{"id":447,"date":"2009-11-08T23:40:09","date_gmt":"2009-11-08T22:40:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.elementally.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/?p=447"},"modified":"2009-11-08T23:40:09","modified_gmt":"2009-11-08T22:40:09","slug":"rememberence-day-poppy-service-speaking","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/rememberence-day-poppy-service-speaking\/","title":{"rendered":"Rememberence Day Poppy Service speaking"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.ppu.org.uk\/learn\/poetry\/poetry_ww1_2.html\">For the Fallen<\/a>, by Laurence Binyon is just about the hardest piece of public reading I&#8217;m going to have to work on for quite some time.  I&#8217;m working on it to be read later today at a <strong>Poppy Service<\/strong>; and it&#8217;s important to me to get it <strong>absolutely<\/strong> right.  Absolutely.<\/p>\n<p>Normally I forgive myself if I make a mistake &#8211; the more you stress about a mistake, the more likely you are to make another&#8230; and another&#8230; and another&#8230; but this one needs to be perfect.<\/p>\n<p>So how am I practicing?<\/p>\n<p>Out loud.<\/p>\n<p>Ignore those people who tell you practice in front of a mirror &#8211; it&#8217;ll just make you self-conscious; ignore those who say use a video (unless you&#8217;ve got professional input and feedback); but don&#8217;t, don&#8217;t, don&#8217;t just read things over.  Public speaking is a physical act and you can&#8217;t practice something physical just inside your head.  (Actually, there&#8217;s some research to suggest that practicing inside your head is better than nothing, but in general you know what I mean.)<\/p>\n<p>Inside your head you never make a mistake that you have to recover from.  Inside your head you never have problems with difficult combinations of sounds.  Inside your head you don&#8217;t have to worry about timing.  Inside your head you don&#8217;t get too caught up in the emotion to concentrate.  Inside your head you don&#8217;t get trapped too far into the cadence, ending up sounding trite&#8230;.<\/p>\n<p>All of that kind of thing becomes very real when you do it for real, out loud.  And given how important it is to me to get the <strong>Poppy Service<\/strong> reading absolutely right (people have died &#8211; the least I can do is make sure they are remembered as best I can) you can bet that I&#8217;m looking very carefully at not being ambushed by the list above.<\/p>\n<p>Absolutely.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m guessing it&#8217;ll take me an hour and a half to get it as I want it &#8211; for about 40 seconds reading.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>For the Fallen, by Laurence Binyon is just about the hardest piece of public reading I&#8217;m going to have to work on for quite some time. I&#8217;m working on it to be read later today [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,7,14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-447","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bttradspace-blog-competition","category-personal-blog-related","category-voice-tips"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/447","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\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=447"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/447\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=447"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=447"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=447"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}