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Three Tips to Improve Your Public Speaking Skills
   Students in American schools learn from an early age to give presentations as part of their regular classroom activities. Children as young as five years old often give brief talks about objects they bring in to school—called "show and tell". This training is a basis for later public speaking.
   Even so, many native English-speaking adults are afraid to speak or give presentations in front of a large group. And there is a large industry of consultants who train professionals in public speaking.
   Comedian Jerry Seinfeld said the most common fear people have is public speaking. The second most common fear is death. He made a joke about this. He said, "I saw a thing, actually a study that said speaking in front of a crowd is considered the number one fear of the average person. I found that amazing. Number two, was death. Death is number two? This means, to the average person, if you have to be at a funeral, you would rather be in the casket than doing the eulogy."
   Charles LeBeau is a public speaking professor and consultant. He began his career in Japan in 1982. Currently, he teaches at two universities and at the Toshiba International Training Center. He has also written books on the subject.
   English language learners around the world use his book Speaking of Speech.
   Mr. LeBeau says that students in other cultures may not have the chance to practice public speaking as young children. When they reach the college level, or enter their career, they need to present well in English. Many careers require public speaking skills.
   The book Speaking of Speech tells about a method of teaching public speaking for non-native speakers. Mr. LeBeau says a simple approach helps English learners.
   "The central thing to remember about public speaking or presentation is that it’s a very complex, sophisticated communicative activity. For non-native speakers it’s a really scary activity. So to make that more simplistic and easy for them, and to keep it from being so overwhelming, because there are so many things going on, the approach that I’ve taken is to simplify and break it down."
   So, the professor divides public speaking into three parts: the physical message, the visual message, and the story message. First if we look at presentation, what’s going on, there are basically three messages that the presenter is giving the audience, all simultaneously. There’s what I call the physical message. It’s basically body language. It’s the way that my body, as a speaker, is talking to the audience. Then there’s also the visual message. The visual messages are the slides that we now make and show the audience. The third message is the story message. The story message is the content of presentation. So another way we can think of the story message is that it’s what we say to the audience. The story message also includes how we organize our ideas to present to the audience.