The Importance of Public Speaking Skills
Have you ever evaluated your public speaking skills? If so, you probably recognize that there is significant room for improvement. This is true for everybody, as public speaking is an art that can be improved throughout your lifetime. Whether you are in a profession which requires you to use your public skills regularly or not, there will certainly come a time when it pays to be proficient at delivering a message to an audience.
Public speaking skills encompass a wide variety of techniques and methods of communication. Unlike one-on-one communication where you have a regular interchange of ideas between another person, public speaking requires that you keep your audience captivated and understanding without the back and forth that goes on in a regular conversation.
Just because your audience does not spend much time talking with you does not mean that they are unable to communicate with you. A big part of developing your public speaking skills involves reading cues from your audience. Much of communication is non-verbal, so despite not directly speaking with you, your audience nonetheless communicates. By learning to read your audience’s non-verbal communication you can deliver your message in the most effective way.
If your audience seems interested, they probably are. This will indicate that you are moving along at a good pace and should continue with your approach. However, if your audience seems to be drifting, you need to know how to modify your approach so as to draw them back in. Studying public speaking will teach you how to do this.
Developing your public speaking skills is not always an easy thing to do, but it is a worthwhile endeavor. When the time comes for you to deliver a message to an audience, you want to be prepared.
If you’ve enjoyed all the exciting information you read hear about public speaking skills,you’ll love everything else you find at presentationstoryboarding.com
Article from articlesbase.com
Thank you public speaking skills… I just presented slides I never saw before… Sweet… – by Jack_DJBlek (Jack Djmal)
PopTech 2009 presenters, day 3 – 045
Image by Ed Yourdon
Note: this photo was published in a Dec 11, 2009 blog titled "5 tips to improve your public speaking skills." It was also published in an Apr 18, 2011 blog titled "Latest Public Speaking Tips News."
********************************************************
For approximately the sixth time since 2001, I attended the annual Pop!Tech conference in Camden, Maine; it’s always held in October, and this year, it took place on Oct 22-24. People often ask me what Pop!Tech is all about, and the simple answer is that it deals with the interaction between technology and society — most often in the form of lectures and presentations about the innovative ways that people around the world are using today’s technology to make a positive impact on a wide range of social problems. But rather than depending on my summary of what it’s all about, I recommend that you visit the Pop!Tech web site for more information.
Unlike previous years, I photographed almost every Powerpoint slide presented by each of the speakers throughout the conference. Combined with the photos that I took of conference attendees, that resulted in some 600 images on the first day — which I whittled down to 450 on this Flickr set, but that’s an overwhelming collection for anyone to look at.
For the second and third day of the conference, I decided to separate the photos of attendees from the straightforward photos of speakers and their Powerpoint slides. This set will contain about 400 images of the Powerpoint slides presented by the speakers on the final day of the conference; I’m uploading them in groups of 100, as I finish cropping, editing, and tweaking them.
All of this was presented to an audience of approximately 500 people, who are shown in separate Flickr sets. The attendees were from all over the U.S., and from several other countries too; they included both young and old; men and women; students and professors; academics and practitioners. Aside from the energy, enthusiasm, and commitment to social change (with or without technology), the other thing that was obviously shared among all of these attendees was the gadgetry they used to stay in touch with the world. There was a predominance of Mac laptops in these photos; and you’ll also see a lot of iPhones and other "smart phones." Keep in mind that people were not chatting on their phones during these presentations; instead, they were using their smart-phones to email, Twitter, chat, and browse the Web.
A couple of technical notes: I used a Nikon D700 for all of these photos, mostly with a 70-300mm zoom lens. I sat in the balcony section of the Camden Opera House, where the conference took place, so I was primarily photographing other people in the balcony section, as well as the presenters on stage. An equally large number of attendees were seated on the main floor of the building, but I didn’t see much point in photographing the tops of their heads. Because I could increase the ISO setting on the camera all the way up to 6400, I was able to get reasonably good images without a flash. The lights were turned on while I was photographing, but it was fairly dim in some areas; I did my best to compensate with an appropriate "white balance" setting on the camera.
Find More Public Speaking Skills Articles
Tags: Importance, Public, Skills, speaking
