Grading Obama: The President Earns a B+ for His State of the Union Presentation—Here’s What He Did Right, Wrong and What It All Means to Communicators

The State of the Union is an important speech for the nation. The lead up to this year's State of the Union put a great deal of pressure on the tone and I think the President came off with the tone of continuing hope and optimism. Now, I am a person who believes that there is a significant role for government and the President did defend the role of government. At the same time he also provided some interesting thinking about careful spending. One media trainer had an early blog grading the President's speech and I have included that in this write up.



Grading Obama: The President Earns a B+ for His State of the Union Presentation—Here’s What He Did Right, Wrong and What It All Means to Communicators

Interesting article from Marketing Profs

There is an interesting article on the MARKETING PROFS web site that discusses public speaking and presentations. He has eight or nine tips. One of his tips is to minimize technology and the other tips generally talk about what you do with the technology you decide to use in the presentation. I really think he could have reemphasized the idea of leave the technology at home because people are wanting to hear your ideas and generally the technology is going to get in the way.

The best tip he has in the article is No Notes. "It is a little unauthentic...", he says. Really, you should know your content and be organized in MAIN POINT structure and be able to adapt your talk to the audience, the time available and the goal you have for making the presentation. That is all easy to write but not always as easy to implement.

So, I will end with one of my continuing public speaking tips. If it has been awhile since you have been in front of audiences, become a Toastmaster. That group makes a rapid difference in a motivated person's ability to become an effective public speaker. Or, if you are a student at a place like Coker College, make sure you get to the speaking classes and then take every opportunity offered to get in front of audiences.

Books are a great place for "Material"

One of the major challenges for many beginning speakers is figuring out what to talk about. Most of these beginning speakers have a great many things they are doing and hope to do but often do not think about those things as speech material. We do a lot of brainstorming in my Coker College classes to come up with speech ideas. While I hear from many of these student that they don't read I continue to encourage them to look to books for both subjects and for speech-content material.

We are in a season when lots of people are summarizing their reading of the past year and I think some of these lists could be useful for speakers looking for ideas. Tim Elmore, who is a leadership trainer and also a frequent speaker, just posted his 12 top books from 2010. This is a good example of a list that could help others begin to find "material" for their talks -- both in class and in their real lives. This idea is not only good for students but can also work for people who are members of Toastmasters and other speaking groups.

I just finished a book by Steven Johnson about where ideas come from and this book could be good for a year's worth of speech material. In addition, he has a major bibliography in his notes section that is excellent for people who might be thinking, writing and talking on such subjects as innovation and creativity, learning, leadership, etc.