TED Talks: The Official TED Guide to Public Speaking

by Chris J. Anderson

If it’s worth Bill Gates’s time and Susan Cain’s time and Tracy Chevalier’s time and Salman Khan’s time to rehearse for a major talk, it’s probably worth your time too.

In our crazy modern attention economy, people respond to crisp, powerful content. They have no patience for flab.

You want an opening that grabs people from the first moment. A surprising statement. An intriguing question. A short story. An incredible image.

Igniting curiosity is the single most versatile tool at your disposal for ensuring audience engagement.

your goal is to persuade someone, in only a few moments, that your talk is going to be a worthy investment of their attention.

First there is the 10-second war: can you do something in your first moments on stage to ensure people’s eager attention while you set up your talk topic? Second is the 1-minute war: can you then use that first minute to ensure that they’re committed to coming on the full talk journey with you?

if the ending isn’t memorable, the talk itself may not be.

Voice coaches speak of at least six tools you can use: volume, pitch, pace, timbre, tone, and something called prosody, which is the singsong rise and fall that distinguishes, for example, a statement from a question.

For most speakers that’s somewhere in the range 130–170 words per minute.

Every field of knowledge is different, but they are all connected.

www.ted.com/tedtalksbook/playlist