‘Speak, Memorably’ Review: How to Make an Impression

Filler words such as ‘um’ and ‘like’ can ruin efforts to connect with an audience. To kick the habit, record yourself—and cringe

Excerpt: "If you are a white-collar worker, you likely clock a lot of your day in meetings. You shuffle between conference rooms, and in each one endure some sort of “dry-as-a-bone, dull-as-dishwater, and maddeningly predictable slideshow presentation” that “makes otherwise vibrant colleagues morph into petrified driftwood.”

So writes Bill McGowan in “Speak, Memorably,” about the art of captivating an audience. “Since reducing the number of meetings in most corporate cultures will take nothing short of a Herculean effort,” the author argues, there’s only one solution to all this dreariness: Make the quality of the presentations better. The good news is that presenting effectively, and in an engaging way, is a skill that anyone can learn. Doing so will lessen the risk of “death by PowerPoint.”

... there are plenty of broadly helpful tips, phrased memorably. Filler words (“um,” “like” “kind of”), the author reminds us, are “the trans fat-laden bag of chips in our communication cupboard.” To kick the habit, record yourself—and cringe. Also, slow down. Use fewer words. “Somewhere rummaging around in the backs of our brains is this fallacy that the longer I talk, the more convincing I’m going to be,” Mr. McGowan writes. In fact, the opposite is true. If only every person rambling on, thanking people for coming to an event, and then saying how excited he is, and then thanking people again—and did he mention he was excited?—would realize that.

Given the ubiquity of Microsoft’s presentation software, Mr. McGowan’s instructions on “good PowerPoint hygiene” may be this book’s biggest contribution to humanity. For starters: Do not read your slides. “There is no quicker way to forfeit the engagement of the audience than to narrate your deck,” he notes, and “the more text you have on the slides, the less your audience will listen to you.”

The only real reason to have slides is to show something visually that will reinforce the point you are making. Mr. McGowan’s tip to foreshadow the next slide also helps people think in terms of narrative arc, an improvement that could make even a pitch to the local zoning board more zippy. 

Mr. McGowan’s previous book, “Pitch Perfect,” came out before the pandemic. It’s perhaps fitting, then, that he devotes a useful chapter here to the rise of Zoom meetings. Plenty of meeting hygiene can help here, too. Sitting too low in the frame of your web cam makes it look like “you’re sitting at the kids’ table at Thanksgiving.” (Instead, it’s best to “angle your webcam so the top of your head is grazing the top of the screen in the shot.”)

Since Zoom audiences are usually muted, sometimes with cameras off, you can’t rely on the usual cues to see whether your message is landing. Mr. McGowan suggests choosing a very engaged audience member and then pinning their window so you see them prominently. If it’s going to be a tough audience, “plant a colleague among the audience members and tell them to remember to nod and smile periodically.”

Presenting may feel like a necessary evil, but as with any skill, “the more you prep and practice, the better you get,” Mr. McGowan writes. Perhaps you’ll dazzle your audience, but even if the net result of someone reading this book is that the fourth meeting of the afternoon is less boring, that would still make the world a better place. "