Terry Szuplat
Speaker
Trainer
Speechwriter
Excerpts from Say It Well
How Barack Obama Learned to Give a Speech
Obama was 24 years old, making a fundraising pitch to a conference room full of philanthropists. “I was feeling pretty cocky,” he remembered. “I had not written down my remarks. I felt like I could go into any room and just sort of wing it, which was a bad mistake.”
He started his presentation. “There are a bunch of people in suits,” he recalled. “I’m looking a little raggedy and a little out of place. About four or five minutes into my presentation, I just started freezing up. I lost my train of thought.”
“I was terrible,” he said. “I felt a little bit of flop sweat and hemmed and hawed, and got stuck, and was not particularly coherent.”
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How to Make an Argument That’s Actually Persuasive
In a fascinating experiment, researchers from Stanford and the University of Toronto examined how we try to persuade other people to change their minds. It involved roughly 200 people—half of whom identified themselves as politically liberal and half as conservative. The liberals were asked to write a few sentences to convince conservatives to support same-sex marriage. The conservatives were asked to write a few sentences to convince liberals to support English as the official language of the United States. What happened?
Almost everyone failed.
The Art of Public Speaking is a Skill We All Need
Porchlight Book Company, February 10, 2025
This may be the first book on public speaking in the age of AI, and I’ll offer some thoughts on how we might harness this technology to sharpen our voice without losing the humanity that’s at the heart of all great communication.
In short, the art of public speaking needs an upgrade—a new guide for our diverse and changing world, with practical tools for the presentations, pitches, talks, toasts, and tributes that we give in our daily lives.
