Page 237 - Between One and Many The Art and Science of Public Speaking

204 Part 3 Putting Theory Into Practice

Exhibit 8.3 Cooking Methods
Visual aids such as pie
charts help audiences
visualize numerical FRIED
data. MICROWAVE
15%
15%
20%
DEEP FAT

50%

BAKED

able sampling techniques. Most important, you need to explain enough about
the numbers you use to your audience so that they will have confi dence in the
claims you are making. Useful tests for numerical data can be found in the box
“Speaking of . . . Numerical Data.”
We must be careful, however, not to overwhelm our audience with numbers.
To make numerical data meaningful, we suggest rounding off information pre-
sented orally. For example, rather than saying “the Dow closed at 12,997.7,” we
could simply say “the Dow closed today just below 13,000.” Comparisons are
also useful. For example, let’s say a speaker wants the audience to visualize how
much land would be needed to produce corn for ethanol in order to signifi cantly
reduce our dependence on foreign oil. The speaker could say it will take 90 mil-
lion acres to produce the corn. That sounds like a lot, but few of us can really
visualize an acre, let alone 90 million. On the other hand, it turns out that that is
an area roughly the size of the state of Montana. For an audience, such a com-
parison would be much more meaningful than raw numbers. Finally, consider
using charts, graphs, and other visual aids to express numerical data, as shown
in Exhibit 8.3 and discussed in Chapter 12.

Opinion

We all have opinions on all sorts of topics. One of the authors loved Sicko and the
other hated it. Some people love hip-hop, others can’t stand it. The list of topics
on which we all have opinions is endless. As speakers, we may want to share our
opinions with our audience. However, unless we are recognized experts on a
topic, our opinion is unlikely to carry any weight with audience members. After
all, why should they give any more weight to our opinion than to their own?
Sometimes speakers have special qualifi cations that enable them to use their
own opinions as support for their speech. For example, a student whose mother

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