TED Talks: The Official TED Guide to Public Speaking

by Chris J. Anderson

This problem is fixable. But it takes some effort. Imagine you get to observe a friend who, over the course of a week or so, tries to memorize his talk. Let’s say that you ask him every day to give the best version of the talk that he can without using notes. You would notice something odd: Early on in the process, he would be quite convincing (if a little unstructured). He doesn’t actually know any of the talk by heart yet, so he simply does his best to give you the information he knows in approximately the order he’s planned. But a few days into the process, you notice a change. He has reached the point where he knows quite a bit of the talk by heart, and so those parts come out in eloquent paragraphs. But, you don’t feel the same original liveliness from them. You feel his stress. You hear words like, Let’s see; Just a minute; Let me start that again. Or you simply hear those paragraphs rattled off a little robotically. Those clues are giveaways that the talk is being recited rather than spoken with meaning. I call this phase of preparation the Uncanny Valley. It’s a term borrowed from a phenomenon in computer animation where the technology of animating humanlike characters is super-close to seeming real but is not quite there. The effect is creepy: worse than if the animator had steered clear of realism altogether. If your speaker friend comes to the stage in this mode, his talk will probably fail. He’d do better to forget about delivering a scripted talk and instead w...