“The Fight of Public Speaking” by Claire Bouchard

The following post was written by Claire Bouchard, Speaking Fellow (BC ’15).

What could pubic speaking and martial arts possibly have in common? One is a sport that focuses on precision and concentration in order to deliver the best and most deadly hit as efficiently as possible, and the other is a mode of communication that focuses on connection with the audience and the skill with which one can deliver their message.

How does the martial arts world connect with the realm of public speaking? They are both performances. As a member of the national United States karate team and a speaking fellow of Barnard College this performance aspect is well known to me. When you’re standing in front of the judges overseas, about to perform a kata (form) in order to represent your country, your adrenaline starts running. All eyes are on you, time slows down, and you feel the pressure to begin. You take a deep breath, relax all of your muscles, and the game begins. You work through your kata; using full moves that you make sure are defined and take your time. Public speaking is not all that different from this set-up.  You enter the spotlight, all eyes turn in your direction, the chatter of the waiting room slowly dies away, and time slows down. You take a deep breath, relax your demeanor and the game begins. You start speaking through your outline, pausing when necessary, using your ability to maneuver between silence and language and deliver your speech.

Both kata and public speaking require the one performing the action to have a strong understanding of themselves and how to present themselves. The performances allow athletes and speakers to present certain aspects of their personality, in kata your ability to focus and in public speaking your ability to connect.

Performances are always a part of our lives; they are an opportunity to present yourself in a fashion that you approve.

Become a Fellow: Information Sessions This Week!

Interested in becoming a Writing or Speaking Fellow?*  Want to learn more about the programs before applying?  Come to our information sessions this week!

WRITING FELLOW INFO SESSION
Friday, 3/8
1:00PM
217 Barnard Hall
RSVP: writing@barnard.edu

SPEAKING FELLOW INFO SESSION
Thursday, 3/7
5:00PM
217 Barnard Hall
RSVP: speaking@barnard.edu

At each session, Writing or Speaking Fellows will be present to answer any questions you might have about what it’s like to be a Fellow.  The administrators will also be there to answer any questions about the application process and training courses.

*Please note that only Barnard College 1st-Years and Sophomores are eligible to apply.  Download a Writing Fellow application here (due Tuesday, March 26th at 5:00PM) and a Speaking Fellow application here (due Friday, March 29th at 12:00pm).

Active listening as a rhetorical choice: The discursive implications of “bad” and “good” listening

We know that body language usually communicates more than what you say, and identifying these physical queues is something we’ve been socialized to identify our entire lives.  We know that yawning, for instance, often comes across as boredom.  We know how to express good listening skills by maintaining eye contact and sitting upright instead of slumping down in our chairs and doodling in notebook margins.  In class discussions, professors have to be particularly apt at reading students’ body language.  They have to sense when a student is trying to jump into the class discussion but can’t quite get a word in.  They have to know the difference between diligent note-taking and avoidance of eye contact.  They have to know an “aha” moment from a complacent nod.

However, how much can we really control in these exchanges, whether it be on the part of the speaker or the listener?  How can we hold ourselves accountable for the messages we intend to communicate and those we don’t?

An important caveat to this question is that the speaker and the listener are both interpreting and communicating at the same time.  What we say, how we respond (verbally or silently), and the body language that accompanies both, all create a collaborative “text” for both the speaker and listener to interpret.  In this sense, “active listening” doesn’t just describe the actions we take to reassure the speaker that we are listening, but rather, characterizes the act of listening as a response, or a choice, that impacts the exchange in powerful ways.

While we can’t completely control how others’ interpret our ideas, we can leave less room for more egregious misinterpretations (particularly in the absence of words, such as when we are listening) by harnessing the power of the physical internally.  As previous posts have described, our body language changes the way we think.  Psychologists such as Amy Cuddy have been doing years of research that demonstrates just how powerful the link between body language and identity is.  As her TED Talk shows, striking what Cuddy calls a “power pose” — sitting up straight, lifting your arms in the air, doing jumping jacks, or simply uncrossing your legs to fill up more space — lowers cortisol (the stress hormone) and increases testosterone (the dominance hormone, which is usually the precursor to more assertive, confrontational behavior).  Slumping down in your chair, then, does more than send a message to the speaker that you’re bored or disinterested — it actually lowers the likelihood that you can be interested and engaged.

The infographic below (created by OnlineUniversity.com) suggests, too, that small physical changes make a big difference.  But, what about moments when we don’t want to listen?  When is listening “badly,” consciously or unconsciously, a form of resistance, and what discursive impacts does that resistance illicit?

Get your own, personal Barnard Speaking Fellow. For free.

Beginning Tuesday, February 5th, every Barnard* student can meet with her own, personal Speaking Fellow to develop her public speaking and presentation skills.

Speaking Fellows are undergraduate Barnard students who have been specially trained to help students craft, prepare, and deliver presentations and participate in class discussions.  Speaking Fellows can work with students on a range of skills, such as:

• How to organize and structure ideas
• How to create a persuasive, well-reasoned argument
• How to make key points in clear, precise ways
• How to use visual aids
• How to improve and polish delivery

To sign up for a one-on-one session with a Speaking Fellow, register an account online.  For more information about this and other Speaking Fellow opportunities, visit the Speaking Program website: www.barnard.edu/speaking

*Columbia students may also make appointments with Speaking Fellows if they are enrolled in a Barnard course or have permission from their Columbia professor/TA.

The Writing Fellows Program mission, as stated by a Writing Fellow.

Follow the link to read “Writing Fellows – An Education of Liberation” by Jamila Barra, one of our Senior Writing Fellows and contributor to The Gadfly, Columbia University’s undergraduate magazine.

Theory Diarrhea: When crisis mode takes over

Thanksgiving is 3 days away.  You’ve been up since yesterday afternoon practicing for Mock Trial and the 14th draft of your senior thesis is due today at 6:10.  You just went to a discussion section where only 4 people showed up because most people only made it to page 617 of Middlemarch (about half of the assigned reading).  The fire alarm just went off in the middle of a meeting with your advisor and everyone evacuated before she could tell you whether to take Vertebrate Biology or Gendered Controversies.

This is about that time in the semester where you feel overwhelmed and deflated, both by the sheer amount of work you have to do and the level of analysis required of you.   It’s hard, if not impossible, to prevent this anxiety from affecting the way you work.  You start writing papers about readings you just couldn’t get to, disguising uncertainty with jargon and unnecessarily complicated sentences.  (If your papers are sounding anything like those on The Postmodernism Generator*… it may be time to take a step back.)

The only antidote to what I will call “theory diarrhea” — a slew of quasi-meaningful, qualified sentences hallmarked by disconnected allusions to canonical theories/ists — is a frank, casual conversation about your ideas.  By talking to someone about what you are trying to say, you ask yourself questions that force you to root your analysis in, well — reality.  What do you really mean when you use the phrase, “subject experience”?  What is the relationship between sexuality and consumerism, and where do you actually see that connection happening in the text?  How does Foucault’s biopower theory apply to you as a twenty-something student in New York City, at Barnard, in 2012?  The truth of the matter is that if you don’t know what you mean (and, consequentially, why it is meaningful), your professor probably won’t, either.

What you may find in this process is something you can carry throughout your life: the authority of not knowing.  No one wants to read a paper full of answers.  A paper is more likely to engage with a “multifaceted, consequential idea” (to quote Wendy Schor-Haim, Associate Director of the Writing Program) if your analysis grows from a question that cannot be easily answered.  This doesn’t mean you should approach a paper without having read the text at all — unfortunately, there is really no way around that part.  But knowing that you don’t have to have it all figured out not only takes the intellectual pressure off, but changes your relationship to the text, or whatever it is you are writing about.  Revealing how you, as a student, engage with the course material makes the whole thinking process more exploratory, giving you access to a more creative mode of thinking.

So make things easier on yourself.  Think about what you know, ask questions to deal with what you don’t know, and work from there.

*Before you start using essays created by The Post-Modernism Generator as secondary sources, please read the disclaimer: “The essay you have just seen is completely meaningless and was randomly generated by the Postmodernism Generator. To generate another essay, follow this link.”

Are my exclamation points undermining my authority?(!)

In a recent email exchange, a friend and I were invited to participate in a research discussion about the youth feminist movement(s).  Having interviewed with this researcher before, we were both extremely excited about the prospect.  My friend first replied to me only, writing:

“SOOO INTERESTING!!!!!!!!  AHHHH I WANNA DO IT LOL”

A few minutes later, when he replied-all, I was struck by his comparatively restrained response:

“Thanks for updating us!  I would love to participate.”

In the second version, my friend reigned in his charmingly explosive enthusiasm to express a more collected, formalized tone, balancing the need to “keep cool” without sacrificing a show of interest.  I, on the other hand, quickly replied-all with very little restraint: “Yes yes yes!!!!!!!!!” I said.  (The originator of the email quickly followed up: “Thanks for getting back to me so quickly and with excitement (Cecelia, these exclamation points!  Are great!)”).

The exchange made me think back to some of the emails I’ve sent to friends recently.  Below, I shamelessly reveal a few of my most recent subject lines:

“i’m on my way don’t wait for me!!!!!!!!!!!”

“Zip Car!!!!!?!?!?”

“sooooooo funnyyyyyyyyy aaahhhhh!!!!!”

And, my personal favorite: “ARE WE GOING TO TARGET AFTER WORK TODAY?!?!?!?!?!??!?!?!?!?”

Rest assured, I always reserve manic punctuation for only my personal life — these emails went to friends of mine, not anyone with whom I have a more professional relationship.  But what was I trying to convey in these elaborately dotted titles?  Why do I use exclamation points so sparingly during business hours, and rampantly on my own time?

On first inspection, the exclamation points in “i’m on my way don’t wait for me!!!!!!!!!!” convey urgency — I was running late.  Yet, at the risk of losing service while riding between subway platforms, I took an extra 3 precious express train seconds to hold down the exclamation point key on my iPhone.  Why?  Because if I hadn’t, I feared my message might seem insincere or careless.  The primary message hiding among that corn field of punctuation, I would argue, is something our generation (and women in particular) often have a complicated and troubling relationship with: apology.

In speech, qualifiers serve the same function.  Starting sentences with, “I don’t know if this is right, but…” — or more subtle qualifiers, like “I think” — express doubt, reservation, and, indeed, apology.  They make meaning obscure and indirect, questionable and inconclusive, rather than powerful and decisive.  In some cases, qualifiers can be used as a tool to introduce a question or invite collaborative thought; but more often than not, they detract from the statement in ways the speaker does not intend.  The irony of the exclamation point as qualifier, in this case, is that exclamation points are supposed to emphasize a point, not reduce it.

In an academic paper, where the writer is the author-ity (see Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author”) of the text, exclamation points are rarely, if ever, used.  The writer creates emphasis with rhythm, pacing, and alternating grammatical structures, all of which are shaped by other forms of punctuation, like a colon, a semi-colon, or even a well placed period.  In this context, exclamation points would appear emotionally charged and brash; but worse, they could appear unthoughtful and impulsive, undoing any readerly trust the writer may have gained through more reflective, controlled, and carefully constructed argumentation.  In other words, the very same punctuation that I use so frequently in personal emails completely discredits the writer in contexts where her authority is being tested.

On the other hand, let’s take a look at that last subject line (here, again, for your reference: “ARE WE GOING TO TARGET AFTER WORK TODAY?!?!?!?!?!??!?!?!?!?”).  As the author of this subject line, I can tell you that it was intentionally overdone, and contained a very specific message.  If you’ve ever been to Target after work, you know it is both indulgent and overstimulating.  It sells toilet paper in bulk (something no one wants to carry home) alongside candy flavored makeup and toothbrushes that suction to your hand (things you may not buy, but would likely interest you for quite a while).  The series of seemingly redundant “?!”s in the subject line condensed my, well, inner struggle into one, nearly instantaneous block of punctuation, encapsulating the following:  ”Are we actually going to Target after work today?  In truth, I really just want to go home, but I know we are practically out of hand soap and toilet paper, so it seems we simply must go.  After all, I suppose I could take a look at their selection of cold weather tights, which is something I’ve been meaning to do for a long time now…. Oh, I don’t know!  I really just want to get home as soon as possible, so if we’re going to do this, it has to happen on an extremely tight schedule.  I know that if we just do it all together we can make it through, so please say yes!  But, if you want to say no, I’ll kind of be relieved.”

When you look at it this way, the slew of “?!”s seems surprisingly efficient.

The question here, of course, is whether the reader actually understood that message without any pretext.  If not, you could argue that my exclamation points did undermine my authority just by virtue of making my message vague and, no matter which way you look at it, hidden.

So:  What are your exclamation points hiding?

The TED Commandments: A Guide to Public Speaking

Ever wonder why TED talks are always so amazing?  The Eloquent Woman, another blog about women and public speaking, shares the TED Commandments, which TED talkers use to prepare for their presentations.

Hero-ization

Chris Hayes caused quite a bit of commotion this past Memorial Day when he expressed concerns about the way the word “hero” is used in connection with the American military.  On MSNBC, Hayes said, apprehensively: “I feel uncomfortable about the word hero because it seems to me that it is so rhetorically proximate to justification for war… I don’t want to obviously desecrate or disrespect the memory of anyone that’s fallen, and obviously there are individual circumstances in which there is genuine, tremendous heroism, you know, hail of gunfire, rescuing fellow soldiers, and things like that.  But it seems to me that we marshal this word in a way that is problematic.”

Having entered a touchy political area, Hayes shrugged his shoulders and jostled his arms, inviting his guests to discuss the matter.  Respectfully, they discussed the word “hero” as a subject of rhetorical analysis, suggesting that although there have been many acts of self-sacrifice and dedication, the word “hero” makes it difficult to understand war as part of a larger political regime not everyone necessarily agrees with.

Despite Hayes’ insistence that he was not trying to undermine any individual’s contributions to the military, his statement was attacked by conservative media.  Sean Hannity, a FOX News correspondent, called it an “outrageous comment,” and a decision to “basically spit in the faces of our fallen heroes.”  Hayes ultimately issued a written apology for his statement, which Sean Hannity also attacked, accusing Hayes of lacking the courage to apologize on television.

The debacle shows how difficult it can be — and thus, how important it is — to reflect on, well, words, particularly those that have become politicized.  Talking about the word “hero” as a subject of rhetorical analysis traces the way we use the word, examines its associations, and unravels how we create meaning through these associative contexts.  This kind of analysis forces us to face the possibility that calling all fallen soldiers “heroes” romanticizes death, war, and extreme violence, an alarming idea to those who do not view America’s military history as victoriously as the word “hero” suggests (to put it lightly).

William J. Astore makes a compelling case for those who, like Hayes, feel uncomfortable with the use of the word “hero.”  In his article, “Why It’s Wrong to Equate Military Service with Heroism,” Astore makes three arguments for why the use of the word “hero” in a military context is damaging:

1. “By making our military a league of heroes, we ensure that the brutalizing aspects and effects of war will be played down.  In celebrating isolated heroic feats, we often forget that war is guaranteed to degrade humanity.”
2. “By making our military generically heroic, we act to prolong our wars.  By seeing war as [an] essentially heroic theater, we esteem it even as we excuse it.”
3. “By insisting programmatically on American military heroism, we also lay a firm foundation for potentially dangerous post-war myths, especially of the blame-mongering ‘stab-in-the-back’ variety.”

I list these points not to express any political point on the matter, but rather to demonstrate Astore’s astute ability to see Hayes’ discomfort as a problem with language and the creation of meaning through language — not an issue of whether or not soldiers deserve to be heroes.  This distinction is essential to understanding Hayes’ point and the debates that followed.

Still, this kind of analysis always ends with that brick wall of a question:  How do we fix it?  Even if we all agreed that the word “heroism” shouldn’t be equated with military service, as Astore’s article calls for, what should we do?  Is problematizing the word, as Hayes and Astore did, enough to create a more complex picture of military service?  Should we consciously change the word?  Come up with a new one?  (Course on military rhetoric, anyone?)

Prepositions that Proposition?

“He was of a certain old-fashioned type — lanky, large-nosed, with an out-sized Adam’s apple.”

When asked to point out the most important word in this sentence, many will say: old-fashioned, large-nosed, Adam’s apple.

“A good compromise, a good piece of legislation, is like a good sentence; or a good piece of music.”
Compromise, legislation, sentence, music.

“A fool too late bewares when all the peril is past.”
Fool, late, bewares, peril, past.

“And may the odds be ever in your favor.”
Odds, ever, favor.

But what about all the other stuff in between?  Of, a, with, an, like, too, when, all, your, may, in — what happened to them?

According to James Pennebaker, a psychologist, these in-between words are practically invisible to us.  Even though we might not forget where the “a” or the “that” went when memorizing and repeating a sentence, we only recall them in order to create relationships between the important words.

Yet there are distinct ways in which we use these function words (articles, prepositions, pronouns).  And, according to Pennebaker, these patterns might even help you find your next date.

Click to read about how function words can act as a human mating call.