Dominic Hughes

Planning this review ideas are flashing across my consciousness. Not insights from this book, though it provides many, but arguments and actions for a speech I am making shortly. Thankfully I'm filing them - building up a hoard of material, which should make writing the speech much less painful. It's one of many lessons learned from 'Successful Public Speaking'.
Hughes and Phillips start with you. As long as you have something worth saying and time to collect your material and think how best to frame and present it you are going to be OK. It is a reassuring message, particularly because they convey it in the first few pages and demonstrate it in less than a hundred.

Page after page of common sense eloquently supported by examples from a cast of great speechmakers and anecdotes from the authors, champion debaters themselves, this book practices what it preaches.

Like a good speech 'Successful Public Speaking' is exceptionally well organised, limited in its objectives, and persuasive. Following on from you, the speaker, Hughes and Phillips focus on the audience. Getting them to agree is the key, they say, not showing off. The greatest speakers appeal to the experiences of their audience who are participating, not listening: nodding in agreement, murmuring approval, clapping and cheering.

But I didn't buy this book to lead a revolution. Because Hughes and Phillips eschew formulas, techniques and stock-jokes and focus instead on helping the speaker communicate, their guidance belongs as much in the boardroom as it does in the classroom, party convention or pub. In the final third of the book the authors give specific advice for business meetings, television and weddings but the job is pretty much done by then.

This audience of one nodded in agreement all the way through 'Successful Public Speaking'. Holmes and Phillips have persuaded me I can make a good speech.… (plus d'informations)