THE GOOD, THE BAD &
THE SPEECH SURVEYS

Now that you're a champion listener, you'll be more able to spot truly engaged audiences when you're behind the podium. As they say, it takes one (listener) to know one (other listener).

For example, if you'd like to evoke appreciative listening during a spoken word poetry performance, you might watch to see if audiences are tapping their feet or cracking smiles. If you want your pupils to engage in informative listening, you might know you're doing well if they break out their pencils and paper to take notes. You'll also be able to tell if your listeners are watching you (a good sign) or sneaking furtive glances at their smart phones (a…not-so-great indicator).

But beyond these cues, there is one potentially powerful tool to tell if you've achieved an outstanding oration or something more mediocre. No, it's not mind reading—although that'd be cool, you'd probably get picked up by Professor X before you got to deliver another speech.

This stunning instrument is the speech survey.

Whether in written or oral form, directly asking audiences about your speech can provide a wealth of information about how you've performed. However, most of the time, speech evaluations aren't exactly a finely honed system. Your friends are likely to tell you that you did a great job no matter what, your worst enemy might sit in the back throwing rotten tomatoes at you, and everyone else probably won't even bother to fill out a survey.

All of these qualify as bad feedback because they can't help you improve your future speeches.

Luckily, you've got us. We'll point out the possible hazards of ineffective evaluations so you can avoid them and teach you techniques for getting truly effective feedback.

In the following lesson, you'll learn more from your buddy, Scott Berkun, as he describes his own experiences, offers his preferred evaluation techniques, dares you to videotape yourself, and introduces you to the wisdom gained from an orator who went by the moniker, Dr. Fox.

Not only will you learn how to gain and interpret useful feedback, you'll finally be able to answer the age-old question: "what does the Fox say?"

Post-Reading Thoughts

Okay, now that you're all set, let's talk speech evaluations. As Berkun astutely points out, survey feedback is often ineffective because:

• Polite people tend to give you an artificial grin and a cheesy thumbs-up, no matter how well or how poorly you did. It's like when your mom hung your macaroni artwork on the fridge (love you, Mom, but you're not exactly an art critic).

• Audiences offer contradictory feedback. You can't make your speech longer and shorter, funnier and more serious, simpler and more complex.

• Hosts rarely set clear parameters for what's expected from your speech and what you're supposed to achieve, which gives audiences no baseline on which to evaluate your performance.

• Without comparisons to other speakers, it's hard to tell how well you really performed in surveys.

• Listeners aren't likely to take feedback seriously unless they know how it will be used. Without a clear purpose, you end up with surveys that read like Yelp reviews—only those with the worst ever or most amazing experiences bother to fill them out. 1/5 stars for unhelpful surveys, would not recommend.

These factors make feedback seem futile. Simply put, most speech surveys are not at all scientific, inappropriately calibrated, and unlikely to seem important to anyone involved.

Fortunately, Berkun isn't all doom and gloom about speech evaluations. Rather, he provides constructive feedback on how to improve constructive feedback (very meta). Berkun provides excellent sample questions on pages 120 and 122. He also suggests that you can make feedback more effective by avoiding the above pitfalls—coordinating the aims of your presentation with hosts, making it clear to audiences that their evaluations matter, and getting past superficial compliments from audiences to ask them what you actually could have done better.

Perhaps the best piece of advice Berkun offers is to videotape yourself speaking and give yourself feedback. Will it feel supremely awkward to deliver the Gettysburg Address to your laptop? Most likely. Will you learn a tremendous amount about how to improve your speaking skills? Most definitely.