Goodreads Bookshelf
Public Speaking
I caught about two minutes of an interview today on NPR, so I really have no idea of what the context was, but the guy being interviewed cited a statistic suggesting that Americans fear public speaking more than death. True or not, it speaks to something in our cultural psyche.
For my part, I don't real fear public speaking, but I never feel like I'm quite successful at it either. As a teacher, of course, I do public speaking several times each weekday, and that's fine. I would actually put that in a different category altogether, call it semi-public speaking. It's a small audience that I get to know well over the course of the year, and a very controlled situation. It doesn't make me nervous and it (typically) goes fine.
When it comes to other sorts of public speaking though, I have to admit to some discomfort. Certainly, I do it and it's not as though I feel stressed when I have to do it. At my old school, I spoke in front of the entire community on multiple occasions as a choral conductor and a tennis coach, in both informal and formal settings. Recently, though, I had to speak in front of a group, and although I did it and didn't make a total fool of myself, I had to admit to myself that I didn't feel very comfortable doing it and I didn't feel like I did it all that well. The context really isn't important, but suffice it to say that I didn't manage to say everything that I wanted to and I didn't feel the least bit eloquent.
When it comes down to it, I'm more of an in-print guy, which I suppose is why I've maintained this blog as well as I have. I feel comfortable putting my words down in print. Usually, when I have to speak in public, I will write something up beforehand, and when I do it flows easily and naturally: although I may refine it because I can, my first draft is usually pretty good. That is to say, impromptu writing is easy for me. In some contexts, I can just read what I've written, either from a paper or from notecards, but in most contexts there just seems like something awkward about an adult giving a speech off of cards like a high school speech class, so sometimes even when I've written something out I won't use it. It should be easy, since I've already "practiced" by writing it out and reading it over several times. It would seem like speaking should be just as easy anyway, right? If I can come up with words on the fly in one form, that skill should be transferable, right? It's just words words words.
But it's not. I'm fairly sure I've heard somewhere that our brains process these things differently. We have speech centers in our brains, and we have writing centers. As teachers, we try to have some awareness of our students' different learning styles, but we're not always conscious of our own. I suppose a big reason I'm an English teacher now is because my strengths have long been reading and writing, but I suspect that being a teacher has strengthened other modes of processing and expression, even if I'm not as strong as I'd like.