If you don’t know TED, you should get to know it.  TED.com is a repository of hundreds of fascinating short speeches, on every subject under the sun.  It’s a tremendous opportunity for speakers and students of public speaking to study the great and near-great on line in tidy little packages. 

What’s fascinating to me is how mediocre, on the whole, these brilliant people with wonderful ideas are.  They’re nervous, they pace randomly, they talk to mediocre slides, they are defensive – they are a catalogue of how not to do it.  That’s partly why they’re so inspiring – even the best have feet of clay.  their humanity makes them feel more approachable. 

And yet, the quality of the ideas does shine through, usually.  These people are opinionated, often a tad condescending, convinced of their righteousness, academic in the bad sense of the word – and yet fascinating. 

I’m going to spend the week talking about a few speakers from this treasure trove, but don’t take my word for it.  Go deep into TED.com and check them out for yourself. 

My first pick, because I’ve been a fan of space flight ever since Star Trek, is Carolyn Porco, a NASA person, and head of the unmanned flight to the moons of Saturn.  I’ve picked her talk to illustrate the right use of visual aids. (http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/carolyn_porco_flies_us_to_saturn.html)

Carolyn’s slides are, quite literally, out of this world, being pictures of Saturn and its moons.  She does manage to convey something of the magic of space flight that NASA’s spokespeople usually manage to kill.  And her story of what the team found on a moon of Saturn – the first time humans had landed anything on a planet in the outer solar system – is arresting.

That said, she commits the classic mistake of an inexperienced speaker.  In her nervousness, she starts out with her hands close to her side, nervously pacing hither and yon, and her gestures are circular, and repetitive, rising from the waist and spreading out, as if she’s trying to unload something, because she is:  her adrenaline.

Speakers instead should find ways of channeling their adrenaline that connect with the audience and build trust and credibility.

Once Porco gets into her topic, she settles down, and becomes quite effective.  It’s a good speech, and one to be studied for an effective use of visual aids.