Skip to main content

Bournemouth University

Centre for Fusion Learning Innovation and Excellence

Embedding excellence through fusion of education, research and professional practice

  • Brightspace staff resources
  • Assessment & Feedback Toolkit

What can speechwriters usefully teach university lecturers?

Posted June 16, 2018 by Debbie Holley & filed under CELebrate, Coaching/ Mentoring, CPD, Drawing, Education, HE Students, Public Engagement.

Martha Leyton (@marthaleyton)  and Martin Shovel (@martinshovel)  run a company (http://www.creativityworks.net) which helps to create speeches, presentations, pitches, campaigns and brand stories that are engaging, persuasive and memorable. This year we invited them to work with small groups of staff as part of our ‘Large Group Learning’ symposium, to offer some tools and techniques for attendees to try out for themselves, and to share with their colleagues.

Below is Martins blog post:

Martha and I had a wonderful time at this year’s CELebrate symposium. Our session, which ran twice, was titled ‘how can I make my lectures more engaging and interesting for students?’. It might also have been subtitled: ‘what can speechwriters usefully teach university lecturers?’. The topics we explored were rich and varied, as were the excellent contributions from participants. Here are a few things we looked at that might be useful to you as you start preparing your next lecture.

Dare to say less

However interesting the subject of your lecture, and however brilliant your communication skills, the spoken word is a highly inefficient way of sharing detailed content. Put simply, when we listen, there’s a limit to just how much we can take in and retain. The written word is the place for detailed information, not the spoken one.

When we read, we can pause for reflection or to look up a word; we can turn back to a previous page to help us understand something better; we can take our time, perhaps reading a small amount of the text in a single setting, and so on. None of these things is possible when listening to a lecture.

So think carefully about the purpose of your lecture. Reframe the need to make it content-lite as an opportunity to do something different and better. A chance to help students understand the lie of the land. A platform that offers time and space to explore a key concept with them at length and in a variety of different ways. You can use it to inspire them, to warm up your relationship with them, or simply as a helpfully signposted path to a text you’d like them to read.

Write for the eye, not the ear

Even if you don’t plan to read from a text, write out your lecture in full. Good speaking, and writing, are a reflection of good thinking. You may have come across this famous quote, which has been ascribed to various well-known authors:

‘I’m sorry this is such a long letter, I didn’t have time to write you a shorter one’.

The act of writing, and editing, will not only help you clarify your thoughts, it will also help you come up with useful stories, metaphors and analogies that will make it easier for your students to understand what you’re saying.

However, as you write your lecture, do make sure you write for the ear, not the eye. In our experience, the reason there are so many poor speeches and lectures is simple: they tend to be pieces of writing read aloud and, as we have seen above, they tend to be indigestible because they’re too content heavy.

By making your lecture a genuinely oral experience, you’ll improve your students’ experience of it immeasurably. And, with this in mind, don’t be afraid to repeat yourself throughout the course of your lecture – it makes it much easier for your students to follow what you say. (If you’re interested in finding out more about this topic, I highly recommend ‘Orality and Literacy’, a classic study of the subject, by Walter J. Ong. Don’t be put off by the dry title – it’s a beautifully written, fascinating book, one of my favourites! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_J._Ong )

And finally:

Climb the ladder of abstraction slowly

In our sessions, we reflected on a video recording of a lecture by Harvard philosopher Michael Sandel. The lecture can be found here and I would encourage you to watch it:

https://youtu.be/TSH-m5GtrzE

It’s a lecture designed to introduce undergraduates to two key – and potentially very dry and abstract – moral theories. As you watch the lecture, note the skill with which Sandel takes his students on an engaging and entertaining journey from the concrete to the abstract. As you watch, make sure you have a good look at the faces in the audience as they hang on to every word. The learning is clear: when introducing your students to abstract concepts, it’s always good practice to begin by grounding the concepts in familiar, everyday situations, as Sandel does.

Thanks again for inviting us to your wonderful symposium and good luck with your next lecture!

copyright 2018 Martin Shovel

Tags: Large group teaching, lecture, Public engagement, public speaking

Leave a Reply

Click here to cancel reply.

Your details
  • (Your email address will not be published in your comment)

XHTML: You can use these tags: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>

Twitter feed

Tweets by @flie_bu

Subscribe for FLIE Blog Updates

We offer FLIE Blog updates to offer subscribers a weekly digest of posts made on the FLIE site. To subscribe to these email updates, simply subscribe below.


 

Click here for more information.

Archives

  • March 2023
  • February 2023
  • January 2023
  • December 2022
  • November 2022
  • October 2022
  • September 2022
  • August 2022
  • July 2022
  • June 2022
  • May 2022
  • April 2022
  • March 2022
  • February 2022
  • January 2022
  • December 2021
  • November 2021
  • October 2021
  • September 2021
  • August 2021
  • July 2021
  • June 2021
  • May 2021
  • April 2021
  • March 2021
  • February 2021
  • January 2021
  • December 2020
  • November 2020
  • October 2020
  • September 2020
  • August 2020
  • July 2020
  • June 2020
  • May 2020
  • April 2020
  • March 2020
  • February 2020
  • January 2020
  • December 2019
  • November 2019
  • October 2019
  • September 2019
  • August 2019
  • July 2019
  • June 2019
  • May 2019
  • April 2019
  • March 2019
  • February 2019
  • January 2019
  • December 2018
  • November 2018
  • October 2018
  • September 2018
  • August 2018
  • July 2018
  • June 2018
  • May 2018
  • April 2018
  • March 2018
  • February 2018
  • January 2018
  • December 2017
  • November 2017
  • October 2017
  • September 2017
  • August 2017
  • July 2017
  • June 2017
  • May 2017
  • April 2017
  • March 2017
  • February 2017
  • January 2017
  • December 2016
  • November 2016
  • October 2016
  • September 2016
  • August 2016
  • July 2016
  • June 2016
  • May 2016
  • April 2016
  • March 2016
  • February 2016
  • January 2016
  • December 2015
  • November 2015
  • October 2015
  • September 2015
  • August 2015
  • July 2015
  • June 2015
  • May 2015
  • April 2015
  • February 2015
  • January 2015
  • December 2014
  • October 2014
  • September 2014
  • August 2014
  • June 2014
  • April 2014
  • January 2014

Other services

© Bournemouth University 2023. All rights reserved.

  • Copyright
  • Disclaimer
  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms & Conditions of use