and the myth about folded arms & defensiveness

• Another expenses dilemma

• The urgent need for EU directives on tea-making and lunch times

• Expenses?
• Imagery worthy of Obama in speech by the Governor of the Bank of England

• News on BBC radio is sometimes very good indeed

• Dudley Moore’s ‘Little Miss Muffet’ by Benjamin Britten

• BBC Television News slideshow Quiz

• No flies on Obama!

• ‘Sound-formed errors’ and humour

• BBC Television News informs, educates and entertains without slides!

• Politician answers a question: an exception that proves the rule
• Combining rhetoric and imagery to get your point across

• Did the MP's manure come by appointment?

• Interview techniques, politicians and how we judge them

• Banksy officially on show in Bristol

• Is the media no longer interested in what goes on in parliament?

• “Labour’s not for turning” – Peter Hain

• Presidential heights

• Why it suited Brown and Blair to take House of Lords reform no further

• Monty Python’s Election Night Special

• Euro-election coverage: was the BBC’s graphical overkill a violation of its charter?

• Lord Mandelspin strikes again

• Brown does a better job than Obama at the 65th anniversary of D-Day

• How Caroline Flint gave the game away about expecting a post in the cabinet

• Gordon Brown’s honesty about the death of New Labour

• D-Day 65th Anniversary (2): a reminder for Sarkozy and a challenge for Obama

• D-Day 65th Anniversary: (1) A British soldier returns to Gold Beach

• The end of free speech?

• Obama: Echoes of Berlin in Cairo

• Inspiring speech for polling day by Peter Sellers

• Pre-delicate hitches from the White House

• Body language and non-verbal communication

• 'Pre-delicate hitches' from Brown as he avoids answering a question about the Queen

• The end of the beginning

• How NOT to use PowerPoint

• Why has Gordon Brown become a regular on the Today programme?

MAY 2009
• Ronald Reagan's moving tribute on the 40th anniversary of D Day
• Driving a car can make you look younger than you really are
• Planning to say 'um' and 'uh'
• The ‘delicacy’ of Mrs Clinton’s ‘consequences’ for North Korea
• Clinton on North Korea: "There are consequences to such actions"
• Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s Oscar acceptance speech
• Obama’s nomination of Judge Sotomayor received five times more applause than ‘normal’
• Two tips for David Cameron after today’s speech on political change
• Bishops' attendance rates and allowances in the House of Lords
• Climbing out of the manure?
• Since when were Archbishops experts on democracy?
• Disputing the meaning of applause
• House of Lords expenses: Lord Rees-Mogg on gravy trains
• House of Lords expenses
• Goodbye from Mr Speaker
• What a fine Speaker!
• What a poor speaker!
• Sky Sports swindle
• Is the MPs' expenses scandal a hidden legacy of Thatcherism?
• Rhetoric wins applause for questioners on BBC Question Time
• Applause for Dimbleby's questions on BBC Question Time
• The liveliest Question Time ever?
• Why it's so easy for politicians not to answer interviewers' questions - and what should be done about it
• MPs expenses claims merely reflect British attitudes towards home ownership
• Well, well Wells!
• A prime minister who openly refused to answer an interviewer’s questions
• UK Speechwriters' Guild
• Gordon Brown's interview technique: the tip of a tedious iceberg
• Eye contact, public speaking and the case of President Zuma
• Chicago!
• Weatherization
• Notes from a large continent
• Are there more longer words in American English than in British English?
• Virgin mile-high poetry

APRIL 2009
• The Turnip Prize
• What’s the difference between a flu 'pandemic' and a flu 'epidemic'?
• Oxford professor models jeans
• A great source of videos for anyone interested in speaking and presentation
• A Tory leader's three evasive answers to the same question
• Jobsworthy News: Council official to walk along a path that doesn’t exist
• Was Kenneth in Wallanderland worth a BAFTA?
• A Labour leader with no interest in spin!
• David Cameron's attack on the Budget used some well-crafted rhetoric
• Gordon Brown seems to agree that Labour is ‘savage’ and ‘inhuman’?
• Poems for St George's Day
• Inspiring banking imagery for Budget day from Martin Luther King
• Budget speech boredom and television news tedium
• When the young Paddy Ashdown surprised himself by the power of his own rhetoric
• Obama’s rhetoric identifies with Martin Luther King but appeals to a wider audience
• A day when LibDems cheered at being told they all read a broadsheet newspaper
• Time for Gordon Brown to say "sorry" to savers
• Burnham, Kinnock and the danger of speaking in a sports stadium
• Derek Draper – another psycho-therapist who talks too much and listens too little?
• A smear that never was
• Derek Draper breaks a basic rule of conversation
• INTERLUDE
• Gordon Brown’s G20 address ignores an important tip from Winston Churchill
• Is there an open-mouthed school of acting?

MARCH 2009
• Gordon Brown is finding the Jacqui Smith expenses story more ‘delicate’ than he says
• ‘The Lost Art of Oratory’ by a BBC executive who helped to lose it in the first place
• Another Tory speech that marked the beginning of the end for a prime minister
• Rhetorical techniques and imagery in Hannan’s attack on Gordon Brown – edited highlights
• Did the media ignore Hannan because they think speeches are ‘bad television’?
• Does Daniel Hannan’s attack on Brown tell us what makes a speech memorable?
• UK media slowly wakes up to Daniel Hannan’s speech
• Media Coverage of Daniel Hannan’s attack on Gordon Brown
• It’s time Brown stopped recycling other people’s lines
• Daniel Hannan v. Gordon Brown at the European Parliament
• Jargon and gobbledygook comedy sketch
• Check the fixtures and fittings before you speak
• Why haven't the Lib Dems learnt from Obama’s use of the internet?
• If Bill Gates doesn’t read bullet points from PowerPoint slides ...
• An imaginative innovation in a PowerPoint presentation?
• ‘From Stalin to Mr Bean’: putting two parts of a contrast in the right order
• How to improve impact by sequence, repetition and a rhetorical technique
• Brown’s ‘poetry’ heads up news of his speech to Congress
• Unexpected poetry in Gordon Brown's speech to the US Congress
• The Gettysburg Powerpoint Presentation
• Gordon Brown’s model example of how to express condolences

February 2009
• The day Barack Obama discovered his powers of oratory and rhetoric
• How to make reading a slide sound interesting
• PowerPoint style presentation continues to dominate BBC News – courtesy Robert Peston (again)
• The 'magic' of Oscar acceptance speeches
• Does Mrs Clinton really know someone everywhere she goes?
• Personality cult as an antidote to tribalism?
• Kenya holiday reading

JANUARY 2009
• Mirror, mirror on the wall, whose is the fairest democracy of all ?
• Rhetoric and imagery in President Obama’s inauguration speech
• The good news from the House of Lords
• Memorable lines in President Obama's inaugural speech?
• The great camcorder con-trick
• Obama’s inauguration rhetoric won approval for some uncomfortable messages
• Rhetoric and applause in Obama’s inaugural speech as a measure of what the audience liked best
• A line I don't want to hear in today's speech by President Obama
• The enduring challenge and importance of funeral orations
• Has talking the economy down become a dangerous self-fulfilling prophesy?
• Kate Winslet ignores Paul Hogan’s advice to award winners
• Slidomania epidemic contaminates another BBC channel
• How would Obama's rhetoric and oratory sound from a London back street?
• Clinton, Palin and the legacy of Margaret Thatcher
• Margaret Thatcher and the evolution of charismatic woman: Part III. The education of a female orator
• Margaret Thatcher and the evolution of charismatic woman: Part II. ‘ The Iron Lady’
• Margaret Thatcher and the evolution of charismatic woman: Part I. Cultural and vocal challenges
• “May we bring hope” – 30 years since Margaret Thatcher took office as Prime Minister

DECEMBER 2008
• Ready made words for Mr Obama from a previous president’s inaugural speech
• Neutrality in the Queen’s Christmas speech
• What did Santa say before “Ho, ho ho!”
• You don’t have to be Barack Obama to use rhetoric and imagery
• High-risk practical joke for an office Christmas party speech
• End of year poll on PowerPoint presentations
• Obama’s rhetoric renews UK media interest in the ‘lost art’ of oratory
• Gordon’s gaffe explained
• The Office Christmas Party Speech: roads to failure and success
• The Queen's Speech, 2008
• Rhetoric, oratory and Barack Obama's 'The Speech', 2004
• "There's nothing wrong with PowerPoint - until there's an audience"
• What’s in a place name?

NOVEMBER 2008
• Content-free sermon by Alan Bennett
• 50 years since Peter Sellers recorded his memorable political speech
• Talking the economy up
• Talking the economy down
• Why lists of three: mystery, magic or reason?
• Tom Peters: High on rhetoric but low on content?
• Bobby Kennedy nearly got it right about Obama
• ‘Reliable sources' on where Obama’s 'Yes we can' came from
• Will there be any ‘rhetorical denial’ from the Obama camp?
• The Queen’s Speech: an exception that proves the ruler
• Rhetoric & imagery in Obama's victory speech
• Not Clinton, not McCain but Obama
• How the BBC handled one complaint about Ross

OCTOBER 2008
• Another BBC News Slideshow
• Don't put the clocks back
• BBC Television News: produced for or by morons?
• Experience and inexperience in presidential campaigns
• Presidential debates – tedious television but better than commercials
• A secret of eternal youth?
• PowerPoint Peston
• Hair today, win tomorrow: baldness and charisma
• Pesky Peston?
• ConVincing Cable
• 'Mature, grown-up and statesmanlike' at the lectern

SEPTEMBER 2008
• Cameron takes to the lectern in a crisis
• Objects as visual aids
• Powerpoint comes to church
• Mediated speeches -- whom do we really want to hear?
• Wisdom of forethought?
• Time for Cameron to surf applause?
• Did Gordon Brown take my advice?
• Eternity, eternity and eternity
• More tips for Gordon Brown
• Tips for Gordon Brown's conference speech

Impersonators as masterful analysts of non-verbal communication

The recent debate on various blogs about some of the myths about body language and non-verbal communication (on which see HERE and HERE) has reminded me of a minor frustration from my days as a full-time academic.

When I worked in Oxford during the 1970s-80s, there were quite a few social psychologists doing research into body language and non-verbal communication.

Although they were always good company and interesting to talk to over lunch, they knew and I knew that there were some quite important methodological differences between their approach and that of conversation analysts like me.

Put briefly, and from my point of view, they didn't seem to let empirical data constrain their claims to the same extent as we did.

Invite an impersonator to give a seminar?
Some of the people I knew used to arrange for visiting academics to speak at their regular seminars, and I was continually trying to persuade them to invite Mike Yarwood. He wasn’t an academic, but was the top showbiz impersonator at the time (and, if I were still there today, I’d no doubt be trying to get them to invite Rory Bremner, for the same reason).

As for why I thought Yarwood would have some interesting things to say, it was because, for his impersonations to convince the mass television audience so successfully, he must have developed some very effective techniques for observing the way celebrities speak and behave – and for analyzing at such fine levels of detail that he was then able to reproduce instantly recognisable versions of them in his own performances.

In fact, as far as I could see, he must have been better at it than those of us who were supposed to be ‘experts’, and should therefore be able to teach us a thing or two that would help us to improve our own observational skills.

What's the point?
My conversations with the psychologists about this always ended in failure, so we never did get to hear Mr Yarwood revealing any of his secrets.

In retrospect, I suspect my argument may have too threatening, or perhaps too undiplomatic, for them to agree to invite him to a seminar.

When they asked “Why?”, “What would the point of that be?”, etc., my reply went along the following lines:

“Because his observations and analyses have to be accurate enough not just to describe their behaviour in detail, but to be able to reproduce it so effectively that anyone can recognize who it is. If Yarwood gets it wrong, his shows will fail and he’ll be out of a job, whereas academics can be wrong for the next 30+ years and still get paid.”

Such were the luxuries of the academic life.

Televised interviews and political communication

If you’re a new reader of this blog and are interested in the problems associated with the growing importance of interviews as the major form of political communication in the UK, there are a number of posts, both serious and not so serious that you might like to catch up on.

They include the following, most of which are illustrated by short video clips:

• Why it’s so easy for politicians not to answer questions - and what should be done about it
• Interview techniques, politicians and how we judge them
• Gordon Brown’s interview technique: the tip of a tedious iceberg
• Why has Gordon Brown become a regular on the Today programme?
• A prime minister who openly refused to answer an interviewer’s question
• A Tory leader’s three evasive answers to the same question
• A Labour leader with no interest in spin
• Politician answers a question: an exception that proves the rule

And here’s another classic from the early 1980s BBC series Not the Nine o’clock News:

Thatcher had more teleprompter troubles than Obama

Bert Decker has just posted a very interesting piece arguing that President Obama’s use of the teleprompter isn’t doing any favours for his reputation as a great communicator.

This doesn’t surprise me, because I’ve always thought it a rather mixed blessing since seeing Margaret Thatcher’s performance deteriorate after she moved from using a script on a lectern to reading from teleprompter screens.

Before 1982, she never used a teleprompter. But, on seeing Ronald Reagan using it in a masterly speech to both houses of parliament that year, she was apparently so impressed that she told her aides that she wanted one too - and, a few months later she tried it out at the annual conference of the Conservative Party.

The immediate result was a dramatic fall in the amount of applause she received. In her 1981 Conference speech, she’d achieved the astonishing average of one burst of applause for every three sentences she uttered. A year later, aided, or rather abetted, by the teleprompter, her applause rate fell by about 35%.

One reason for this was that it interfered with an extremely regular part her delivery. When using a script on a lectern, she would routinely lower her eyes and head towards the text during the last two or three syllables as she approached a completion point (e.g. the end of the second part of a contrast or the third item in a list).

If anyone in the audience still wasn't sure that she’d finished and it was time to respond (i.e, applaud), any such doubt was eliminated by two more non-verbal signals: she would close her mouth tightly and audibly clear her throat.

In some of her speeches from a lectern, this didn’t just happen now and then, but on every single occasion she was applauded. You can see examples of the routine as she delivers two consecutive contrasts at the start of her third successful general election campaign in 1987:



Whereas this all worked pretty smoothly to trigger instantaneous applause, it was a very different story when Mrs Thatcher's eyes were fixed on teleprompter screens instead of a lectern. She no longer looked down towards the script as she came to a completion point, but gazed beyond the screens into thin air.

The removal of these decisive and unambiguous signals that she’d definitely finished and it was time to applaud meant that it didn’t happen as often as it did when could return her eyes to the lectern.

The line in this first example should have been guaranteed to get applause from any Tory party audience in 1982:

THATCHER “.. this is why we need nuclear weapons, because having them makes peace more secure.”

But, as you'll see, nothing happens, other than some rapid eye-blinking and a long pause from Mrs Thatcher before continuing, perhaps indicating that she’d both noticed and was surprised by the lack of applause:



In the next example, the audience does applaud after the second part of a contrast, but only after a delay of about half a second and then for noticeably less than the ‘standard’ 8 seconds (for more on ‘standard’ bursts of applause, see HERE) .

THATCHER: “We all want peace, but not peace at any price; peace with justice and freedom.”

Once the slight delay is over and the applause is underway, you can see that Mrs Thatcher half closes her mouth and then, looks down towards the lectern – after the applause had started rather than before it, as would have happened had she been reading from the lectern:



Although these may seem to be small details, there were so many of them in her 1982 conference speech that it's easy to pick out enough similar examples to be unsurprised that she got so much less applause than in the previous year.

For Mrs Thatcher, it brought with it other new, and rather odd-looking, changes to the way her eyes and body had previously moved. Sometimes, her eyes would remain fixed on one screen as her shoulders started moving towards the other one. Then, once the shoulders were in position, her head and eyes would dart very quickly and suddenly from one screen to the other, as if she wasn't going to take any chances about losing her place.

So this is why I started by saying that teleprompters are a mixed blessing for speakers. Few, including, it appears, President Obama can match Ronald Reagan's mastery of the technology. And some, like Margaret Thatcher, were considerably more effective reading from a script on sheets of paper resting on a lectern than when reading from transparent screens in front of them.

I first came across teleprompters when writing Our Masters' Voices 25 years ago. In those days, they used to be called 'sincerity machines' – and that, perhaps, is precisely the problem with them.

Jargon & gobbledygook refresher course

Ahead of the holiday period, this video might help you to get your ducks in a row when it’s time to get up to the plate again going forward - and two earlier posts might help to get the issues up the flag pole HERE and HERE.

But Sky News can hardly claim to be innocent when it comes to telling us that something is happening ahead of something else when what they mean is 'before'.

How many numbers can you get into a minute?

A few months ago, I made the point that Gordon Brown tends to pack far too much information into his speeches and still has to take notice of a crucial tip from Winston Churchill about simplicity.

In his final press conference before the Summer recess, he was at it again. At one stage, as you can see below, he managed to mention nine numbers in less than a minute.

The trouble is that a lot of people glaze over when numbers come at them so thick and fast – a problem that’s even worse if, as in this case, they’re delivered in a flat monotonous tone of voice.

And the importance of speakers conveying enthusiasm for their subjects cannot be overestimated – for the very obvious reason that, if a speaker sounds bored by his or her subject matter, why should the audience feel any less bored, let alone be inspired by it?

Add to this Mr Brown’s earnest facial expression and it's hardly surprising that he’s so often referred to ‘dour’.

Will The Times be investigating Lord Rees-Mogg’s House of Lords expenses?

Today’s Times on Line has a story about Lord Bhatia’s House of Lords expenses claims.

This raises the interesting question of whether they are going to be as thorough in their investigations as the Telegraph was with it’s stories about MP’s expenses.

If so, they might like to start with one of their own columnists, William Rees-Mogg.

A previous post on this blog reported that, in the last year for which details were available at the time, Lord Rees-Mogg drew £41,463 in tax-free allowances. £8,923 of this was for ‘office costs’, part of which is quite likely to have helped to subsidise journalistic activities for The Times and other newspapers.

Why is the MoD involved in planning Harry Patch's funeral?

Harry Patch, who died yesterday, was a familiar face to those of us who read the Wells Journal every week and had become nationally famous as the last surviving Tommy from WW1.

Funeral services in Wells Cathedral are not available for everyone who dies in this area, but I’m sure there will be widespread local consensus that, if anyone deserves a send-off in the Cathedral, Harry Patch certainly does.

The only thing that seems a bit odd about the plan is the following announcement on the BBC website, that has been echoed in a lot of other media reportage:

‘The Ministry of Defence said there would be a funeral cortege through Wells followed by a service at Wells Cathedral.’

This raises the question of whether the MoD has a say in where the funerals of all ex-servicemen are to be held, not to mention whether there is some kind of hotline or special influence between MoD and the Dioceses of Bath and Wells?

At the risk of sounding ungracious, disrespectful or even a little suspicious, I can't help wondering if the MoD’s apparent involvement in planning Mr Patch’s funeral has something to with the PR attractions of holding such a high profile event for a famous war veteran at a time when we're hearing almost daily news of British deaths in Afghanistan.

Clarke has more to say about Brown than a few weeks ago

In the wake of Labour's loss of the Norwich North by-election, it looks as though former Home Secretary Charles Clarke is less reluctant to tell us what he thinks of Gordon Brown than he was five weeks ago.

Here's what he said then:

Q: "Will you tell us what you think about Gordon Brown?"
A: "No."



But today's BBC website has rather more detail on what Mr Clarke thinks of Mr Brown now:

Ex-home secretary Charles Clarke blamed the result on Mr Brown's "incompetent" treatment of outgoing MP Dr Ian Gibson … Mr Clarke - the MP for neighbouring Norwich South and a long-time critic of the prime minister - said there had been no "guiding principles" to the prime minister's handling of the expenses scandal.

"What happened to Ian Gibson was not fair and many, many people felt that," Mr Clarke told the BBC. "You need the transparency, you need a comprehensive approach, you need fairness and you need it to be done quickly and these things didn't happen."

Book plugging news

It's 10 days since I posted some comments about the impact of BBC 'plug-a-book' shows on sales, following a mention of Speech-making and Presentation Made Easy (see above) on the BBC website.

As expected, it soon slipped back from its all-time high of 1,841st in the Amazon bestsellers chart, but it's still been averaging about 220,000 places higher than it was before the plug on the BBC website.

What this means in terms of actual sales, I'll have to wait for news from the publishers.

But, with the ever-growing domination of booksellers like Waterstones, Amazon and word-of-mouth are becoming even more important to frustrated authors, and the book's current placing prompts a degree of cautious optimism that it might have just about reached lift-off.

Why doesn't Amazon have a Spanish site?

Wondering how the Spanish translation of Lend Me Your Ears was doing, I thought I'd have a look at Amazon Spain.

To my astonishment, I discovered that it doesn't exist, even though Spanish is the 3rd most widely spoken language in the world.

But, there are Amazon sites in Japanese (10th most widely spoken) and German (11th most widely spoken), not to mention three in English (UK, USA, Canada) and Amazon China.

I'm not as worried about Amazon missing such a major market opportunity as I am about the fact that Spanish speakers don't have access to books translated from English into Spanish.

I know from emails and comments on the blog that there are some regular Spanish speaking visitors.

They might like to know that the Spanish edition of Lend Me Your Ears is published as Claves para hablar en público: Todo lo que necesita saber sobre cómo pronunciar discursos y hacer presentaciones, further details of which are available HERE (from where copies can also be ordered).

Media debilitated by swine flu news pandemic

I just tried (but failed) to catch up with the news by listening to The World Tonight on BBC Radio 4 at 10.00 p.m..

Twenty minutes into the broadcast and they were still banging on about the latest flu statistics, when a vaccine would be ready, government help lines, websites, etc., etc.

All of which could have been collapsed into a three-part list that would have taken less than 10 seconds to read out:

"There's more of it about, it's not very serious and a vaccine's on its way."

(See also What's the difference between a 'flu pandemic' and a 'flu epidemic'?)

More standup comedy from Gordon Brown

The story about Ronald Reagan that Gordon Brown told at the TED conference the other day wasn’t the only one that got a laugh from the audience (see previous post).

He also had one about singer Amy Whitehouse and Nelson Mandela. It was a neat example of the puzzle-solution technique illustrated last week with clips from Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and William Hague.

Puzzle: “Amy Whitehouse said “Nelson Mandela and I have got a lot in common.

Solution: “My husband too has spent a long time in prison.”

But I was always taught that you shouldn't laugh at your own jokes, and this would surely have worked better if he hadn't done so.

Standing ovation for Gordon Brown after anecdotes about Reagan, Cicero and Demosthenes

A couple of days ago, Gordon Brown took time out from local problems, like today’s by-election, to make a surprise appearance at the TED Global conference, and one can’t help wondering if the chance to give a lecture in Oxford marked the official start of his exit strategy into teaching that he was dropping hints about a few weeks ago.

You can see the whole of his TED performance at the bottom of this page and inspect a brief review of Twitter responses HERE.

Readers of my books will know that I give great emphasis to the importance of anecdotes in effective speeches and presentations, and there are two nice examples of this in Mr Brown's speech.

The first one came as he tried his hand at a bit of standup with this story about what Ronald Reagan is alleged to have thought of the then Swedish prime minister, Olaf Palme:



Then, right at the end came another anecdote involving a contrast between the way audiences used to respond to Cicero and Demosthenes. Brown firmly identifies himself with the latter and gets a positive reaction that doesn’t often happen to him outside Labour Party conferences – a standing ovation - and it doesn't often happen to anyone in Oxford either (or at least, I never got one when I worked there).



The whole unedited 16 minute speech can be watched below. And, as you'll see from the first few minutes, someone must have advised Mr Brown that, if you must use PowerPoint, you can't beat genuinely visual slides like pictures:

Gordon Brown's tough decisions and/or rehearsal for defeat

In case you missed Gordon Brown’s last press conference before the Summer recess, here’s the ‘Top Story’ on the No 10 website today:

Government taking “tough decisions” on economy – PM
The Government has taken “tough decisions” to tackle the recession and reduce its impact, the Prime Minister has said.

Speaking at his final Downing Street press conference before the summer recess, Gordon Brown said it was a challenging time for the country, but ministers had put in place “considerable” measures to help British businesses and families.

The Prime Minister also set out what the Government is doing to prepare for an increase in swine flu cases, and took questions on Afghanistan.

Read more: Government taking “tough decisions” on economy - PM

Curiously, if you do click to read more, you won’t find any mention of a question about tomorrow's Norwich North by-election.

Luckily, however, the Channel 4 News website does show us the the question and 'answer' under the headline ‘a rehearsal for by-election defeat’.

Here's how reporter Gary Gibbon introduces the video:

'Gordon Brown at his press conference just now sounded like a man rehearsing his lines for Friday when Norwich North looks like getting a Tory MP.

'He said he thought “people do understand the uniqueness of this by-election” in answer (or rather in reply) to a question about why he deselected Ian Gibson.'

See what you think:

White paint, red lights and fuel conservation

Yesterday, I suggested that the country could achieve significant energy savings by the simple and virtually free device of permitting left turns at red traffic lights.

Even greater savings in fuel consumption could be had by replacing as many traffic lights as possible with mini-roundabouts.

A few years ago, for example, there weren’t any traffic lights in the city of Wells, and the worst traffic jam I’d ever been in was one in which there were three cars in front of me (and that was at 8.55 a.m in the morning).

But Somerset County Council, aided and abetted by their highways consultants, W.S. Atkins, soon put a stop to all that by installing numerous sets of traffic lights at as many junctions as they could find.

As a result, Wells now has plenty of traffic jams in which, more often than not, you have to keep your vehicle idling while waiting for no traffic at all to come from any other direction.

In every place where the lights were installed, traffic flow would have worked more smoothly – and have cost far less money – if the County Council had spent a few pounds on white paint to create mini-roundabouts.

As there’s so little traffic in Wells, fuel conservation would have been significantly improved by a reduction in (a) idling time and (b) the number of times vehicles have to move off from a standing start.

Are you ahead of reading this post?

A few months ago, I posted a 'Jargon and gobbledygook comedy sketch' that was based on various words and phrases in common usage that that I find irritating and/or annoying.

One that baffles me more than most is the ever-increasing preference of writers in the press and broadcast media for using the phrase ‘ahead of’ when they actually mean ‘before’, as in the following recent examples:

‘Man scales plinth ahead of launch.’ – BBC website.

‘Today's co-ordinated attacks came with violence surging in Afghanistan ahead of presidential and provincial elections next month times on line.’ – Times Online.

'Kevin Pietersen will see a specialist about his longstanding Achilles problem ahead of the third Ashes Test at Edgbaston.’ – Sky News website.

In these and the scores of examples you can read or hear every day, wouldn't it sound much more normal and natural if they’d used the good old English word ‘before’.

Is it just me, or did something go seriously wrong with the way I originally learnt to speak (and, as far as I know, continue to speak) my native tongue.

I’m pretty sure I didn’t go to school ahead of going to university any more than I became a father ahead of becoming a grandfather. But I do know that I did both of the former BEFORE experiencing either of the latter.

So can anyone explain to me why is it that so many journalists and editors are so obsessed with using a way of saying ‘before’ that’s not in common usage among any section of the British public (outside the media)?

When did it start being used, and where on earth did it come from in the first place?

I'd really appreciate it if anyone can shed any light on all this going forward – and there’s another one that sounds just as out of touch with common usage and raises much the same questions.

Nudging in a more enlightened direction

Rob Greenland has an interesting post on The Social Business about the encouraging reduction in plastic bag use – and the even more encouraging way it’s been achieved:

'It's in the news today that supermarkets just missed their target of 50% reduction in plastic bag use (they got to 48%). I'm not a big fan of supermarkets but I think on this one they need to be congratulated. Remember the reaction against proposals to tax plastic bags, and how, many believed, people would never change their habits.

'Far too many bags are still used but a 48% reduction is a massive improvement. If businesses and the public can get their act together on this issue, what other seemingly impossible environmental problems might we solve? It may also suggest that it's better to nudge people into doing the right thing (like the clever question the checkout assistant was trained to ask), rather than taxing them into behavioural change.'

I couldn’t agree more with his recommendation of the nudge-nudge approach and would like to add a couple of simple but effective options that wouldn’t even need nudge-nudge because they would not only achieve savings automatically, but would also be be virtually free and require no new targets or elaborate regulatory controls.

1. ALLOW LEFT TURNS AT RED TRAFFIC LIGHTS
If you’ve ever driven in the USA, you’ll know that most states allow drivers to turn right on a red light if there’s no traffic coming from that direction.

This was arguably the single most important legacy of Gerald Ford’s administration and saves fuel by reducing (a) idling time and (b) the number of times you have to start off from a complete stop. Apart from reducing overall fuel consumption and emissions, the rule brings the added benefit of instant financial savings for motorists and transport companies.

In the UK, for obvious reasons the equivalent would be to permit left turns at red lights – and could be introduced instantly at minimal cost to the taxpayer.

2. REDUCE ROAD AND STREET LIGHTING
In an age when car head-lights are so much better than they used to be, why do there have to be so many lights on so many miles of motorway – and why do they stay on into the early hours of the morning?

And can we really justify so many street-lights in our town centres, suburbs and villages?

Whereas the first recommendation could be brought in instantly, this one would need a bit of experimentation to get the balance right. As a start, I’d suggest turning off 50% of all road and street lighting and see what happened.

Moon rhetoric from Neil Armstrong, JFK & Werner von Braun

About twelve years after the moon landing in 1969, I started writing about the power of rhetorical techniques like the contrast, and remember being vaguely amused and delighted when I realised that, of all the possible things that Neil Armstrong could have said 40 years ago, it was a simple contrast that was beamed back to earth.

[A] That's one small step for man;
[B] one giant leap for mankind.



But this historic achievement was also the fulfillment of earlier memorable rhetorical flourishes from President Kennedy, who’d committed the USA to land a man on the moon within a decade. And here he is cranking out a contrast and rounding off his message off with a three-part list:

We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things,

[A] not because they are easy,
[B] but because they are hard,

because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is

[1] one that we are willing to accept,
[2] one we are unwilling to postpone
[3] and one we intend to win.

(The full text of the speech is HERE).



Rocket scientist though he may have been, Werner von Braun, without whose brains NASA might never have met Kennedy’s deadline, was no slouch when it came to coining memorable quotations.

When the first of the V2 rockets he’d designed for Hitler hit London, it’s been claimed that his mind was already on space – as he was quoted as saying: "The rocket worked perfectly except for landing on the wrong planet."

Other famous lines from von Braun include the following:

“Man is the best computer we can put aboard a spacecraft, and the only one that can be mass produced with unskilled labor.”

“Our sun is one of 100 billion stars in our galaxy. Our galaxy is one of billions of galaxies populating the universe. It would be the height of presumption to think that we are the only living things in that enormous immensity.”

“Research is what I'm doing when I don't know what I'm doing.”

“Don't tell me that man doesn't belong out there. Man belongs wherever he wants to go -- and he'll do plenty well when he gets there.”

“We can lick gravity, but sometimes the paperwork is overwhelming.”

“There is just one thing I can promise you about the outer-space program - your tax-dollar will go further.”

“Crash programs fail because they are based on theory that, with nine women pregnant, you can get a baby a month.”

“It will free man from the remaining chains, the chains of gravity which still tie him to this planet.”

“For my confirmation, I didn't get a watch and my first pair of long pants, like most Lutheran boys. I got a telescope. My mother thought it would make the best gift.”

For someone who helped the Nazis to develop the V2 rockets that launched so much terror and destruction on London, US citizenship wasn't such a bad gift either.