Book Review: How to Talk So People Will Listen

Title: How to Talk So People Will Listen

Author: Steve Brown

Date: 1993

Publisher: Baker

ISBN: 0-8010-6144-X

Length: 170 pages

Quote: "[F]reedom of speech doesn't mean anything if you don't have anything to say."

Steve Brown is one of those people who achieved niche fame. The publisher describes him as "a familiar radio broadcaster and pastor," and the text frequently cites a long career of preaching, teaching, and radio speaking...but I'm not aware of ever having heard him. So it's hard to tell exactly what he's saying, in some of the text, because he's writing a book to be read, not a close analysis of the way people talk. Most of what his fans were going to learn from him, they'd already absorbed from hearing his own speeches; and, reading his book, they could "audialize" how he would have said these words.

From what my eyes can receive of what Brown was saying, there's nothing really wrong with his book. On the other hand, if you're not a fan taking his style of speaking as a model, there's much to be desired. Brown offers some general rules about speaking and writing, lots of encouragement to speakers to overcome the emotions of fear or stage fright or mike fright, but nothing fresh for the speaker whose problem is not what s/he is feeling but how to bring the audience around to a similar state of feeling.

The result is a readable book containing some enjoyable examples and reusable stories. It's likely to be a good first book for people who don't remember Brown's active career. It's not the only book today's broadcaster or podcaster needs. It is likely to be adequate for a student who is required to make a speech to a class, or a church member or employee who is asked to make a speech to a church or work group. So long as your audience are people with whom you communicate satisfactorily every day, encouragement to be bold, organize your ideas, and keep it short is all you need to make a good speech. I think this book is less focussed, contains more pages per unit of fresh information, than The Ultimate Presentation Roadmap, but how would I know what information is fresh to you? If your English classes at school spent less time on general guidance for making speeches than mine did, this book would be fresh and informative for you, too.

The broadcaster or podcaster needs more information. Many of us have been miseducated about communication. A speaker may feel enthusiastic, but sound whiny. He may feel concerned, but sound belligerent. She may feel devout, but sound sarcastic. The difference may or may not be obvious on the printed page; it may be a matter of spoken nuances, sentence intonation, "accent" (seldom so much the actual regional accent as the sloppiness or precision of enunciation), even the speaker's look that interferes with the communication of what the person thinks, feels, and may have succeeded in writing down. If that's your problem, you may be doomed to be a speaker of, at best, limited effectiveness. You may be rated excellent by a limited audience; you may still crash and burn when addressing a different audience.

If that's the case, no one book is really all you need, although cyberspace's late lamented Ozarque wrote some excellent studies of U.S. English-speaking audience--most useful to those addressing the Greatest Generation, still useful if you want to talk to baby-boomers, and apparently of some use if you want to address the young. Any book, however precise and accurate the author's observations, is going to be limited to the subcategory of people the author had the opportunity to observe. That may or may not include your audience. The best anyone can do is learn as much as we can from books, then rehearse the speech to a friend within the target audience and see how it works for him or her.

Sometimes the best course of action is in fact to revise speeches for different audiences. You lose credibility when addressing doctors if you're not comfortable using terms like "nephrolith"; you may sound as if you were trying to misrepresent yourself as a doctor (which you're not), when addressing people who aren't doctors, if you don't know that the standard English for "nephrolith" is "kidney stone"; and you may lose your audience, when addressing primary school students, if you don't translate the concept to "a painful disease."

Sometimes speakers can perfect the nuances we need, and sometimes not. I would say that, although Brown doesn't even claim to offer any insights into the nuances that allowed him and a sometimes antagonistic speaker to recognize that they were intimidating each other, and intimidate each other less...at least he does offer some funny stories. But one of the nuances that are specific to a speaking situation is that some audiences don't like funny stories...

For most amateur speakers who need only make speeches to people with whom we communicate reasonably well already, How to Talk is a useful, concise book.