In 1949 REA published a guidebook for co-op employees who were assigned to advocate for electricity. It’s a wonderful general guide for activists and advocates and teachers of all kinds. It covers public speaking, demonstrations, dealing with the media, dealing with coop boards, and recording and evaluating your own results. I wish I’d heard some of these hints when I was young!
On public speaking:
Three qualities are essential characteristics of a speaker’s attitude towards his subject-familiarity, interest, and fairness. Familiarity with your subject enables you to speak with authority, and contributes to your own self-confidence. You are more effective when you can get across to your audience the feeling that you know a great deal more about the subject than you have time to cover.
Since most questions have more than one side, fairness is an essential attitude. While you will present your own case with as much clarity and force as possible, be careful not to omit or distort facts that do not coincide with your point of view. You can best hold the sympathy of the audience if you are careful not to misrepresent the other side.
Modulation covers tone, force, quality, and pace. Changes in all of these help you avoid monotony. Keep your voice normal in tone, neither too high nor too low. Unless you are a trained speaker you probably don’t have much control over the quality of your voice, but try to vary it so that changes in your voice occur in response to changes in subject matter. You can emphasize a thought through the use of either more or less force than in your normal speech. Speak at a speed that is neither too slow or too rapid, and remember the value of a pause and a change in pace.
On graphics:
Nothing can be quite as dull as a list of facts and figures presented in a droning voice at an annual meeting or printed at length in your news letter or newspaper. Yet these figures are mighty useful in getting a story across, if interestingly presented. There is no trick in thinking of stories that can be told with charts. The trick is in telling them in a clear, easy-to-understand, and above all, interesting way. Every successful chart observes these basic rules:
1. Tells one story at a time.
2. Tells that story simply.
3. Makes that story interesting.
Here are some ideas for making your charts interesting: 1. Try to present facts pictorially. For instance, if you are contrasting the number of farms electrified to the unelectrified, show the electrified as a black silhouette with lighted windows; the unelectrified all black. Or illustrate the unelectrified by means of a child studying under a kerosene lamp in contrast to a child studying under a good electric lamp. As you begin to think about what you want your charts to do, many pictorial methods will present themselves. The important thing is to use them. Even if they are a little more crude than you would like them to be, they will still be more interesting than a bar or line chart.
Living graphics! Love it. Reminds me of an animated graph I did in 2018 when I was more animated.
Polistra's Mill 