The five top public speaking professions:
University lecturers
Comedians
Newsreaders
Broadcasters
Actors
The five worst professional speakers by profession:
Politicians
Sportspeople
Lawyers
Scientists
Real estate agents
University lecturers top the list of the best public speaking skills for professionals, according to industry-specific speech analysis.
Indeed, some professions really do communicate better than others and not all professionals speak with the same level of skills. Certain communication skills and personality traits are common within industries.
Yet there are exceptions to the rule. Individuals in the best communicating professions can speak poorly and a few in the worst professions can speak well.
Nonetheless, industry-wide traits are worth examining.
Lecturers combine intellect, extended vocabulary, confidence, and commandability with good research skills. Their professional egos might build ivory towers, but lecturers are aware that the fate of students is dependent on their professional obligation to be intrinsically understandable. They need to frame information well and speak with conscious clarity – it is the most important public speaking skill.
Comedians are routinely excellent speakers and surprisingly the second most skilled. This is because their social radar is highly tuned, they are quick-witted and capable of writing their own scripts. They present with affable energy, excellent timing, and speak clearly. Amazingly, they can even thrive without being funny.
Newsreaders exude professional clarity. Their pre-training as reporters is a platform for organising information into communication capsules and advancing speech skills. They masterfully relay news with a serious, stable, and calm demeanour, gently leading the emotions of viewers by subtly revealing attitude under a semblance of objectivity. Yet some networks are under pressure to employ newsreaders with speech impediments in the name of diversity.
Broadcasters have the gift of the gab. They generally lack the same clarity as newsreaders, but make it up with a much larger emotional range, lucid personality skills, colourful speech melody, and attuned social skills. They exercise the licence to inject their personality and must be good listeners with good timing and dialogue skills.
Actors develop their speech and personality skills as a result of being well-practised at diligently rehearsing and ironing-out deficiencies. They rehearse as often as musicians; yet lately standards have been slipping. It is amazing that despite intoxicating budgets, viewers can be challenged to understand the speech of incoherent actors who create a need for subtitles. Hollywood sometimes resembles Mumblewood.
Politicians lead the five worst professional communicators. Most enter political life without speech training and are out of their depth. Just listen to the poor quality of their maiden speeches to Parliament. They can be dreadful.
Many receive poor advice from their handlers; one victim was a former Prime Minister instructed by her minders to emphasise clarity by speaking painfully slowly. They failed to tell her that if you speak slowly, you have to add speech colour.
Politicians disprove the methodological rule that practice makes perfect. It is not uncommon for them to reinforce their speech deficiencies with the same mistakes over and over again. We’ll be hearing our current Prime Minister’s awkward speech skills quite a bit over the coming months as the election draws near.
Sportspeople are thrust into public speaking by accident and circumstance. They commonly are untrained public speakers with limited vocabularies and lack of confidence. It must be challenging to have a microphone thrust in your face when you’re puffed-out after a game. Nevertheless, sportspeople routinely speak in testosterone-pumped chesty tones. They don’t always sing together in tune either.
Scientists can be both brilliant thinkers but poor communicators. Many scientists struggle to bridge their busy cerebral brain-spheres with basic communication skills. This fact is no surprise to the science community. The 3MT competition was set up largely to train scientists to communicate better and improve science communication. There seems to still be a long way to go.
Lawyers’ personalities tend to become parched by the dryness of the profession, just like the statutes they read. Their speech usually lacks colour with highly limited tonal range and monotonous delivery. Their composition is fraught by the habit of using far too many words to make points that could be more cogently expressed. Their personal energy can have a slightly unpleasant air, a mixture of the patronising and the sterile. Professor George Hampel set up advocacy training as a compulsory subject for new barristers to address these matters.
Real estate agents these days seem to talk with heavy Aussie accents. Like politicians, they are unfiltered, ever-ready to launch into endless sentences and can keep talking until their batteries run flat. They are purposefully affable, but read to script. They can set-off a scent of untrust-ability.
There is definitely a gulf between the top and bottom five public speaking professions in Australia. But the gap needs to be closed by lifting communications standards, not lowering them. Clear speaking is not too much to ask for.
Dean Frenkel works as a Communications Consultant. He has lectured in Public Speaking and Communications at Victoria University and was a 3MT judge.
