{"id":161,"date":"2008-08-16T15:31:51","date_gmt":"2008-08-16T14:31:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.elementally.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/?p=161"},"modified":"2008-08-16T15:31:51","modified_gmt":"2008-08-16T14:31:51","slug":"public-speaking-competitions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/public-speaking-competitions\/","title":{"rendered":"Public speaking competitions"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Why?<\/p>\n<p>I really mean that &#8211; why bother with competitions.  I honestly and genuinely can&#8217;t see the point.  I don&#8217;t want to be rude to people who are entering (and doing will in such things &#8211; see <a href=\"http:\/\/sixminutes.dlugan.com\/2008\/08\/15\/world-championship-public-speaking\/\">here<\/a>, for example) but to me it seems to be akin to such things as<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>competitive ironing;<\/li>\n<li>combat yoga.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>You see, to me, a competition in public speaking and\/or presenting seems to defeat the whole point of speaking in public &#8211; you&#8217;re not (or at least you shouldn&#8217;t be!) doing it for yourself.  If you&#8217;re doing it for anyone at all, it should be for the audience.  That said, personally I think you should be speaking for the sake of your subject.  &#8220;Don&#8217;t speak unless you can&#8217;t not&#8221; would be a good Yoda-like mantra, wouldn&#8217;t it?<\/p>\n<p>If you&#8217;re speaking to compete, almost by definition you&#8217;re doing it to see if you can do it better than the other people there &#8211; and that&#8217;s just plain ol&#8217; ego, isn&#8217;t it?  Well not entirely, but I&#8217;m sure you see what I&#8217;m getting at, even if I am overstating my case.  You&#8217;re certainly speaking to speak, not speaking to say something.  You&#8217;re even being <strong>marked<\/strong> on things like technique!<\/p>\n<p>Now don&#8217;t get me wrong, I believe in good technique &#8211; good techniques makes it easier to give a good presentation &#8211; but it&#8217;s <strong>not<\/strong> an end in itself&#8230; it&#8217;s a means to an end.  You can deliver damned good presentations with only mediocre technique, sometimes.<\/p>\n<p>Seriously, I can see that there&#8217;s a use to &#8220;low-level&#8221; competitions &#8211; they&#8217;re a bit of fun and they give some focus to improvements and so on (they&#8217;re also a harmless hobby, of course!) but when it comes to things like a World Championship I&#8217;m a bit lost.<\/p>\n<p>Quite apart from the innate pointlessness of it all, it gets worse because of the necessity of imposing rules (such as a seven minute time limit).  That&#8217;s arbitrary.  By all means speak for seven minutes if that&#8217;s how long it takes to say what you&#8217;ve got to say but if it takes four, take four.  If it needs nine, take nine.<\/p>\n<p>Add to that the self-referential elements of it (quite a few of the presentations are simply about making presentations :) ) fact that the &#8220;world championship&#8221; only involves Americans and it really does start to sound like not my cup of tea.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Why? I really mean that &#8211; why bother with competitions. I honestly and genuinely can&#8217;t see the point. I don&#8217;t want to be rude to people who are entering (and doing will in such things [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,5,7,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-161","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-key-posts","category-personal-blog-related","category-reviews-case-studies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/161","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=161"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/161\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=161"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=161"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=161"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}