Letters Remain

Category: speaking

  • The Nerd Urban Dictionary, or: The Overcomplication Compilation

    Seemingly frustrated at how ‘nerds’ throw around technical terms in order to sound smart, Chris Anderson (writer of The Long Tail, etc.) put together The Nerd Urban Dictionary to compile the most common and worst offenders. With terms coming from disciplines ranging from statistics to chemistry, finance to the military, here’s a small sample (mostly…

  • Mister Rogers’ Nine Rules for Talking to Children

    Having not grown up in the US, I only became aware of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood as an adult. However, this is entirely due to Fred Rogers himself: his kindness, his humanity, and his ability to draw children into his safe world. In the lead-up to the publishing of The Good Neighbor: The Life and Work…

  • The Wadsworth Constant: Ignore 30% of Everything

    I’ll start with a story. Last year my girlfriend and I watched the pilot episode of a new TV show and were immediately hooked. The pilot episode was refreshingly complex and forced us to guess missing plot details continuously: it’s adventurous to make your audience work so hard during a pilot, we surmised. We later…

  • Personal Pronouns as Relationship and Company Indicators

    The personal pronouns used by couples during “conflictive marital interactions” are reliable indicators of relationship quality and marital satisfaction, according to a study tracking 154 couples over 23 years. The study showed that ‘We-words‘ (our, we, etc.) were indicative of a more positive relationship than ‘Me- and You-words‘ (I, you, etc.) (doi). Using We-ness language…

  • Words to Be Aware Of

    Wish. Try. Should. Deserve. These are four words thatĀ “lend themselves to a certain self-deception”, says David Cain of Raptitude, and when you catch yourself using them you should take note, figure out how the word is being used, and maybe try to change your perspective. Why? Because, Cain says, these are ‘red flag’ words that…

  • Rhetorical Devices to Incite Timely Applause

    Any delay between the end of a speech and the audience’s applause can send strong negative signals to those watching and listening. In order to prevent this awkwardness, there are rhetorical tricks we can implement that trigger applause or laughter at appropriate moments. Speechwriter and political speech advisor Max Atkinson, inĀ a critique of UK Deputy…

  • Psychic Numbing and Communicating on Risk and Tragedies

    I’ve been preoccupied lately with the developing aftermath of theĀ Tōhoku earthquake. Unlike other disasters on a similar or greater scale, I’m finding it easier to grasp the real human cost of the disaster in Japan as my brother lives in Kanagawa Prefecture and therefore there are less levels of abstraction between me and those directly…

  • The Science Behind Good Presentations

    We know that cluttered presentations and those with paragraphs of text per slide aren’t good and that the 10/20/30 rule is a guideline generally worth adhering to, but why? Could there be a scientific basis for why some presentations are better than others? Chris Atherton, an applied cognitive psychologist at the UK’s University of Central…

  • The Basic Plots of All Stories

    That there are a finite number of basic plots from which all other stories are formed is accepted as fact by many literary theorists: Georges Polti, for instance,Ā believes that there are thirty-six dramatic situations, while Ronald Tobias believes there to be only twenty. The Internet Public Library has compiled together the most commonly accepted lists…

  • Foreign Accents Make Statements Less Trustworthy

    Due to the principles of processing fluency (also known as cognitive fluency, discussed here many times before), we know that information that is easier to process is perceived to be–among other features–more familiar, pleasant, truthful and less risky. A recent study has shown that this is also true for foreign accents: statements spoken by non-native…