Harold Carr

Harold Carr

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home :: community :: 2003-11-07-listeningSpeaking.html

Fri, 07 Nov 2003

Educating us to listen and speak clearly

Poor speaking engenders weak listening. For example, I have just spent the last week at a conference in Sicily. Over 90 percent of the speakers had too many slides for the alloted time, had slides with too many words on them, spent too much time on background material leaving little time to discuss their unique contribution, read their slides with their backs to the audience --- in other words, they spoke poorly. Many times, despite my efforts to listen, I found myself falling asleep.

Clear concise speaking enables resonant listening. For example, one speaker, Dan Dvorak (of JPL), had simple slides with diagrams and lots of white space. While the slides were up he faced the audience and narrated the diagrams with words not present on the slides. In other words, he engaged the audience.

What I am suggesting is that we need to be educated in how the speak and listen effectively. In the past I've always said that we are not educated in two areas in which we will deal with for the rest of our lives: sex and personal finance. I now realize it is actually three areas with the inclusion of effective listening/speaking.

(I wrote the above in response to Phillip Bimstein's article Composing a Community Dialogue in New Music Box.)

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Harold Carr

Harold Carr