Smiles, a Day Late

I have occasionally told people that if they gave me any topic and two minutes to prepare, I could talk for half an hour on the subject.  That is true partly because I have knowledge of a wide range of topics to draw upon and my years of writing has made me very good at organizing facts.    But my wife, Muri, will tell you that I am also very capable of making things up if I don’t know the facts … and I can be a silver-tongued devil in making you believe what I say.   That’s why I’m good at Balderdash.  Being a writer of fiction and of slightly exaggerated blog post has certainly honed those skills.  I have also been speaking in front of audiences of from 10 to several hundred people for over fifty years, mostly on esoteric technical subjects.  There is no doubt that repeated public speaking has made me able to be more relaxed in front of an audience and able to convert what could be nervousness into excitement.

Who’s Your Audience?

In spite of mediocre grades as an undergraduate in engineering school at the University of Connecticut, I turned out to be a pretty decent engineer once I started working in the emerging field of digital systems design.   I had apparently absorbed more education than my grades would have indicated and applying that education to real problems was a lot more fun than classroom work.   But it also turned out that the social education I’d received in college by being active as an officer in my fraternity (one of the very reasons my grades were mediocre) served me well, too.  I was used to conducting meetings and speaking in front of an audience.   While giving presentations freaked out most of my young colleagues, I took it in stride.   Add in that my abilities as a writer … neglected since high school … were valued for report and proposal writing and I found myself in demand.  I thought I was pretty hot stuff.