What Is Public Speaking and How Can You Hate Doing It Less?
In modern times, public speaking is generally defined as the act of delivering remarks to a group of people. It’s TED talks. Nobel Prize acceptance speeches. Wedding toasts and eulogies. Class reports, work presentations, Zoom meetings, or any other kind of group discussion.
Modern speech coaches and teachers approach the subject of speech training by either teaching people how to dress, move, and behave, or by helping them alleviate their feelings of anxiety. In general, speech is approached as a performance—like a form of acting.
Twenty-four hundred years ago, Aristotle, author of the Art of Rhetoric and the world’s greatest authority on the subject of public speaking, described it a little differently. In public or private, he taught, we speak for one reason: to persuade.
For Aristotle and scores of Ancient Greek and Roman scholars, “public speaking” was a subset of rhetoric—the study of all available forms of persuasion. This discipline had less to do with self-presentation and mere acting than with the far deeper, more interesting goal of exploring the basic operating system of human nature. It was about understanding how listeners process information, and how to leverage that to your advantage. Want to know the secrets of power? Want to connect with people better? Want to get more stuff done? The study of rhetoric was both a philosophy of human nature and a practical education for adult social and professional life.
None of this means that TED talks and eulogies and Zoom meetings are not, in fact, forms of public speaking, and that self-presentation and acting aren’t relevant skills for learning how to do it better. But at its core, rhetoric (and public speaking) is all about learning to think differently—about speech, and about people.
The Greeks and Romans believed that ANYONE could learn how to be decent at public speaking. It was not something to hate or fear. From Aristotle’s day through the late Renaissance, Western European middle schoolers—at least, those lucky enough to receive an education—embarked upon a curriculum known as the progymnasmata: a 14-step, years-long series of speech exercises. By the end of the course, students could hold forth for 45 minutes on any topic introduced at random.
The initial exercise of the curriculum was simple. Students were required to stand before their class and read a paragraph-long story from a text they held in their hand. No performing. No memorizing. The beauty of the exercise was that no one could fail or say, “Oh, yeah, um, I suffer from speech anxiety. I just can’t do this.”
Later exercises taught students to recite from memory, then to begin acting out voices of characters—young, old, male, female, good, evil—to understand why we use certain voices for different characters, or for the beginning of a story vs. the end. Why do certain performance techniques “make sense” and others make us sound weird? Students proceeded to give short speeches about people and things they loved or hated, learning in the process how to alloy logic with passion and thus to speak with authority.
The curriculum proceeded from the assumption that the ability to speak well or badly has nothing to do with one’s personality or emotions, and everything to do with simple training. In fact, the Ancient Greek word for “embarrassment,” aporein, did not translate directly to “bashfulness” nor anything so emotional but, rather, “perplexity or hesitation.” It meant, literally, “having no way out.” The inability to explain oneself or to connect with others verbally had nothing to do with psychology or inborn character, but rather a simple deficit of language and social skills—skills that anyone could learn.
Why should we be taking a cue from the Ancient Greeks? You could certainly say that they were backwards. They had slaves. The men weren’t very nice to the women. But you might also note that weren’t destroying the entire planet, eliminating tens of thousands of species every year. So that’s my third point, I guess. In an era where we possess the scientific capacity to save our species and civilization but lack the political, emotional, rhetorical capacity to do so, any art form that teaches people to connect, understand one another, and agree to a common plan might be kind of handy thing to learn.
Yep.
