Accustomed As I Am to Public Speaking ...

[Peg Herring]

In a former life, I taught communication: reading and writing, of course, but also speaking and listening. One would be hard put to say which is most important, but it always surprised me that schools usually focus on the first two at the expense of the latter two. We assume that because students are sitting before us and talking to us, they are learning to speak and listen. It's true to a degree, but they (and all of us) often do it badly and keep making the same mistakes over and over.

My favorite illustration occurred when I was teaching world history. We did a two-week unit on India, and I talked about its isolation in early times due to the mountains that separate it from its neighbors. On the test, I asked an essay question: "Explain some factors that contributed to the isolation of the Indians." A girl who had never missed a day, who had sat with her eyes on me and heard every word I said, responded, "I think it really hurt the Indians when we put them on reservations." Dumb? Maybe, but if she'd been really listening, wouldn't she have picked up on the fact that we were talking about a different continent?

Listening is the most important thing we do. From presidential elections to a request that we take out the garbage, information is imparted verbally that we must act on, yet educators assume that students will get better at listening simply from being deluged with information. It's an odd assumption, rather like concluding that a baby will learn to breathe water if we simply plunge him under. Okay, bad simile. We don't die from immersion in sound; we merely learn to tune it out.

Most schools also neglect oral communication. Speeches are haphazardly assigned, poorly explained, and badly delivered. There is seldom instruction on how to speak effectively and consistent requirement to get better at speaking. Yet in most of our encounters in the world, it is by our speech that people first judge us . Aside from the dreaded query letter, which authors live and die by, we are called upon to speak long before anyone sees our writing and reading skills. So why isn't effective speaking taught from Day One and onward?

I thought I'd take a break from writing about writing and share some of what I learned about speaking and listening over thirty years in the classroom. As writers we know that it's critical for us to network, and networking involves speaking and listening well. So if you're interested, stay tuned for some speaking and listening facts and advice between now and Christmas.