IN THIS CHAPTER we are going to focus on oral presentation—that is, the presentation of ideas in spoken form, as against written. You will see that everything that we have learned so far about communication in general applies equally to oral communication, but the form is often different.
By “oral presentation,” I mean extemporaneous delivery, as against taking a completely written-out statement or talk and simply reading it aloud. That is oral, in the sense that it is spoken rather than written, but it is kind of halfway between writing and speaking. I will say a few words about it at the end of this chapter, but our main topic is extemporaneous delivery. In this type of presentation, it is all right to have some brief notes or keywords as an aid or a jog to your memory, and I will say something subsequently about the kind of notes that would be helpful or appropriate. But you have nothing approaching written-out sentences. Essentially, in extemporaneous delivery, you are putting your ideas into words on the spot before the audience, rather than reading what you have prepared at home.
What is the value of extemporaneous presentation? There are several good features to it. For one thing, it is excellent practice in your own intellectual development and growth. It is equally excellent practice for writing, because it is practice in one crucial skill, namely putting your thoughts into words as clearly as possible. The essence of communication, if you break it down into steps, is that you first have an idea, but in an inchoate, undefined, unverbalized way; it is, in effect, like a prenatal idea, an idea that has not yet been born, which is experienced almost as a mental pressure in your head—you know something, but you have not yet found the words to state it. Then you grope, you struggle, you hesitate, you pick out a word focusing on your idea, until you finally express it exactly. That is involved in all communication, in any form. And that is exactly what extemporaneous presentation consists of. It is the pure process of finding words for your ideas. In this type of delivery, you have no time to concentrate on higher subtleties, such as style, editing, or polishing. That is out of the question in an extemporaneous delivery. You have just one basic imperative: “There are people sitting there, and somehow I have got to put this mental pressure into coherent words that they can grasp; I have to translate my thoughts into language.” When you develop an ease or facility in this, you will find that it is helpful in all communication, including writing, because then, when you sit down, the writing of your rough draft becomes, in effect, like doing an extemporaneous talk. If you have developed the skill properly, the words will pour out of you (other things being equal), and then you can apply the later skill of editing. So it is very helpful to have practice in having to put your ideas into words without knowing the formulation in advance.
Another value of extemporaneous presentation is its sheer practicality. Most people can do much more of this than they can of writing, owing primarily to time. The preparation for extemporaneous delivery is brief. You just sketch down a few notes, and then you take the plunge. The main work is on the spot, rather than in advance. It is also a more practical form of expression, in that most people have more opportunity to use this than they do any other form of expression. There are any number of meetings, forums, gatherings, etc., at which you could spontaneously rise to give a two- or three- or five-minute statement of your views off-the-cuff. You could even do so in a living room or informal setting, as opposed to settings where you would be the invited speaker with the need for an official, prepared talk.
One further value of extemporaneous delivery is that audiences, as a rule, far prefer this kind of talk to one that is written out and read to them. There are many reasons for that, as we will see. But one of them is that there is a certain excitement to live presentation that a prepared talk virtually never equals, comparable to the difference between live TV and prerecorded broadcasts. There is a certain quality when you know it is live. It is not merely, as has sometimes been said, the hope of scandal—that is, the audience’s hope that the speaker will go blank or say something outrageous. It is a certain sense that the presentation is happening now, and who knows what will come next, bad or good. You see the person actually functioning, right before your eyes, on his feet. It is a present event, as against one that was over and done last week. Among many other factors, it is also the case that in a live extemporaneous presentation, the audience knows that it is the center of attention; the people listening know that the speaker is aiming his comments at them, as opposed to just going on with a preset speech whether or not the audience follows, understands, or even hears him. So extemporaneous speaking is good practice for you; it is enjoyable to an audience, comparatively speaking; and you get a great many chances to use it, even if your field is not the professional communication of ideas.
I can say at the outset that everything we have already discussed about communication applies to extemporaneous presentation also. The similarities to written presentation are overwhelming. Whether you speak or write, it is a conceptual presentation, with everything that that involves. You have to take into account the audience’s context; you have to remember the limits of what people can retain, i.e., the crow epistemology; you have to delimit your subject matter; you have to make your formulations self-contained; you have to motivate the audience; you have to have a structure; you have to concretize; and you have to be objective. All of this applies.
What is interesting, though, are the differences, those things that separate oral delivery (as I will call it from here on) from writing. Let me give it to you in the form of several differences.
Pace
Perhaps the most basic difference is that there is a difference of pace between oral delivery and writing. In all communication, as you know, the principle of the crow epistemology applies. The audience can hold only so much. There is always the potential problem of giving people more than they can retain or integrate, leading them to lose you. We have already seen the example of the sentence from Kant, as well as the case of a speaker who started an interesting talk with three tricky examples and then went on to the main theoretical point, overloading his audience. This is always an issue, in every form of communication. You always have to try to economize your units, to reduce the amount that the audience has to hold—whether it is the complexity of your sentences, the number of examples, or other factors. This is a much greater issue and problem in oral than in written communication. The problem of overloading is much more severe if your audience is listening to you. It is a difference only of degree, not of kind, from writing; but nevertheless, it is a big, important difference. An audience at an oral presentation can retain or deal with fewer units. This has to affect the whole presentation, specifically the pace or rate at which you offer your material. You have to slow down.
One major reason for this is that in writing, the audience can set its own pace. Whenever the reader needs a pause or a stop, he simply takes one. Even assuming that something is properly written, there are a number of reasons you, the reader, would have to stop and pause. Something might strike you as new. Some connection, for instance, strikes you; you get a side thought, and you want to pause for a moment to make a note of it. Another important reason is that people get tired. They need to rest, not necessarily for a long time, but maybe just enough to catch their breath and remind themselves where they are. You can stop frequently when you are reading somebody else’s work. Another reason to pause might be that you come across a striking formulation. It is perfectly clear, it does not suggest any new implications to you, but you need a moment simply for the mental equivalent of saying, “My God!” or, “Gee, I never thought of it that way.” The mental gears need time to click, as it were. Or you may get a puzzling formulation—not one that is the fault of the author, but maybe one with several aspects to it—and it takes you a second either to reread and say, “Oh, I see what he meant,” or else to say, “I do not see it, but I will put it to one side and go on with the understanding that I do not get this point.” Or the author may make a backward reference, such as, “As we saw in the last chapter,” and you do not remember, so you have to stop and say, “What did we see in the last chapter?” Sometimes, too, you reach the end of a section, and your mind feels the need to pause and sum up.
These are some of the reasons why perfectly clear, well-organized, interesting writing can still give the attentive reader reason to pause. He certainly does not have to sit over every sentence, but every once in a while he needs a couple of seconds, without which he cannot absorb the material. This, by the way, is why I am profoundly opposed to the speed-reading method as applied to ideas. You may as well not even pretend to read if you use that method in which the finger just goes down the page and you turn the pages every five seconds. Attempting to read Ayn Rand, Kant, or anything in between that way is ludicrous. Reading necessitates the constant possibility of stops. They may be brief ones, but they are essential to enabling the mind to stay on track. The reader has to know where he is and what he thinks; he has to have a chance to monitor his own reactions. Everybody, in fact, does this in one way or another if he is trying to understand, although everybody will stop at different points, for different reasons, and for different lengths of time.
When you read, the pauses are under your own control. In oral presentation, however, the audience is at the mercy of the speaker. The audience may need just a very brief, fleeting pause to square the mental books, but a merciless speaker just goes right on. For one second, the audience’s attention leaves the speaker’s voice; there was one baffling thing, and the audience just paused mentally for one second to try to get what it was. Meanwhile, by the time people tune in again, the speaker has gone on to the next sentence. They lost the end of the sentence, they lost the point, and, if it was important enough, they lost him. This, of course, would be true whatever the category of reason for the pause. You might attempt to solve this by stopping after every sentence, but you cannot do that, because it is very often unnecessary and you would simply bore the audience wild. Besides, pauses vary from person to person according to their need for them, so that is not the solution.
Another reason that there is a necessary difference of pace between speaking and reading is the difference between seeing and hearing. Most people find hearing ideas much more difficult than seeing them in print. I know I do. One obvious reason is that in seeing, if you miss something, you can always go back. There is a certain basic security; the stuff is always there under your control; whereas in hearing, if you miss something, you are out of luck, because the speaker has gone on. In my view, though, there is a more fundamental issue involved. Sight is the sense that permits us to grasp entities. In that way, it is the basic sense bringing us into contact with the world (or, at least, one of two senses that do so, the other being touch). Sight conveys a kind of reassurance, a solidity, the idea of the dealable-with and that which is within one’s control. Hearing, on the other hand, deals merely with a fleeting, transitory attribute—not an entity, but simply the sounds it makes—and therefore, the experience it provides is less solid, less absolute, less dealable-with. In any event, for whatever combination of factors, speaking is harder to take in than writing. The degree of concentration required, of sheer, unbreached focus on the audience’s part, is greater.
We therefore have to recognize that there is a certain problem. Listeners are often unavoidably torn between the needs of their own consciousness in regard to the material and the demand of the speaker that he go on, and we have to know how to adapt the presentation of ideas to take this fact into account. We have to know how to reduce the pace of the presentation vis-à-vis writing. “Pace” here means not simply the rate of speaking, but the actual amount of material you cover in a given time to a given audience. The actual rate of data must be less, thereby relieving the audience of the need to concentrate so furiously. Writing can be supercondensed, and often the very condensation is what makes writing good—it makes it purposeful, lean, taut, fast; every word counts, as in a telegram. Speaking cannot be that way; the audience could not keep up with it. For example, if you are writing to your father, you might simply send a telegram saying, in pattern: “Broke, send cash.” That would be okay in writing. But in speaking to him, leaving aside now questions of tact and so on, the same information would have to be fed like this, in pattern: “I spent all my money. I have nothing left. I need more. I would appreciate your help.” In other words, you give the listener a moment to wander if necessary, to let his attention flag for a second; if he misses that you spent all the money, he tunes in when you say you have got nothing left. He can thus still keep up with you. In writing, however, it is his responsibility if he does not get it, because it is right there unequivocally. The way I look at it is that in writing, the audience is responsible for getting every word; in speaking, you are responsible for getting it into them.
I can give you a real-life example showing how I first discovered this. Many years ago, I was teaching a course that subsequently became The Ominous Parallels, and I had finally written out a certain lecture that I had always presented extemporaneously. I thought, “Oh, how terrific; I do not have to do anything now; I will just go to class and read aloud.” And it was a revelation to me, because although the content was thoroughly prepared, the class was entirely baffled. I could feel that something completely wrong was going on, and yet the material was very clearly stated in every aspect; I could not figure it out. I will present it to you as is, and then show how I would give this exact same content to an audience orally, as opposed to in writing. This is one paragraph that actually appeared in The Objectivist as an excerpt in May of 1969. It comes at the end of my presentation of Hegel’s philosophy and how Hegel is responsible for the Nazis. It says:
While the Hegelian philosophy is the primary modern influence responsible for Nazism, no philosopher can produce such a cataclysm single-handed. A complex series of lesser intellectual influences—both preceding and proceeding from Hegel—was involved in preparing the climate for the rise of the Nazis. The sum of such accessory influences determined the specific form of Hegelian statism prevalent in modern Germany. Some of the better-known of these influences are worth mentioning briefly.*
That is how I presented it in writing. Now, this is how I would say the same thing orally:
Hegel is the main influence, the big gun here. But no philosopher could do it alone. There were lots of others, lesser ones. Some came before him, some after. Together they made up the climate; they paved the way for the Nazis. Now let us look at some of these smaller fry for a moment.
You see that that is exactly the same content, but I have reduced the pace, lengthened the time per unit, generally simplified, and made it easier to take in. Later we will analyze the differences and the different technique involved.
Exactness of Formulation
A second, crucial difference between an oral and a written presentation is the exactness of formulation. We are speaking now of the difference from the perspective of the speaker, rather than of the audience. In writing, you can choose the exact word or phrase you need. You can reach perfect accuracy, because you have three stages: first your outline, which gives you your basic directions; then your rough draft, in which you blurt everything out onto the page; and then your editing, during which you say, “This phrase is unclear; this is misleading; this is equivocal; this is too vague,” and knock the piece into shape. When you speak extemporaneously, your notes function like your outline in writing. Your actual talk, though, is the rough draft. There is no chance for editing. You are thinking aloud, to a certain extent. There is, therefore, a necessary groping for your words, and the best choice will not necessarily come first.
For this reason, in oral extemporaneous delivery, there is a certain amount of what we might call “circling around,” in which you say something and then come back and restate it slightly differently. Perhaps the first way of putting it suggested to you a different word that would make it clearer, but the word did not occur to you until you made your first statement. Or, as you are uttering the formulation, a flash goes through your mind that there is an aspect that you missed, and you realize that another, slightly different formulation will cover it. Or you suddenly think, as your lips are moving, “Gee, that could be misinterpreted,” so, as you finish, you immediately say, “Or, to put it another way,” and then you catch and obviate the thing that was worrying you. In other words, you circle around it; you say it and restate it from different aspects until you get the sense that, “Now I have got it across, and the point is unmistakable.”
To show you the difference from the point of view of formulation, here is an example sentence on Thomas Hobbes, from the same article: “Thomas Hobbes [is] the materialist apostle of modern science, who, in its name rather than God’s, issues anew the perennial call for unqualified obedience to the state.”* Now, suppose I am speaking and my notes reminding me of what points to make said, “Hobbes, materialist, science, state.” I might say something like, “Thomas Hobbes was a materialist. He bases his ideas not on God, but on science—what he calls science.” Here I have to add in “what he calls science,” because I realize that if I say “he bases his ideas on science,” it sounds as though I agree that he represents science. So I amend it right there to “what he calls science.” I go on: “His idea is the age-old idea ‘obey the state.’ Without qualification, mind you.” Note that I would have to add that last comment; otherwise, people would think I am advocating anarchism, because it sounds like I do not think you should obey the government. In writing, that is avoided, because I choose the words so carefully that that problem does not come up. In speaking, there is a little stumbling and self-correction as you try to get the gist across. You try out synonyms, elaborations, and so on, until you are satisfied that the audience gets it. We can call this a process of self-monitoring. It is the closest to editing that you can come in extemporaneous delivery; you are, in effect, amending or clarifying your formulations as you go. It is not nearly as compact as in writing.
This kind of temporary roughness is unavoidable in extemporaneous speech. It is not fatal to objectivity, though, because if you do it properly, you do finally achieve complete clarity. You just do so by a different means. You have to know that this process is involved and then do the self-monitoring, coming again at the same formulation two or three times until it comes out clearly. This takes a certain skill and experience, because it is as though one part of your mind is checking what you have already said (“Is that okay, or could it be misinterpreted?”) while the other part of your mind has to focus on the new material, so that if you do not find any correction to make, you do not just sit there with your mouth open; you go into the next point. It is an oscillation of attention. It is not as difficult as it sounds, but it does take experience.
Audiences, I may say, are almost always sympathetic to this problem. They understand. Once they know that the delivery is extemporaneous, they do not listen to the nuances of every word choice. In fact, they could not take it in anyway, because since they are hearing, they have their own problems with absorbing what you are saying. So they get only the gist of the point, and know from experience not to expect more. Thus if you grope for words a bit, that does not bother them, so long as the main point emerges. In that piece on the draft that I wrote, we criticized the sentence “Money is the main issue involved,” and I showed all the dreadful implications it contained. In writing, such a sentence would be really wrong. In speaking, however, it could very easily happen that when you get to that point in your talk (assuming the rest of the paper is okay), you are groping to formulate, and the words that occur to you are, “Money is the real issue here.” Then you think, “I had better clarify that I am talking about the practical solution, not derogating ideas.” The audience understands this. They know that it is an extemporaneous process, so they are not going to rush out in horror, thinking you are opposed to ideas, when you say that money is the main issue. They know you did not have time to pin it down, whereas in writing, they have every right to judge your every word. For this reason as well, then, the pace has to be slower in speaking.
You can see that there is no conflict, therefore, between you and your audience. They need a slower pace, and so do you. You are groping for words, and they take things in more slowly. If, on the other hand, you could speak like a perfectly edited piece of writing, it would be much too fast for them to take in. Your need to circle is matched by their need for you to slow down. There is thus perfect harmony here, in principle.
The question now becomes, How do we implement this slowing down? What specifically do you do to tailor your presentation to the requirements of oral delivery? Generally speaking, you have to give your audience every pointer you can, many more than are needed in writing, about your structure and content. You have to make it as easy as possible to follow. In basic terms, of course, the method is to reduce the amount that you include in a given time and in a given context. Strip your talk down to essentials. In writing you can cover a host of complexities, shadings, asides, nuances, and integrations, whereas speaking has to be much more single-track. That is the basic issue. Now, though, let us look at some more specific ways to reduce the pace.
1. Simplify your grammar and vocabulary. Long, complex sentences can be very elegant in writing, but they are not too good in speaking. Asking your listeners to subordinate complex thoughts makes their job difficult. A sentence that begins, “While the Hegelian philosophy is the primary modern influence…” tells the poor audience listening, “You have got to hold the whole thing that comes after ‘while,’ and that is going to modify yet another clause.” It is much easier to give them two main clauses: “Hegel was the main one,” which the audience can grasp and pass by, and then you go on to the next clause: “There were others.” This does not mean you should never use subordinate clauses. Generally speaking, though, short, independent clauses reduce the pressure on the audience.
By the same token, simplify your vocabulary. If you use a very big word—even a perfectly legitimate, genuine, exact word—that is not completely routine to your audience, it may stun them for a second; it may cause a little pocket of fog and confuse them even for the moment it takes to realize, “Oh, yes, I know what that means,” during which they lose your thought. I would thus tend to be much more colloquial in speaking than in writing. For instance, in that passage on Hegel, I referred to “the cataclysm of the Nazis.” Now, “cataclysm” is not exactly a horrendous word, and it is an exact word; it means, in effect, a negative on an enormous scale. In speaking, though, I would instinctively, unless I had a very erudite audience, avoid a word like “cataclysm” and say “disaster” instead. Because an average audience would take it in right away; it would not cause a mental wrinkle; they would take “disaster” as a normal kind of term. Then, if I thought, “Well, ‘disaster’ is not really big enough,” I could say, “It was Hegel who prepared the disaster of the Nazis. Not just the disaster—the catastrophe, the cataclysm.” By the time I get to it, it is already prepared; I have dug a trench in their minds, and “cataclysm” slips right in.
Obviously, you must not overdo this point about simplification. It does not mean that you should treat your listeners as though they are babies. As a general rule, though, you shift your presentation in the direction of simpler sentence structure and more colloquial vocabulary, and the more so the harder the subject. If I were talking about concept formation, for example, I would tend to approach baby talk in form, simply because the subject is so difficult.
2. Anticipate the audience’s need to pause. Sometimes you know that a given formulation is going to puzzle or impress your audience; sometimes you see it written on their faces. In such a case, just stop for a second and give them the time that they would have taken on their own. This is a very difficult thing for most people to learn, but it is okay just to stand and look. If it goes on too long, the audience does get restless. But it rarely seems as long to them as it does to you, so you can have a drink of water or whatever. It is much more common for a speaker to have too few pauses than too many.
3. Be liberal about repeating yourself. This is one of the most important points. In writing, repetition is generally needless and usually confusing, because if you use exactly the words you just used, the reader thinks, “Why is he saying this again?” And if you use similar but different words, the reader thinks, “Is this the same point, or another point?” It is, therefore, generally confusing to repeat yourself in writing; in most cases, writing moves forward very tersely. In speaking, however, repetition is imperative. It is one of the major ways of slowing the pace down. Repetition sometimes means simply repeating the same words, such as important formulations. Most often, though, it means not literal repetition, but circling around, groping, saying something in several different ways: “I have no money. There is nothing left. I need some assistance.” You cover your point several times, and one of them gets through to your listener.
A very important aspect of repetition is to sum up frequently for your listeners. “Now we have done so-and-so. We have covered this topic.” In other words, you give them a kind of overview of what you have said. That is one of the things they would have had to do themselves in reading; you have to do it for them in speaking. The same is true of repetition as applied to review. Whenever you say, “As we said,” you have to decide: Do they remember what we said? If they do not, you stick in a quick reminder. That is another form of repetition. Again, you have to do it, whereas in writing, they can look it up for themselves. You do not do it all the time, but only until you feel that your audience gets it. For instance, when I first introduce the term “crow epistemology” to a class, that is a big mouthful. So the next five or ten times that I mention it, I will say “the crow epistemology—in other words, the point that consciousness is limited.” At a certain point you see that they get it and that you do not have to remind them of what it is anymore. But you do have to repeat until you reach that point. So I repeat: repeat in various forms.
4. Make transitions unmistakable. A transition is the movement from one topic to another, from one point of your outline to the next. For instance, if I go from one difference between writing and speaking to another one, I have to get somehow from the first to the second. This is true in writing as well as in speaking, but in writing it is not so difficult for the reader, because he can always pause and figure out himself where you are (assuming you are somewhere). In writing, too, there are visual aids to help the reader, such as paragraphs, sequence breaks, asterisks, chapter titles, and so on. So it is not urgent in writing that you stress transitions. In fact, it is very often a virtue to make your transitions so smooth that your audience is irresistibly carried along with you and does not even notice that you have switched from one subject to another. An obvious example of that occurs in fiction, when an author goes into a flashback from the present. A skilled writer will begin a scene in the present, and without your even being aware of what is happening, the sentences will take you into the past, and it will be twenty years earlier and you will read right through it absolutely unknowingly. Ayn Rand is an expert at this. Think of the transition in the scene in Atlas Shrugged that begins with Dagny walking to the Wayne-Falkland Hotel to see Francisco; suddenly you are back in her childhood days with him, and it is the most brilliantly seamless transition imaginable. In contrast, imagine an author who would write, “Now let us look at this character’s past.” That is definitely an unmistakable transition, but it would be just awful in writing.
In speaking, however, you need every aid possible, including an explicit structure. Therefore, as a rule, in oral communication the reverse generally applies: Reveal your skeleton. If you are just starting to speak and you want to be clear, a good rule of thumb is to break your material up into units in your own mind, about ten minutes per unit at most, so that you have, say, five or six units per hour. Whenever you move from one unit to the next, make a point about it; let your listeners know, “We have now finished that, and we are going on to this.” The best and the simplest way is to state, “Okay, so much for that, on to the next.” Or you can say, “Now I would like to turn to,” or something along those lines. Numbering is obviously of value here, because a number signals that you are starting a new point.
Remember also that you are going to lose some of your audience as you go. No matter what their level of motivation, some people are going to tune you out, because there is some extent to which they are not going to be synchronized with you. You are not going to pause quite at the point that each one needs. He is particularly tired that night; she has got a personal problem; you are always losing some. But each transition gives you a chance to get them to tune in again, because you are saying, in effect, “Okay, we have finished that; we are starting again with a new point.” It amounts to saying to your listener, “All is forgiven; come back.” Very often, you can get them back even if you have lost them, if you make it clear that you are starting a new point.
5. Use emphasis where appropriate. In writing, there are many ways of indicating emphasis, besides repetition and degree of elaboration. For instance, you can put a sentence in italics, which indicates that it is really important, or you can take a short sentence and make a whole paragraph out of it, and then it really hits the reader. In speaking you have to do the equivalent, but even more so. If your particular statement is important, you have to signal that to the audience unmistakably. You have to stress important points and throw away lesser ones—not mumble them or make them unclear, but make them unstressed. There has to be a difference, for instance, between the examples you give and the principle that you want your audience to retain. You give the examples, let us say, a bit more rapidly, a little more quietly, a little less intensely, whereas, when stating the principle, you slow down and say it louder, with more emphasis and intensity. Emphasis in oral presentation involves many factors, but basically volume and speed.
Let me give you the same material with and without emphasis. It is a point that we have covered, but I will try to give it to you as much as I can with no emphasis at all. “One of the big problems in oral presentation is too much material for the audience to hold. The crow epistemology, which we discussed many times, applies here also. The audience can hold only so much. Therefore, go more slowly. Pace is an important issue.” Now that is exactly the right wording and the right pace; it is geared stylistically to an oral audience. But look at the difference now: “One of the big problems in oral presentation is too much material. The crow epistemology, which we have discussed many times, applies here also. The audience can hold only so much. So go more slowly. Pace—P-A-C-E.”
In other words, in speaking, not only do you have to get the material out clearly, but also, if you think about it, you have to imprint it in the audience’s mind as far as is possible to you. You have to give them the signal not only by the words, but by the stress. “This is important; remember it!”—as against, “If you have to forget something, forget this.” Use any means of stress you can, including spelling out words if necessary. I have seen very good talks—good, I mean, in content and in every presentational device—fail, simply for lack of emphasis. If I were to put it in a slightly philosophical way, I would say: Do not be egalitarian in your delivery. Statements are not all equal; some statements are more important than others. Therefore, they have to be treated that way. And by the same token, lesser points should not be emphasized.
Monitoring the Audience
There is one last, crucial difference between oral presentation and written presentation. In oral presentation, leaving aside radio and TV, you, the speaker, are in direct contact with your audience members. You can observe their reactions as you go, and you can adapt your presentation on the spot according to what you observe. In writing, there is a certain problem, in that you have to project your audience theoretically, without their being present. You have to try to figure out what the reader will understand, what he needs to have explained, and what will interest him. In any communication, you need to know whether you are getting your point across, whether you have projected the audience’s context correctly. In the case of writing, you have to do this by sheer theoretical projection. You simply define your audience and try to figure out what will motivate them and what will be clear to them.
In speaking, of course, there is also a certain degree of theoretical projection; you do, after all, make notes in advance. In the actual delivery, though, you have the audience right before you. Every moment, you are being given a torrent of concrete information about the motivation of your listeners (are they interested, or are they bored?) and about the degree of their understanding (are they following you, or are they lost?). You can, therefore, tailor your presentation to the specific needs of your audience. If they are bored, you can do something right there on the spot, including, if necessary, throwing away your notes and doing something dramatic to rescue the situation and bring them back. The same is true if they are lost. Writing is frozen in this regard. Once it is done and in print, it is out of your control. An extemporaneous presentation, though, is continually self-correcting. This is another reason that in writing, every word is calculated, whereas in speaking, you have a certain safety margin, because if your message is not getting through, you can see immediately that it is not.
In order to take advantage of this difference, it is essential that you look at your audience. You have to see their responses, if your eyesight permits it; you have to try to maintain eye contact, rove around, move your head, get a sense of their response. Naturally, most of your mind has to be on choosing your next words, because if you get too involved in the audience, you stop that inner voice feeding you what you want to say. But in quick glimpses, you have to get a sense of how your talk is going over. You may see smiles and nods, and you make a quick mental check, “Fine”; or you see brows knit together and grimaces and contortions and so on, and you think, “Something is not right here.” Audience reaction is in no way infallible; I have had classes that smile and nod, and then turn in a disastrous exam. But even if the people smiling and nodding are wrong, it does mean something, because they think they are following you, at least for the moment, and so they will continue to listen; whereas if they are frowning and you do nothing about it, they give up and you lose them.
You have to monitor two different issues: your listeners’ actual grasp of your content, and their interest—in other words, whether they get it, and whether they care. You should be able to recognize the indicators: yawns; coughs; shuffling; the quality of the silence when you pause; a restless feeling in the audience; whether you get the desired response when you say something, or whether it falls flat; whether people return your looks, or avert their gaze, or glaze over entirely. To repeat, you have to rove; you have to monitor the audience as a whole. You also have to be careful, because in almost every audience, there are one or two extremely expressive faces, and since any speaker desperately wants to know if he is getting across, there is a terrific temptation, when you find a really expressive face, to look only at that one person. Then, of course, you end up tailoring your talk wonderfully to that one person, while leaving hundreds completely baffled. So you have to keep your head moving, however much you would like to focus just on the one responder.
It is also the case that people like to be looked at. Therefore, if you move your head in their direction, that makes a difference to them; they feel they are getting something more for their money than just words. The master of this, in my experience, was Frank Sinatra. I saw him at the Nassau Coliseum, in an audience of many thousands. It was a theater in the round, so his back was always to a good fraction of the audience, and he just kept going around and around. It was uncanny the extent to which, buried in thousands of people, you had the feeling—when his back was not to you—that he was looking right at you. He was a real master in that regard. I am not suggesting that we should attempt to approach the top level of the entertainment profession, but simply pointing out that it is good to keep your head moving and scan as much as you can.
To repeat, you cannot take any one response as probative. If one person yawns, that is not per se a comment on you; he might be tired. If several start to yawn, that is already a bad sign, and you should be gearing up mentally to take corrective action. When you see whole rows sinking under the seats, you may as well quit then; you have already lost, so you have to do something drastic. A proper extemporaneous presentation is an interaction. You are getting constant cues, and you are making continual small adjustments in what you intended to say according to the feedback that you get. That is an essential difference between extemporaneous delivery and lecturing from a fully prepared paper, when you just rattle off your material regardless of the audience’s reaction. It is also one reason that a completely written-out presentation is closer to writing than to speaking; the audience reaction does not affect it.
Let us look at some methods to regain your audience if you are losing them, techniques that will help you if you feel that your listeners are confused or bored or both.
1. Change your pace. This can mean either slow down or speed up. For example, suppose that you had decided in advance, when you were projecting your talk, “A certain degree of elaboration is necessary at this point, and then I expect the audience to get it.” Yet when you reach that point in speaking, everyone looks at you completely blank and uncomprehending. Then your mind should tell you, “I have to throw in something more here; I did not anticipate the right reaction, and they do not get it.” You have to do this quickly—you cannot stop to sit down and figure it out. But if it is very abstract material, you might decide that one more example is really what they need; or, if it is a lengthy point and you have been developing it for about five minutes, you can think to yourself, “I did not realize it would go on for quite this long when I wrote it in notes. It is a pretty big amount for them to hold. Maybe what I had better do is toss in a summary at this point, so that they get it and I relieve the strain.” Alternatively, suppose your words came out in an excessively snarled form, grammatically speaking; the sentence was so contorted that the audience came to a halt. You had not planned to repeat yourself, but you stop to do so. You might even say, “Let us try that again, a little more simply.” In other words, you slow down the pace as necessary, adding material right on the spot according to what the audience requires.
Suppose that you really cannot figure out what the problem is. You think that a given point is clear; you have given examples, it is not that long, the sentences are simple, and so on—it is all prepared, but everybody looks baffled at this particular point. It is not a subnormal audience, either, so you cannot explain it by reference to the audience as a whole. The best thing to do in a case like that is to ask the audience. Say, “I see you are not getting this point. Could somebody tell me why? Is there any question you might ask that would help me clarify this to you?” That helps to enlist the audience on your side, because they become partners in trying to figure out where the communication failed. Sometimes, someone will actually ask a question. However, people in an audience tend to be very shy if they are not warmed up, so if they are baffled, everyone will feel, “Everybody gets it but me,” and very few people will raise their hand to say, “I do not see this point.” What you might do in that case is say, “I do not see why you do not get this. Let me put it this way: I really was making two points, A and B. How many see A?” Then they raise their hands. “How many see B? Oh, B is the one you do not see? I will explain that.” In addition, the fact of raising their hands helps to give your listeners a certain courage—they see that they raised their hand and nothing awful happened, so the next step is that someone will actually speak and tell you what the problem is.
The same considerations are applicable to the need to speed up a presentation. Suppose you are all prepared to launch into a lengthy discussion, but the audience shows signs that they have had enough; they already get this point; they are ahead of what you expected. You then have to throw out, on the spot, your prepared elaborations and just skip right over that point. You may have a moment of regret—you may have this wonderful, sexy example that you can hardly wait to give them—but the audience has already gotten it, and therefore you just drop it. With experience, you get to know what degree of elaboration to include for a given audience, and what not. Almost always, even after many years, I find I need some adjustment. But for each point, there usually comes a moment when you can sort of hear in the room, if you have had some experience, “This audience gets it; it is clear.” As a general rule, stay on the point until that moment comes, and get off it right away as soon as they do. Of course, they will not all get it. There will be some members of the audience who never get it. But you have to get the overview of the total. This is perhaps most crucial in adjusting your pace.
2. Reestablish motivation. Suppose your pace is okay, and let us assume your individual points are clear, but the audience is still generally restive and you cannot tie it down to any specific issue. It is not as though your listeners are frowning on one particular passage; they are just generally uninterested, and speeding up and slowing down do not seem to make any difference. You might consider, then, the idea that there is something wrong with their underlying interest in what you are saying. If this happens to you, it is of no use whatsoever to continue with your outline, however brilliant it may be, because if the audience is indifferent, they are simply not taking it in, and you may as well be talking to a brick wall. You then have to stop, just completely stop, and rectify the situation by some means if you can. But it is completely useless to continue with a bored audience. Ideally, you would not reach this situation, because you would have established a strong motivation in advance. But let us say you misjudged; you did not make it strong enough for a given audience, you did not explain to them clearly enough at the beginning why they should want to listen, and now you think you are losing them—not because your pace is off, but because they simply do not care. At that point, stop and say something like, “I do not think it is entirely clear to you why we are covering these points, so let us take a moment to discuss the purpose of all this.” Then beef up your motivation right there. It is better to give up the last half of your talk, to spend ten minutes talking your audience into being interested, than to continue when they do not care. So stop and state the importance of the issue to them. Explain why the particular topic is necessary. Or remind them of why you are covering such-and-such topic. Continue up to the point at which, as far as you are concerned, they really do now have the knowledge to understand why you are covering it; they have all the content needed to motivate them, and there is nothing more you can do.
3. Use humor. What do you do if your pace is okay, you have established motivation, and the audience is interested, but people are still unresponsive and restless? That does not necessarily mean that the audience is bad or hopeless or hostile; nor does it mean that the talk is wrong. It can come from many factors, including the sheer strain of listening to ideas, which is always there and always needs relief. There is always that relentless pressure on listeners to concentrate. They have to listen to the next thing and the next, and the speaker never seems to stop. Anything you, as a speaker, can do to relieve that pressure will often help you to get back an audience that is restless even though the basic content and motivation of your talk are fine.
There are certain techniques you can use that will rest a tired audience, spice things up, and buy you a little bit of interest, assuming now that the basic pace and motivation are okay. A good one is to use humor. Make your audience laugh, if you can and if it is appropriate. I visualize an audience’s mind as being like a room with a door. When the door is shut, nothing enters, however brilliantly clear; it simply does not go in. When the door is open, then it goes in and they get it. A laugh temporarily opens the door. My general rule is that a loud laugh from an audience is worth three to five minutes of additional attention; a chuckle is worth about one minute; a smile, twenty seconds. In a lecture on ideas, if a person laughs or even smiles, his inner reaction is, “My God, this is not so bad; I am enjoying it.” People today are so incredulous, given what they expect in regard to education and ideas, that when a speaker makes them laugh, for a moment they feel, “Gee, I like this; I would like to learn.” To be sure, it is very temporary. A few minutes later, they forget; the old context returns, they come back to the idea that education is grief and boredom, concentration becomes hard again, and their attention starts to wander. Humor thus grants you only a limited reprieve. But it is a way to get some life into a flagging audience, and it can be very helpful. So I would suggest that you lighten your material wherever it is appropriate. Use a funny example, a joke, a story—anything to wake them up. Obviously, you have to do this with a certain taste. If you are in the midst of moral condemnation or moral praise of somebody, you do not inject a giggle. You would not need it anyway, because if it is a moral issue, presumably your audience would be aroused by the gravity of the issue. Humor is particularly appropriate in the drier, more technical parts of a speech.
How to get laughs is where this course leaves off. That depends on you. Some speakers actually have a fund of prepared jokes, and they just dole them out when needed; as soon as they feel the audience is sagging, they say, “That reminds me of…” and they use a joke, or they build jokes into their topics. Good speakers on an audience circuit usually have prepared jokes that tie into their material, ready to inject about every ten minutes, and they feed them as their audience starts to go to sleep. This is fine, if you can do it. It requires that the jokes have some appearance of relevance to the audience, because an audience is offended if you just stop in the middle without any connection to anything. Also, it takes a certain courage; to tell a joke with a beginning, middle, and an end, you have to have supreme confidence, because it is going to come to an end, and if it falls completely flat, you are in even deeper than you were when you started telling it, and you have to get out of that as well.
If you do not want to tackle prepared jokes, you can confine yourself to extemporaneous remarks—ad-lib wisecracks, funny wording, ridiculous examples—anything on the spur of the moment that occurs to you to pep things up. I favor this approach, because I cannot tell a prepared joke. The question, however, is not how you do it, but whether you do it. In other words, it is important to include an element of entertainment. You have to project to your listeners, “It is okay to like this. It is not so horrifying just because it is ideology and theory and philosophy and so on.” You have to communicate to them, in effect, “I appreciate that you are trapped in here and would give anything to escape, and I am going to help ease the pain.” If you get that message across, your audience will be grateful, because listening is very difficult.
4. Get the audience to participate. Another way to get an audience back is to let people speak. Assuming that you have established the context so that they are not afraid of speaking, people like to speak, as opposed to just listening. If necessary, ask a question, and then try to get somebody to answer it. In part, this will help you figure out whether your audience understands you, because if you ask a question and you get a completely hopeless answer, you know that you have to do something to salvage the situation. Partly, then, it gives you some information. Partly, however, it is motivation, and the sheer fact of taking part, of raising hands and speaking, amplifies the audience’s interest. They feel that they are actively participating, not just passively letting your words wash over them. And if they say something right and you can say, “That is very good; that is just the point that I was going to make,” then that is reassuring to them, and they think, “Yes, I get this,” so they are back with you. But the most important reason to have people speak is to keep them interested.
You can do this in many different ways. One is to stop on one word and ask people to call out. For example, you get to, “We are at the theory of knowledge here; what is that? What is the theory of knowledge?” And there is dead silence. You continue, “One word for the theory of knowledge, anybody? With an E? E-P?” You just bring them to it that way for a minute (it was “epistemology,” by the way). You can also ask questions, have people express their views, or something similar. The most drastic technique, in this regard, is to single out specific members of the audience by name and without warning. In the middle of a large lecture audience, just say, “Ms. Smith, what do you say about so-and-so?” That has the motivating effect of a knife of fear through every member, because nobody knows who will be next. So you can keep a whole room on the edge of their seat waiting. But that is a very unfriendly technique.
The pitfall with audience participation is how to keep it in balance. If an audience gets too eager to participate, then you have simply an unstructured bull session, which is a complete waste of time. You have to keep participation limited. You have to remember that the main purpose is to get your ideas across, and participation is simply one accessory means to keep your listeners awake if it is heavy going for them. You also have to remember to spread it around. There are always a few people in a large group who want to speak on every point, who will monopolize the discussion if you throw it open. The rest of the audience then resents that the same person is always speaking, and they sigh and look at the ceiling and roll their eyes. You have to avoid that. Therefore, when the same person responds over and over, you simply do not look in his direction when you ask questions, but look to the other side.
There are, of course, other factors that could be relevant besides the above four. Therefore, what I want to say now is in the nature of an “etc.”; we are passing now from content to something more in the nature of oratory.
Just for what it is worth, and in passing, it is very helpful to try to exude a certain enthusiasm and confidence in your voice. Do not just drone on at the sky. There is a certain quality of energy, of commitment, that you can put into your voice, a kind of take-charge quality, when you throw yourself into what you are saying and, in effect, communicate by your energy: “I know what I am doing; this is the most important subject in the world, and I know it thoroughly, and here is your chance to get it.” If you can communicate that, that is very helpful in motivating an audience. Sometimes you will have to act this out if you do not feel it spontaneously. If you have repeated something so often, to so many audiences, that you do not really feel that excited in the moment, you can still act enthusiastic if you remind yourself of the audience’s context.
One factor that I must mention—and it sounds obvious, but more talks have come to grief owing to this than perhaps any other single factor—is volume. If an audience has to strain to hear you, you are finished. If you say quietly, “It is important to stress enthusiasm in your tone,” they will simply tune you out—no one can stand it. You have to be like Ethel Merman and just belt it out. Ideally, of course, you do not scream at the audience, although I myself have a tendency to err in that direction. But be sure your voice is loud enough. This is particularly true for women speakers, because their voices are higher.
There are many other factors to consider, such as mannerisms. The best speaker stands unobtrusive and still. He does not weave back and forth, as I sometimes do. He does not talk with his hands, adjust his tie, have a tic or twitch, or the like. The more motionless you stand when speaking, the better. You can have a talk that is clear, interesting, and brimming with motivation, but if your mannerisms are so obnoxious that your listeners cannot get their minds off them, they will not be able to listen to what you say. The temperature can also do you in. If you have any doubts about the motivation of your audience, lower the temperature—the colder, the better. Better they should really shiver; then they will listen. If it is even slightly too warm, you will find it hard to keep them. If it is too smoky, if it is too dark, if the microphone reverberates—there are a million things of this kind, but for that you do not need me; just consult any professional speech manual. The only last point I would make on these lesser points is that you must remember the possibility that a given audience is just simply tired, particularly in the evening. Give them intermissions, and above all, do not go on for three hours the way I do.
The Role of Notes
A few practical topics now on the mechanics of oral presentation. The first regards note making. I am often asked, “How detailed should a speaker’s notes be?” Here you want to strike a balance. If your notes are too brief, they will not serve as a guide, and they will leave you stranded. The worst thing is to get to the end of a point, look down at your notes, see nothing, and think, “My God, what comes next?” You have to have enough detail in order to keep yourself on track. On the other hand, if your notes are too detailed, you are going to revert to reading rather than to extemporaneous delivery. What I would suggest is to make notes to cover two main types of things: the divisions of your outline and your key formulations.
By “divisions of your outline,” I mean your structure, your main points. You can sketch them in with maybe just a word or so each; the level of detail depends on your knowledge of the topic and your experience. But whether in a word or a phrase, write down the key divisions, enough to keep you going. If you are not sure, rehearse in advance: Make up your outline, look at a blank wall, and then look at your notes as you deliver it to the wall. If you notice your mind continually failing to know what is coming next, you have not got enough. So stick in what word you would have liked to have had there to remind you, had you actually been in front of an audience. Then try it with that further word there. After a while you get the hang of it. You need to take into account here, though, that if you are not an experienced speaker (and even if you are), you will be nervous at the beginning, and nervousness has the effect of making many people go blank. This is not a disease or an abnormality; this is in the nature of speaking. Therefore, if you are not experienced, you are much better advised to have detailed notes for the first minute or two of your presentation. That helps to counteract the nervousness, because you know that if worse comes to worst and you go completely blank, you are safe for two minutes. You then find, after two minutes, that it is not as bad as you thought; you can speak, the audience did not rise in wrath or roll over on the floor as you had imagined they would, and so you can go on from there. The first public lecture I ever gave was many years ago, in a class at Hunter College. I was petrified, as I had known I would be. Because I knew I was going to go blank, I wrote out the first five or ten minutes of the class word for word: “My name is…” “This class is…” Then I found that it was not so bad, and I went on from there.
There is a whole spectrum of speaker’s notes, from the briefest notes—which might be one or two words for a whole hour—to a completely written-out talk. You need to judge which to use according to the various variables mentioned above.
Let us turn now to specific formulations. I would write out any tricky formulations, any points that it is really important to get exact and that you are not completely sure of. After all, this is the substance that you want to get across to the audience. If you have to grope a little bit on some of the lesser material, that is okay. But on the really crucial stuff, if you know you are not too clear about it, write it out so that you are sure you will get across your main point. Here you have to rely on experience as to how much to write out—not too much, but not too little.
While we are on notes, I might just point out one other thing: How do you combine watching your audience with following your notes? If you look down at your notes all the time, you do not see your listeners, and they resent it, and if you look at the audience all the time, you do not see your notes. What if you look at the audience while you speak, and when you decide you are ready for the next point, you look down at your notes and say, “Where the heck in this pile of paper is the next point?” The solution that I have found is just to keep your finger moving down the outline as you proceed. I never take my finger away from the point that I am on, so that when I look down, I look right to the point where my finger is. Then I just move it to the next point and look up until I am finished with that, after which I look down and get the next one, and so on. I thus always have an anchor. I am not patenting that device, so use it if you find it helpful. But you need some device so you can keep yourself linked to your notes as well as maintain eye contact with your audience.
Another topic that is very important in preparing an oral talk is timing. This can be quite tricky. On the one hand, you may find that you run out of material too soon. The audience is looking at you; they were told to expect an hour-long talk; ten minutes have gone, and you have come to the end. That is very upsetting both to you and to the audience. The other difficulty, of course, is when your time runs out and you still have mountains of material to cover. The audience will not sit there indefinitely; you have to come to an end somehow, but you have run out of time without reaching your main point. To avoid either of these situations, you need experience in translating your outline into time estimates. You have to get to know your material as well as the rate of delivery. After a while, you will get to know that a particular point X—which may be only three words in your notes—is a difficult point, one that audiences have trouble with, and therefore you are going to need a lot of elaboration, examples, and so on, so you give it ten minutes. On the other hand, point Y, which is also represented by three words in your notes, is an easy point, one that audiences grasp right away, so you give it just two minutes. After a while, you get the sense of that. Again, the best thing is to practice speaking to a wall at home. Choose a point from your talk, estimate the time in advance, and then actually deliver it as though to an audience and time yourself. You will be amazed, at least at first, at the discrepancy between your projection and the actual time it takes you.
Professional speakers usually have the time of their talks written right on the notes. I definitely recommend this. The time is usually written in a different color, such as red, so that it leaps right out of the page at you. Wherever you should be at that time is marked right there. That, of course, means that you have to have a watch right in front of you, so that you can always check as to whether you are on track or not. Normally, professionals divide their talks into units of ten or fifteen minutes, and they keep track of the time. So if they start at seven thirty, at a certain point in the notes it will say seven forty, then seven fifty, then eight, and so on. This is a very, very valuable technique, as long as you start with the right time. It is really bad if you assume that your talk starts at seven thirty, and the audience is late and you start at seven fifty, and you have to add twenty minutes to each estimate as you go.
The important thing about timing is to watch it as you go and be flexible in both directions. As soon as you begin to see, “This is overlong,” you start to cut, and as soon as you see, “This is too short; I am running out of material,” you need to expand. As it happens, the need to expand is not commonly a problem. Speaking usually takes longer than anybody expects, because there is more groping for words than you would project. But it has happened to me once that a talk I gave finished too early, and it is very embarrassing. To avoid that, I now always keep in reserve about twenty minutes’ worth of material that I have no intention whatsoever of delivering. That way, if worse comes to absolute worst, I know as a certainty that I have a twenty-minute cushion of relevant material. I virtually never use it, but it is reassuring to know that it is there if I need it.
The much more common problem is the need to cut. You are running long and you cannot go on indefinitely; what should you do? The most important thing I could advise you in this case is a negative—do not talk faster. That is the curse of all beginning speakers, and even of some not-so-beginning ones. The idea in their minds is, “I have so much to cover, and I have not got time; I have got to start blurting it out as fast as I can possibly get it out of my mouth.” There is no use doing that, because the audience’s mind remains the same. The listeners cannot take it in any faster than the norm. It is therefore an exercise in futility to talk faster. Your first instinct, then, should be to slow down when you realize you are running much too long. That will cut the temptation to cheat and to try to squeeze in a lot of material very quickly. If you have marked your time estimates ahead of time, as I suggested, you should find this out early; it is very bad if you do not find it out until late. That should help you, because in any extemporaneous talk, you should have optional points, marked as such in your notes; you can put them in square brackets, or draw question marks beside them, or whatever. That would be your shorthand to say to yourself, “If I am running long, leave these out; the talk can stand without them.” That gives you an out in the other direction. As soon as you see you are running long, start cutting those points, one after another. If you do not have optional points, then you have to cut extemporaneously, and that is hard to do. Again, it is good exercise to practice at home. Take some point, any point you want, and allow yourself five minutes to present it; then set the timer for two minutes and give the same point in two minutes; then set it for thirty seconds and give the same point in thirty seconds. That is really terrific in teaching you what is essential. But if worse comes to worst and you just cannot cut, and you end up running out of time in the middle of your talk, then simply confess to your audience. Say, “Well, I am sorry. I ran overlong, I did not get to my main point, but at least you got something, and maybe another day.”
One final point, and that is about reading aloud from a completely prepared text. You can see that this has one great virtue, and that is exactness. It is like writing—there is no groping or circling necessary. The problem, of course, is that the pace still has to be what is required for a listening audience. Therefore, the sentence structure and the language must be appropriately simplified. And it is very difficult to do this in completely written-out form. When most people write, they tend to write, and that implies a certain formality that is very different from that involved in speaking. It is very hard, therefore, to completely write out everything and still keep the pace needed for an oral presentation. A further problem with a completely prepared text is the issue of not being adaptable to the audience. You are stuck with your prepared script, and there is nothing you can do, whether they understand or not, whether they are bored or not.
You can, however, do one thing. (I just want to indicate to you that this exists, but it would come more from a speech course than from this type of course.) One problem of these completely written-out talks is the sense that the audience gets that they are canned, that they are not taking place live. You can fake this to a certain extent by the form of your delivery. In other words, it is possible for a skilled speaker to take a talk completely written out in every word, read it without departing from it in any way, and have the audience swear that this was an extemporaneous performance. The trick is that the speaker reads it as though he is thinking of it for the first time. He reads it not as though he already knows it, but as though it is just occurring to him. So he deliberately hesitates as though he is searching for a word, when he knows perfectly well what the word is. But he stops—and then he says the word. What it amounts to is that he is reenacting the process of thinking as a deliberate performance. An audience always likes this better than just reading, because it gives the sense that it is live. This is a skill that can be taught and learned, and if you are stuck with a written-out delivery, it is very helpful. But I just mention that that exists. Generally speaking, extemporaneous delivery is much easier to do, and the audience finds it much livelier.