I seem to have been sucked in to answering questions on Quora. Many about public speaking in all its forms. But other stuff too. Oddly addictive. I’ve been asked by someone to help with a couple of significant speeches. Apart from the squalid business of the fee *coughs* there is the […]
Here is my new piece for Diplomatic Courier in Washington. On The Language of the Sustainable Development Goals. It turned out to be a bit of a slog to find the original SGD texts, but here they are in the UN General Assembly Resolution adopted on 25 September 2015: Right […]
My latest piece for DIPLOMAT looks at some rather, er, basic issues. Namely the idea of civilisation(s). As raised by President Trump in his speech in Warsaw: President Trump’s speech helpfully gave a long list of Western values and practices: The world has never known anything like our community of […]
PunditWire is shutting up shop: As with all good things, it’s time to bid PunditWire adieu. We will be ceasing operations on August 31, which means we no longer will be publishing new content on our site. PunditWire won’t vanish — to those of you who want access to the […]
You want to give the speech that EVERYONE talks about after the conference, to the point that you can’t eat over dinner because everyone is asking you about it? But … you have nervous colleagues who tell you not to take any risks? Try letting go. Try being amazing: As Luke […]
+++ UPDATE +++ James Spencer VoiceCoach who knows more than a thing or two about public speaking writes to me about the piece below: This is one of the best critiques of quantifying communication that I’ve come across in the vast flotsam of internet public speaking commentary. You also address, specifically, […]
My guilty secret is out, thanks to the Guardian: “When we started, we didn’t know about linguistics and speech science. So we spent six or seven months behind closed doors just reading about this,” Gupta says. The AI algorithm has been modelled on data collected from 3,000 publicly available speeches, […]
What was President Trump’s speech in Poland really saying? Views differ. Even though anyone listening to the speech might think that Trump pushed back hard against Putin in the speech, it was a stunning victory for Putin: The initial reaction to the speech was far more positive than to his previous attempt […]
On 6 July President Trump gave a hefty speech in Warsaw. Here’s the official text. And here is a video of him delivering it. How was it as a speech? First, the speech is some 3700 words long, delivered in 36 minutes. Just over 100 words per minute. Quite a […]
A really difficult and sensitive issue in ‘management’ and ‘leadership’: how do junior colleagues tell senior colleagues that they’re (perhaps) not getting it right? One of my own most powerful life lessons on this came back in the early 1980s when I was a mere Second Secretary at the British […]
