A trick for public speaking #

We begin with a melody by Gary Provost:

This sentence has five words. Here are five more words. Five-word sentences are fine. But several together become monotonous. Listen to what is happening. The writing is getting boring. The sound of it drones. It’s like a stuck record. The ear demands some variety.

Now listen. I vary the sentence length, and I create music. Music. The writing sings. It has a pleasant rhythm, a lilt, a harmony. I use short sentences. And I use sentences of medium length. And sometimes, when I am certain the reader is rested, I will engage him with a sentence of considerable length, a sentence that burns with energy and builds with all the impetus of a crescendo, the roll of the drums, the crash of the cymbals–sounds that say listen to this, it is important.

So I write with a combination of short, medium, and long sentences. Create a sound that pleases the reader’s ear. Don’t just write words. Write music.

Back when I was in university, I had an economics professor who was a captivating lecturer. When he spoke, each word seemed to bend and undulate, carefully positioned to be part of the crest or trough in a larger discourse. His pace, too, varied, with some words punctate and punchy, others leisurely and expansive. Then there were the pauses - long, exceptional pauses, meditations even - and then there would be no pauses at all.

What exactly made his lectures so compelling? There were many things of course: his mastery of the subject, his openness to student questions, his clarity of communication. All of these contributed to his appeal, though instead I want to focus only on the manner in which he presented.

One thing about attending his lectures was that it felt like going to the theater. It was performative. There was movement, energy, gesticulation, audience interaction. We were not just to be informed, we were also to be entertained. And so I wondered: what makes a good performance? 

Almost always, a good performance succeeds in conveying emotion. Whereas the conveyance of information is sterile and mechanical, the conveyance of emotion is expressive and human. Whereas the machine aims to subdue variation, like a factory producing widgets, the human aims to amplify it.

And so we return to the introductory quote by Gary Provost. People do not like wholly short sentences, nor do they like wholly long sentences. They do not like overly complicated sentences, nor overly simple ones. They do not like only detail and specificity, nor do they like only abstraction and generality.

What they seek is variation, variability, the exploration of range between the short and the long, the fast and the slow, the high and the low, the paused and the rapid, the mobile and the static. Injecting variation along these axes made my professor’s lectures in economics - no, his presentations of economics - suddenly interesting.

What else, beyond tone and pace, could be varied, I thought?

Indeed, my professor varied the degree in which he interacted with his students, in how he moved around the room, in how he gesticulated, and in how he steered his facial expressions through curiosity and surprise and frustration and excitement.

He crossed his arms for a while, and then didn’t. He raised his voice, then whispered. He paced maddeningly back and forth, then stood perfectly still. He dove headlong into technical detail, then zoomed out to the big picture. He did everything and nothing, the essence of variation.

And so herein lies the trick I learned from my professor, which stuck with me far longer than any economic theory he taught. People appreciate the expressiveness of form, and the expressiveness of form derives from variation. Inject a little into your work and people will be captivated by it.