A bunch of links – February 22, 2009

Comments

Hey Nathan, do you have a plugin that disables comments on old posts?

I was wanting to comment on your ‘sermonising’ post for a week or so ago, but I couldn’t find the comment link. So I’m going to (non-violently) hijack this thread.

You mentioned that the broadcast reading speed is around 160 words/minute, and I vaguely recall my year 8 English teacher say that we do public speaking at about 120 words/minute (which is vaguely what I use when writing sermons).

Do radio/TV people speak faster than public, ‘live’ speaking should be? Is this because of the ‘simplicity’ of their content, their vocal training, or the nature of the medium (no reverb/environmental factors to deal with)?

Nathan says:

Hey Dan,
It’s not a plug-in. I do have a setting that limits commenting on posts 2 weeks old. Mostly because I get about 30 spam comments a day on one particular post about a garage sailing expedition. I must have struck spam keyword gold there.

It does seem that finding old posts via the search function on the blog strips their unique URLs from the results. I don’t know how or why, but it annoys me if I want to link to an old post – so I’m going to look into it.

Re the speech pace of journalism v public speaking – I think the goals are different. News is about fast dissemination of information and being as succinct as possible. Public Speaking is about convincing someone of your view or presenting it for consideration – so needs to be more measured.

I tend to think preaching falls into the category of public speaking – so should be aiming for the 120 words per minute mark. It’s just a habit I have to unlearn. You don’t pause in news presentation. At all. Which is bad for your listeners when you preach.

I’m convinced by the idea that spoken presentations are best when they come across as natural, conversational speech and not as either a spoken essay or a news bulletin. I use a lot of short sentences and repetition in my sermons. Because I really just want to make sure a couple of simple ideas stick. And most conversations involve short, sharp, exchanges of ideas – not long boring monologues.