Mel Grubb read my post on Public Speaking and Movement onstage and inspired me to write this post with his comments.

"I think a good background in stagecraft could benefit a lot of public speakers. Simple things like basic blocking, "cheating" your face toward the audience, finding and eliminating your particular "tics" or problem words, etc. Speakers who say "basically" more than once every five minutes drive me up a wall.  'Essentially' is even worse." - Mel Grubb in comments and email.

He struck another of my nerves. I was on a conference call just yesterday with people that will go unnamed partly because I don't want to call out anyone (don't worry it's no one local) and partly because I can't remember who was talking or what they were talking about because I was so distracted. I IMed with Larry Clarkin about it and this is a snip of the conversation.

Josh Holmes‎‎:
I'm really hoping that he'll really use the word really to really make a really good point soon.

‎‎Larry Clarkin‎‎:
really?

‎‎Josh Holmes‎‎:
Really really...

My wife actually reminded me of a story from a class that she took where the professor used Um and Ah non-stop. There was at least one lecture where they focused on counting the number of Um and Ah's that he used rather than listening to the presentation.

The primary reason that speakers fall back on these type of words is that they are used to fill the air while the speaker is constructing the next sentence in their head. Even though most speakers are terrified of it, Silence is still ok. Some call it Golden. There's a huge difference between dead air and silence. Dead air is when nobody is saying or thinking anything. Silence is when it's quiet.

In addition to my background in theatre, I was a member of a ToastMasters International for 4 years. In fact, I was president of my chapter for a year. As an organization, they have a great curriculum for teaching people the basics of speaking. While we, including me, have been obsessed with the format of the slide deck, they have been continuing to educate great speakers by focusing on delivery and real speech writing. There's a series of talks that you have to give. Some of these are using props. Some are very serious and dramatic. Others are humorous speeches. Side note - I actually took second in a regional humorous speech competition with a speech about the plight of the thumbless in America.

One of the components of a Toastmaster meeting is an "Ah Counter". This is a person who sits in the back of the room and listens for filler or crutch words. When they hear these, they take a note and they ring a bell. It's the most aggravating thing in the world! The first talk that I did there, despite my background in theatre, sounded like a parade.

"Um, ah, so it's like, um, well, you know a thing that you, ah, might basically find in, um, your, ah, backyard" - Josh Holmes in one of his first public speeches.

You might think I'm joking but you've done it too! There were more filler words in my talk than content. When I realized that it was astounding. After a while, you start consciously weeding out those filler words. You will be at lunch somewhere and be ringing that bell yourself inside your head. At some point later, you have eliminated most of them from your vocabulary. Unfortunately, I've slipped in the 9 years that I've been away from ToastMasters International. I've started noticing that I'll start repeating words in my speech pattern. I've started answering questions with "Sooo, the answer to that question is...". I have got to stop! It's annoying me. I can't imagine what it's doing to you listening to me.

I hope that you'll take this to heart and start listening to yourself speak. First, look for a ToastMasters' club near you with their handy meeting locator. There are 10 clubs within 20 miles of my house and I live in the sticks. If you can't get to ToastMasters, or really even if you can, you should tape your sessions and review them. Watch for movement, speech and more. Make notes and practice with those notes in hand.

This will help you be a better speaker. Even if it's not obvious to you, two things will happen. First, you'll be able to say more in less time and second, people will focus on your message rather than your quirks.

Wednesday, April 30, 2008 4:56:03 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)    Comments [6] 

Movement when speaking is very important.

"Acting is, therefore, the process of illustrating the dramatic action - through activity. Activity is the how; action is the what" - Play Directing by Frances Hodges

For those of you who don't know, I was a theatre major in college. Specifically, I studied directing. I was a decent actor but directing was what I really enjoyed from light design to directing actors and the full blown play. For a ton of reasons, I ended up with an English degree with a minor in Drama and a minor in Communications.

Recently, I was asked to critique a talk by a friend of mine. One of the pieces of feedback that I gave him was that he wanders while speaking. I expressed it as it drove me nuts, but I didn't really go into detail so I'm going to do that here.

I chose the word wanders for a reason. I started thinking about how I would have directed the talk if it were a play and I was directing him. The blocking (movement that the director lays out for the actor) is very important as it emphasizes the meaning of what's being said (or not said) at the moment. One of the many exercises that actors and directors go through when preparing with a script is to tear apart the script line by line, sentence by sentence and assign verbs to those lines. Every line in the script has a verb and action.

"If you can sense the action, the verb will come easily to you" - Play Directing by Frances Hodges

Thinking about the first quote - if the action is the what, the action is what you are trying to get the other person (in public speaking this is the audience) to do or feel. The activity (movement) is how you conveying that to the audience. When you are giving a talk, you are typically trying to convince the audience of your ideas and thoughts around the given topic. To do that, you have to be careful about how you convey your thoughts on stage. Think carefully about each thing that you are saying and what you are trying to get the audience to do or feel with that and what verb and activity should go with that. Are you going to threaten the audience? Retreat from the audience? Are you going to ignore, shame, beg, torment, entrance, lead, relax, motivate, berate the audience? These are verbs and you should think about everything that you say in a talk as conveying some verb. Once you understand the Action and Verb, the Activity, read walking or gesture or other visible motion, that you make on stage will become obvious. Each and every activity is there to illustrate the verb to the audience. It's extraordinarily difficult to motivate an audience while sitting. On the other hand, if you are leaning back against the front of the table, it becomes easier to relax the audience.

The reality is that it's the same in public speaking. It kills me to see someone walking backwards or sideways or heading back to the podium when they are making a big point. What this says (yells, screams...) to the audience is that they don't believe in this point because they are retreating from the audience. As this poor soul gets to the podium and finish the point as they get there - right when they put a large obstacle between themselves and the audience. These are not things that the typical audience member will consciously pick up on, but they will on a subconscious level. If they didn't, directors could go home and actors would wonder aimlessly all over the set. When someone is pacing aimlessly back and forth on stage, they are wandering or lost in thought and pontificating so the audience will automatically start to wander in their thought train as well.

The solution is to block out your session. In other words, choreograph your talk so that your movements match the verbs that you're trying to convey. I'm not going to pretend that this is easy. Especially since many talks have a decent amount of improvisation in them. The trick is to figure out what your big points are and make sure that you nail those.

One way to get started is to pick two spots that you are allowed to be at in the room. Call them home and away. Home will be placed somewhere in the middle of the stage with easy access to your laptop and your water. Away will be closer to the audience and slightly to the right or left of center of the stage. While you are at home - pretend that you a playing basketball and you have to keep one foot planted. You can move your upper body all that you want to but the lower body has to stay still. Only after you have decided to really make a point will you start moving and it will always be movement the the away spot and it's the build up to a point. While making your point, plant on the away spot with both feet square to the audience, shoulders back and speak clearly in a loud firm voice. Hold that position for as long as you need to for the point to really sink in. I'll often make a point and then wait 10 or more seconds for it to sink in. Maybe I'll even wander back to "home" and take a drink while letting it sink in. And then you slide back home to reset before your next point.

As you get comfortable with that you can start getting fancier and start doing more and more.

Monday, April 28, 2008 8:11:52 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)    Comments [9] 

This quarter's ArcReady is coming quickly. This quarter we are talking about Software + Services (S+S). This is Ray Ozzie's vision of the future of the industry. It's a vision that encapsulates SOA, SaaS and Web 2.0 and really takes it to the next level. SOA can be how you compose, govern and control your services but it doesn't talk enough about delivery of the software to the user. SaaS is a great way to deliver software if your users are willing to rent the software. It A: doesn't work for every user base and B: doesn't address multi-headed clients where you might want a desktop client, web client and a mobile client. Web 2.0 is in the same boat. Web 2.0 can define the user's experience with RIA, collaboration, collective knowledge and more. These tenants of Web 2.0 that we discussed in the last quarter (See the video of the session posted on the ReMix07 Boston site) are engaging on a number of levels but it doesn't really address some of the enterprise concerns of security, accountability and more.

Software + Services really builds on top of all three of these ideas. Come learn more in a city near you.

For the full abstract - see http://www.arcready.com.

* means I'm speaking...
** means that we're actually doing a last quarter's Web 2.0 session followed by this quarter's Software + Services session. They go well together and I missed Louisville and Grand Rapids last quarter.

That's going to be a tough 2 weeks on the road there to be honest. 12/7 - come to my funeral as I die from Red Bull overdose. :)

Microsoft ArcReady - Downloads

Tuesday, November 06, 2007 6:26:11 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)    Comments [0] 

I had a lot of fun with the Boston Remix session that I picked up. I did the Web 2.0 talk that we've did for the ArcReady sessions. It was an amazing operation to watch G. Andrew Duthie (aka DevHammer) and crew locked away in the media room working tirelessly to get the keynote and other select sessions on the web site. I'm honored to be one of the selected sessions that they put on the web site as there was a ton of great content at the conference.

The content was originally put together by Jon Rauschenberger, CTO of Clarity consulting. That being said - I have a very different delivery than Jon does so even if you saw him do it - take another look and see if you pick anything new. This is a discussion about what the tenants of Web 2.0 are and how they apply to your applications whether you are in the enterprise or consumer space.

It's cut up into 4 parts due to file size limitations on Channel9.

Web 2.0 and Beyond, Part 1

Web 2.0 and Beyond, Part 2

Web 2.0 and Beyond, Part 3

Web 2.0 and Beyond, Part 4

After watching my session, then I guess that you can check out the Brad Abrams keynote. :)

All of the REMIX07 VIDEOS

Friday, November 02, 2007 3:52:23 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)    Comments [0] 

 This past weekend I was privileged to attend and speak at the third iteration of the Day of .NET. I was one of the original organizers of the Day of .NET along with John Hopkins and Jason Follas a year and a half ago. They have far surpassed the original vision which was to just do a cool event for South-Eastern Michigan. The Ann Arbor Day of .NET is now one of the staple events in SE Michigan and they have moved it up to an every 6 month cadence.It's even being exported to a number of other locations including Grand Rapids and Memphis.

The basic tenets are that:
A. Content is king. Over glitz and sponsors and everything else, this conference makes it's mark by delivering rock solid content year after year. There were talks about .NET 3.0, WCF, LINQ, Astoria, Story Driven Design and Fitness, the Dynamic Language Runtime (my talk :) - more on this topic coming soon), and even XNA. 20 sessions in all + 5 vendor driven half sessions. That's a lot of fantastic content.

B. See rule A. :)

C. Leverage sponsors to cover the costs of the venue, food, T-shirts and more. I know that there's been talk of requiring some type of registration fee of all the attendees. So far that's not happened. There are a lot of benefits to the fee based attendance. It means that the variable costs (food, T-shirts and the like0 are covered based on the number of attendees rather that coming out of the flat fees that the sponsors have put in. There's about 30-40% drop off from registration on free events. That's because the people registered don't have any skin in the game and decide that they don't feel like it or it's not a priority to show up. This is frustrating to all the organizers because it makes capacity planning really hard and it's a slap in the face with all of the hard work that they've done to make this event amazing.

D. Nobody makes any money off of this. At different points, we discussed paying for different speakers to come in but we keep getting such great speakers that we haven't ever resorted to that. I'm really hoping that we never have to. in the

E. Maintain your independence. While sponsored in part by Microsoft, there are many sponsors and none of them control the content or anything else - just get their name on the web site and other publicity. The independence of this conference and others like it is crucial. It means that they are able to take chances on "non-approved" content, maintain some level of credibility and attract an audience that would not be interested in a Microsoft or other sponsor driven marketing style event.

All of that being said - the community run aspect of this means a lot of work for the guys that are running the event and it really requires a good committee to do it right. John Hopkins and Jason Follas do a fabulous job year after year and should be proud of their work. I helped out the first year but was too busy with new job to help out last spring so Darrell Hawley stepped up, responsibilities were shifted and they pulled off an amazing event. This year Darrell Hawley was busy so they pulled in Patrick Steele, Chris Woodruff and Jeff McWherter to help out. At this point, there are parts of the event that were really hard that are on autopilot such as the registration system. The first two years were interesting because they didn't have a registration engine and had to scrounge for one. Now they have one written that is just flicking a switch on and off to control the registration. That's cool and needed. The web site was really hard the first year and now it's pretty much writing itself when they add in the speakers, sessions and assignments. The giveaways were really hard the first couple of years but there have been a lot of great strides making that as automated as possible. I'm really impressed by the organizational and leadership abilities demonstrated by John Hopkins and Jason Follas to really make this a repeatable and sustainable event.

Thanks guys!

Day of .Net in Ann Arbor Fall 2007

Wednesday, October 24, 2007 10:50:10 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)    Comments [2] 

Jeff Blankenburg already did a fantastic post on DevLink. John Kellar and his crew did a fantastic job pulling this conference together. In its second year - I was impressed with the whole event from the speaker’s dinner to the quality of speaker that this event was able to attract. There were 5 regional directors, 19 MVPs and some of the heavy hitters from Microsoft including Ron Jacobs and Brad Abrams. For some reason they let me speak too.
Have I mentioned that Brad Abrams is my new hero! I’m not belittling any of the other speakers because there were some amazing speakers and things that happened but I feel compelled to brag on Brad a little here.
I saw Brad at Boston Remix but I got to actually meet and spend some time with him at Devlink in Nashville, TN. This is a community conference, large for a community conference but a community conference none the less which is what makes this all the more special. First, someone on Brad’s level is actively engaging the community is very cool. For those of you who don’t know who he is, he was one of the original 5 on the CLR team. He has moved all the way up from writing the String class to his current position as the owner of the entire UI platform. That’s WPF, Silverlight and AJAX.  Between him and Scott Guthrie (his boss) – I can’t think of another company whose brass get out into the community the way these guys do.

Anyways, back to the story. Brad did the opening keynote where he did a fabulous job. He also did some other sessions with a lot fewer people in them. When he wasn’t talking, he was attending sessions like a normal attendee and between sessions and at lunches he was hanging out in the lobby and just talking to people. It was fun sitting in on a lot of those conversations as they ranged from Test Driven Development to the Dynamic Language Runtime to Kathleen Dollard and Billy Hollis taking him to task over complexity in the frameworks, timelines and more. At this point in the conference I’m really blown away by Brad and how approachable he is. He told me to call him and chat about some of the questions that I have around Silverlight road mapping. I know that he meant it and I’m going to take him up on it after we’ve both had a chance to recover from our travel this past couple of weeks.
Then I heard the about what he did on Saturday afternoon and was completely blown away. John Kellar, the main conference organizer, wrote me to tell me about it and I found Brad's post on it. Brad went to listen to a talk on AJAX but the speaker didn’t show. There were 30 people in the room that were, understandably, getting bent out of shape about it. So Brad steps up and asks – “Who wants to see me do some AJAX demos?” An hour fifteen later – the crowd was completely jazzed by the stuff Brad was showing off the cuff. That’s very cool of him and shows that he is truly invested in the community and still has the technical chops to backup any of his things he says.
It’s truly impressive and that’s why Brad Abrams is my new hero!

Friday, October 19, 2007 12:37:56 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)    Comments [1] 

I'm speaking at eRubyCon next week (7/16-7/18) joining the other speakers such as Neil Ford, Justin Gehtland, Jim Weirich and Joe O'Brien among many others. It's going to be an exciting conference. I'm speaking on Silverlight (keep scrolling down - it's about halfway down). Here's the Abstract:

Introduction to Silverlight

Silverlight is the latest in the continuum of technologies from Microsoft to help you create differentiated user experience in the supplemented web space. Based on XAML (eXtensible Application Markup Language) for its UI and backed by a number of different options for logic including C#, JavaScript, Visual Basic, IronPython or IronRuby (once it’s released) – it’s a exciting new tool in the back of tricks for any web developer. It brings with it a rich networking stack, fantastic media support, scalable vector graphics and much more on both Windows and the Mac in all of the major browsers including IE, FireFox, Safari and Opera. In this session, we will explore the boundaries of Silverlight, see the integration points and hosting options between Ruby and Silverlight and talk some about what’s coming with IronRuby.

I gotta say, it's been a ton of fun putting together this session (not implying that I'm done). I'm playing with so many new technologies and ideas that I'm sure that I'm doing things exactly wrong but it's fun and I've got a cool demo working. I wish that I had IronRuby bits, but the IronRuby bits are to be released at Oscon the following week according to John Lam...

erubycon - Columbus, Ohio

Wednesday, July 11, 2007 5:14:24 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)    Comments [0] 

This is a gag video from 4 guys on the mobile team (Loke, Mike, James and Rob Tiffany) showing a lot of the worst practices for presentations. The really sad part is that it's histerical because it's true. I've seen multiple examples of the worst practices in multiple presentations over the course of time.

Link to Jason Langridge's WebLog - MR Mobile! : MEDC Video - Worst practice of presentations

Saturday, May 12, 2007 3:23:42 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)    Comments [0] 

Wow I've been swamped. There's so much to blog about in the past couple of weeks so I'm just going to catch some of the highlights.

Ann Arbor Day of .NET was on 5/5/2007. It was fantastic! It sold out at 250 people and of that there were 210 people show up. That's actually really good as most free events have a 40% droppoff and they had less than 20% droppoff. The only downside on the day was that with less than a 20% droppoff - pizza was a little short at lunch.

They are actually thinking about going to every 6 months instead of every 12 months. I think this would be fantastic!

I kicked off the day with a session on User Experience technologies at Microsoft. I borrowed from some of the materials that we are putting together for the upcoming ArcReady (Check the site for dates and times across the entire central region - Detroit on 5/25 in two weeks for all those that attended Day of .Net). We dipped into WPF, AJAX and Silverlight. My favorite demo is the Silverlight Airlines Demo. It shows a truly out of the box user experience that's not all glitz and glammor but a truly solid UI for a true business application. Many of the demos, while showing off the platform really well, are marketing apps that show lots of 3D and animation. My customers often look at the glitzy demos and say that they are not doing 3D so they don't look at the technologies. What they are missing is that there are real benifits here with enabling truly rich interfaces that go well beyond text and pictures.

I had two more 30 minute sessions. In both of those sessions the overwhelming requests were to have more Silverlight content. I had nothing prepared for these sessions but they went really well. In the first session, I pulled Don Burnett, who started Michigan Interactive Designers, out of the crowd and asked him to do a tour around Expression Blend and Silverlight. He got up, completely unscripted, and did a fantastic job! I will definitely be bringing him in to do more demos and presentations - especially when we have a designer based crowd. It turns out that he used to work with Bill Wagner (my former business partner when I was at SRT Solutions) on the Lion King Animated Storybook.

In the second session, I was on my own but I showed Top Banana, the DLRConsole (python and javascript version - IronRuby will be released as a CTP from CodePlex later this year) and talked about the .NET support in Silverlight 1.1 Alpha. Yes - I actually wrote some Python and did a simple overview for people at the conference. It was a fun day!

Here are some of the resources that we talked about during the three talks:

•Windows Forms @ .NET FX Developer Center
http://msdn.microsoft.com/netframework/windowsforms/

•WPF @ MSDN Developer Center
http://msdn.microsoft.com/winfx/reference/presentation/default.aspx

•.NET 3.0 (WPF, WCF, WF) Community Site
http://www.netfx3.com/

•Silverlight
http://www.silverlight.net

•ASP.NET AJAX @ ASP.NET Developer Center
http://msdn.microsoft.com/winfx/reference/presentation/default.aspx

•ASP.NET AJAX Community Site
http://ajax.asp.net/

•DirectX @ DirectX Development Center
http://msdn.microsoft.com/directx/

•Microsoft Visual Studio @ Visual Studio Developer Center
http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/

•Microsoft Expression
www.microsoft.com/expression

Day of .NET site

Link to Day of .Net in Ann Arbor 2007 - Home

Don Burnett's write-up of the event.

Link to Don.NET's WPF Designers Blog: Eastern Michigan Day of Dot Net

Wednesday, May 09, 2007 3:39:46 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)    Comments [3] 

Larry Clarin (one of my fellow Architect Evangelists) has a great write-up of the ArcReady tour and a bit about the new one coming.

Larry Clarkin on the upcoming ArcReady events

From the ArcReady site:

Architecting the next generation of software. The why, the what and the how.

Microsoft’s journey towards creating new technology strategies, platforms, tools and practices is to drive the next generation of software for consumers and the enterprise. It’s not without irony that one of the most neglected and challenging components of the software design process is understanding how to identify, design and implement the ‘experience’ that an individual will have with an interface. Learn how Microsoft is elevating ‘user experience’ to a first-class citizen in the software design and development process. Understand why ‘user experience’ may be one of the most important parts of an Architect’s job in creating new software that will matter.

Our next ArcReady program is called “Architecting for the User Experience.” Our guest speaker will be Chris Bernard, UX Evangelist for Microsoft. Together with the Central Region Architect Evangelists, we’ll discuss the role of the ‘user experience’ in architectural design and provide hands-on, practical guidance for getting better results in your own projects. We’ll discuss WPF, WPF/e, XAML and the new Expressions suite of products that allow designers, architects and developers to build great ‘user experiences’ using the same base technologies. More importantly, we will discuss how architects can work with software design professionals in new and innovative ways to create the next generation of ‘experiences’ and products that will be demanded by consumers and the enterprise.

Session 1: "Why the User Experience Matters in Architecture"

Session 2: "Architecting for the User Experience"

Join Us for This Free Event.

Show Cities and Dates

• Houston - 05/07/07
• Dallas - 05/08/07
• St Louis - 05/09/07
• Kansas City - 05/11/07
• Austin - 05/15/07
• Downers Grove - 05/15/07
• Minneapolis - 05/16/07
• Des Moines - 05/18/07
• + Nashville - 05/21/07
• + Louisville - 05/22/07
• + Cincinnati - 05/23/07
• Indianapolis - 05/24/07
• + Detroit - 05/25/07
• * Memphis - 06/11/07
• Milwaukee - 06/12/07
• * Cleveland - 06/13/07
• * Columbus - 06/14/07
• * Grand Rapids - 06/15/07

The ones with the + are where Chris and I will be speaking together and the ones with the * are were I will be speaking by myself or with a partner such as Jeff Blankenburg.

Link to Larry Clarkin - Architecture meets User Experience at upcoming ArcReady events

Registration for the next round of ArcReady events - http://www.arcready.com

Monday, April 09, 2007 12:14:19 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)    Comments [0] 

 Were you at Day of .NET last year? Couldn't get enough? This year there will be two Day of .NET events in Michigan! That's right, you read it right - two Day of .NET events in Michigan! The first will be in Ann Arbor at the Washtinaw Community College on May 5th and the second will be in Grand Rapids at Davenport University on May 19th. These are two distinct events with dif