Tips on giving history talks
I’ve given many public talks about history — usually on topics connected to the subjects of my books. Speaking about history is an acquired skill. For those of you contemplating giving a history talk, I offer these tips:
Don’t read aloud. Authors often believe that they must read out loud from their work, and many speakers read their presentations from printed pages or from PowerPoint slides, but doing so puts people to sleep. Audiences, who are often as interested in learning about you as your writing, want to understand your historical obsessions. Let your writing speak for itself, give the audience an intriguing story about your path into this history, and look at your audience when you talk.
Avoid distracting language. The study of history is full of jargon favored by specialists or indicative of lazy thinking. I refer to words like contextualize, futurity, zeitgeist, and discourse. Don’t use them. They are the enemies of engaging storytelling. In addition, I make a point of eliminating from my talks the terms I call “The Evil I’s” — the various forms of the words impact, inform, and issue — in the interests of clarity and directness. Create your own hit list of terms to avoid.
Let your audience teach. We all know to ask for questions from the audience, but a skilled history speaker will go further by directing questions to the audience. A standard feature of my talks about my book The Lobotomist and the history of psychosurgery is my call for stories from the audience about their experiences with psychiatric surgery. People have risen to give the most amazing personal accounts — many of which I wish I could have included in my book — and one person even displayed a set of lobotomy tools she had brought with her. (Her father was a psychosurgeon.)
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