6 Habits of Highly Annoying Public Speakers

Watching public speaking -- at a corporate seminar, a presentation, a high school assembly -- is more often than not a miserable experience. Part of the problem is that a lot of what's being presented is bullshit, which already doesn't bode well, but lots of speakers make it even worse by trying to glaze the bullshit with decorative cake frosting and sprinkles, so to speak. They'll dress up a five-minute talk on the most obvious and meaningless statements about sexual harassment with annoying gimmicks and tricks to the point where everyone leaves the seminar determined to sexually harass somebody, just out of spite.

Here's a couple of their worst habits:

I think a lot of us have run into a guy like this at some time in our lives. Now what can we see here, other than that stock photo minorities are apparently very vindictive people?

Well, the most annoying thing, beyond being nagged to do something you don't really want to do, is that the speaker is basically blaming you, the audience, for not being enthusiastic about something as stupid as his initial greeting, or maybe a catchphrase he wants you to repeat later, or maybe some opinion you're supposed to get excited about.

Well, that's his job. He's supposed to get you excited by making the subject matter exciting, not by guilting you into pretending to be excited. Does the pizza delivery guy have the balls to lecture you about not paying him for the pizza when he hasn't brought you any pizza? Does he tell you that good customers pay money? Does he act disappointed in how little you care about the pizza he didn't bring?

It's even slimier when a speaker equates lack of volume with the audience not caring deeply enough about the subject -- especially when the subject is some morally good cause. "That's it? That's all I get when I talk about building houses for the poor?" or "Come on, don't you care about Darfur a little more than that?" You could be giving a thousand dollars a month and passing out flyers all over your campus, but apparently because you don't yell loudly enough at a speech, you don't REALLY care.

Sometimes the speaker means well and naturally shouts about anything he cares about, and is just mistakenly projecting his extroverted personality onto everyone else, but sometimes the speaker is deliberately hoping to redirect well-intentioned audience guilt about a good cause toward cheers for himself. In which case maybe those vindictive minorities above aren't too far off.

An acrostic is that piece of shit I made above. It's different from an acronym, I guess, in the sense that saying the whole thing in order doesn't have to make sense, and you can have sentences. Every motivational book or speaker has to have one, and the famous ones are "good" in the sense that they're easy to understand and you can remember what they stand for.

Unfortunately, that means that every high school speaker and bush league pastor thinks that using them is the key to success.

As you can see, when you have to force your points to begin with the letters of whatever cutesy word you come up with, like "SMART" above, you'll end up with convoluted phrases like I've got, or you'll be digging in a thesaurus and coming up with obscure, hard-to-remember synonyms for the word you really wanted. It completely defeats the purpose of the acrostic in making your points easy to remember.

Another variant on the same thing is "the 4 E's" or something similar, where you make every point begin with the same letter. This really forces the thesaurus usage.

In this case, it would probably be easier to just make people memorize those three sentences than to make them try to remember the weird, barely used word you came up with, and then figure out what that word was supposed to mean.

Seriously, if you can't think of a clever, compact way to make people remember your points, just pass out a goddamned outline. The printing press has been around for over 600 years, maybe make some use of it.

All that said, I want you to memorize the acronym for Forced Audience Participation (FAP) because it's very apt. FAP is basically a speaker getting his rocks off by having the audience do things that he can fool himself into believing are a sign of how interested they are in his fascinating speech.

For example, there's a kind of bad habit going around where the audience has a printed outline of the speech, and at certain points, the speaker asks them to stop and circle a key word. Sometimes this makes sense, I guess, if you're introducing a new term like the 180 degree rule, or if the word is central to all the points you're making. ("Quentin Tarantino goes in a lot of exciting directions in his films but it all comes back to his foot fetish. I want you to circle 'foot fetish.' We're going to come back to that a lot.")

Filmdrunk
"Just like Tarantino does."

Of course, all this depends on a grasp of what words are vital and recurring in your speech, and you know what? Most people with that skill know how to emphasize those words without making people circle them on a piece of paper. So most of the people using this trick have no idea what words would be appropriate to circle. I have seen speakers tell me to circle words like "the" and "and" in a desperate last-ditch effort to feel like the audience is listening to something they are saying.

And it's very self-gratifying when you give an order and everyone obediently scritch-scratches with their pencils. It's easy to fool yourself into thinking, "Well, that particular 'and' I asked them to circle must have been a very important 'and' indeed." But if that's not enough, you might make them repeat key words or phrases out loud, which is annoying in the same sense as forcing a louder "good morning" out of people is annoying.

But if you still can't get an erection after making people dutifully circle and repeat things, you can make them really pretend they're into it by dragging volunteers up to the front of the room and having them participate in stupid skits. You can give them goofy props, to make it funny. Just don't give them anything sharp.