(from Steinar Kvale, Sage Publications, Thousand Oaks California, 1996, p. 133-135)
a. Introducing questions: “Can you tell me about....?”, “Do you remember an occasion when...?” “What happened in the episode mentioned?”,...
b. Follow-up questions: Direct questioning of what has just been said, nodding, “mm”, repeating significant words, ....
c. Probing questions: “Could you say something more about that?”, “Can you give a more detailed description of what happened?”, “Do you have further examples of this?”,...
d. Specifying questions: “What did you think then?” What did you actually do when you felt
a mounting anxiety?”, “How did your body react?”,...
e. Direct questions: “Have you ever received money for good grades? When you mention
comptetion, do you then think of a sportsmanlike or a destructive competition?”
f. Indirect questions: Projectove questions such as ‘How do you believe other pupils regard
the competition of grades?”
g. Structuring questions: indicating when a theme is exhausted by breaking off long
irrelevant answers: “I would now like to introduce another topic:...”
h. Silence: By allowing pauses the interviewees have ample time to associate and reflect
and break the silence themselves. With significant information.
i. Interpreting questions: “You then mean that....?” “Is it correct that you feel that...?”Does
the expression.... Cover what you have just expressed?”
Most people listening to presentations around the world right now are hoping their speakers will end soon. That’s all they want. They’re not judging as much as you think, because they don’t care as much as you think. Knowing this helps enormously. …The things speakers obsess about are the opposite of what the audience cares about. They want to be entertained. They want to learn. And most of all, they want you to do well. Many mistakes you can make while performing do not prevent those things from happening. It’s the mistakes you make before you even say a word that matters more. These include the mistakes of not having an interesting opinion, of not thinking clearly about your point, and of not planning ways to make those points relevant to your audience. Those are the ones that make the difference.
No matter how much you hate or love this book, you’re unlikely to be a good public speaker. The marketing for this book likely promised you’d be a better speaker for reading it. I think that’s true on one condition: you practice (which I know most of you won’t do). Most people are lazy. I’m lazy. I expect you’re lazy, too. There will always be a shortage of good public speakers in the world, no matter how many great books there are on the subject. It’s a performance skill, and performance means practice.
The easiest way to be interesting is to be honest. People rarely say what they truly feel, yet this is what audiences admire most. If you can speak a truth most people are afraid to say, you’re a hero.
All good public speaking is based on good private thinking. …This means the difference between you and JFK and Martin Luther King has less to do with your ability to speak—a skill all of us use hundreds of times every day—than it does the ability to think and refine rough ideas into clear ones.
Avoiding Boredom. A speaker must set the pace for the audience if he wants to keep their attention. … Think of your opening minute as a movie preview: fill it with drama, excitement, and highlights for why people should keep listening. Be confident in what you say and do. If your talk consists of several problems important to the audience, and you promise to release the tension created by those problems by solving each one, you’ll score big.
