If you want to be someone people will talk about after a public speech, you need to go beyond what most people do in their preparations. You need to look at people who already know how to keep their audience's attention and borrow elements, keeping what's successful in mind as you go forward. The following four points are here to help you out:

You Need Catchphrases

The importance of catchphrases is something we have experienced since childhood, all through adolescence and into adulthood. Marketing jingles, the memorable one-liners of our favourite action heroes, and things successful businessmen and media personalities or authors said that stuck with us. These are all extremely quotable things, the kind of things people share by word of mouth and social media. 

These are memorable phrases and concepts you can communicate in short sentences. You need to build these into your presentation; think of something people can meme, quote, tweet, or name. Make this a priority, so your audience won't have to work for it, digging for easily special meaning. Hopefully, your presentation has plenty of material to work with, something both compelling and new.

Share Concrete, Not Subjective Advice

You can split the public speaking people into groups - those who rely on catchphrases above all else and those who tend to focus on the technical side of things and plenty of data. Both of those get a lot of attention from audiences worldwide, so there is no wrong path regarding being inspirational or memorable in this case. The most important thing is to remember to give concrete advice and be on point, not generalising and giving advice anyone can come up with. Depending on the nature of your presentation and public speech, this may or may not apply, but in all cases, the message your speech must present should be well-honed and valuable to your audience. You also need to give concrete examples of why your advice works and how that applies to the audience's needs. Provide information and data to back up your claims, as that is part of what will convince your audience of the truth of your statements.

Make People Want to Write Something Down

You may have had an experience where you saw someone speaking, but you didn't feel like writing anything down. You may have even experienced the opposite with watching someone who wasn't the best speaker, but you wrote a lot of exciting data down for later use. Writing down or recording means that people find the information relevant and interesting. Inspiration is essential, but it must be paired with helpful information to make it matter. You can't simply tell people what they already know, such as "You need to make your brand more popular" or something similar; people need to be given concrete and useful information, something worth writing down and memorising, then utilising in their daily lives.

Include at Least One high-impact Chart or List

Images with rich and interesting data do very well in presentations and social media. Though images do much better than text, unsurprisingly, colourful images also do a great job. In industries like marketing, for example, sharing images with meaningful information is a great way to get your point across. The same goes for many other subjects, especially when combined with text and data. The best part about these images is that people can learn a lot from the slide or image itself; they won't have to look deeper into the subject on the spot to discover your meaning.

©Presence Training

Today's #quotable from #saimariejohnson #limitations #letnobodydefineyou#defineyourlimits #breaktheboundaries #believeachieve #inspireaspire #justdoit#standupforwhatyoubelievein #bethechangeyouwanttosee #authorsaimarie#positivemantras #influentialdecisions #selfmade #builtforsuccess

This was the Goodreads Classic Horror Lovers Tales to Chill Your Blood group read in October 2017. I listened to it on Kindle. This volume contains five stories: "Green Tea" "The Familiar" "Mr. Justice Harbottle" "The Room in the Dragon Volant" "Carmilla" I will go through and discuss each story separately.

"Green Tea"--I have read this story before. It's interesting, although the way it's written is a bit on the dry side. It's told with detachment, which I suppose makes sense as it's told through letters written by Dr. Martin Hesselius, a paranormal investigator. The interesting component was the concept of green tea as a substance that can cause a person's third eye to open and to allow them to see into the spirit world. The unfortunate clergyman who is the focus of the story is able to see a monkey that continues to haunt him until it drives him crazy. It could have been more suspenseful, honestly. 3 stars "The Familiar"--A psychological horror story about a man who is being haunted by a figure from his past as a sea captain. Another use of the trope of a person being driven mad by his perception of something no one else can see. I was not particularly impressed by this story. 2.5 stars "Mr. Justice Harbottle"--a story about a judge who is haunted by the spirits of those he wrongly condemned to death. Nice build of suspense. I think the writing is much better in this story than "Green Tea" and "The Familiar". Ironically, I read the original version of this story, "An Account of Some Strange Disturbances in Aungier Street" (1853) out of another ghost story volume I was reading in October. I like that it deals with the concept of spiritual consequences for the wrong that one does, even when the person seems to be powerful in this life. The judge was not just a corrupt official, but he was also a degenerate who treated those around him poorly. 4 stars "The Room in the Dragon Volant"--This is more of a suspense story. It reminds me of something Robert Louis Stevenson might have wrote. It's one of the longer stories in the volume, with some involved storytelling. It's not a ghost or horror story, although there initially appears to be supernatural elements. Lots of nice twists in the story that did impress me. 4 stars "Carmilla"--Another reread for me. A very famous novella about a female vampire with some very obvious homoerotic overtones. Carmilla chooses exclusively female victims and uses her allure to develop their attraction to her. Carmilla is a create of simultaneous seductiveness and repulsion to her newest victim, Laura. Readers can plot this story out and see over time that there is something very wrong about Carmilla. The story builds to an exciting climax as Laura's father and other concerned parties work to deal with the evil vampire. This is old school vampire horror. Carmilla is the bad guy. Readers who enjoy the romantic angle cannot escape the fact that Carmilla is a sexual predator who is endangering the life of Laura. This was written during the Victorian age, in which sexual values were highly pruritanical, so it couldn't have been written any other way without national outrage. However, it was a night springboard for plenty of later vampire stories that focused more of the erotic aspects and less on the evil monster component. First time I read this, I found the flowery descriptions tedious. I enjoyed this a lot more this time around, maybe because I listened to the narration. 4 stars. Overall, I would give this 3.5 stars, which is an average of my individual ratings. Le Fanu is a good writer, but his style isn't my personal favorite. He's not the most active writer and I don't find his writing particularly scary (other than a couple of moments in Carmilla). However, he has some interesting ideas and concepts and his storytelling has been influential to the genre of classic horror.

“Now I will destroy the whole world.”
– What Bokonists say when they commit suicide, Cat’s Cradle, Chapter 106

You’d think a story about the end of the world – not just the world of one person, or human civilization, but all life on the planet – would be a grim affair, but Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle is replete with wit, wry humour, and a touching compassion for human frailty.

Vonnegut’s book is no bright dystopia, like the one portrayed in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, nor is it as unrelentingly dark as George Orwell’s 1984. It’s our world that Vonnegut so amusingly satirizes, a world in which human beings are awfully good at creating doomsday devices (atomic bombs, religions), and lying to themselves.

Many have said this is a story about the insanity of the Cold War, but I think it’s a short history of human stupidity. And it is as relevant today as it was when it was first published in 1963. The plot follows a narrator who is writing a book about one of the creators of the atomic bomb and in the process discovers the scientist has also made Ice-9, a substance with the potential to turn all water into solid ice. Why invent such a dangerous thing? Come on, science can’t be held back by such existential worries – it’s progress, baby.

Our world is beset with climate change caused by our technologies. As a species, we’re on the cusp of massive changes that could exceed the pace of evolution – whether from genetic engineering or through fusing our biology with information technology – and this is precisely the kind of book that everyone needs to read.

We need to think about what we are doing with our scientific power, not just proceed blindly.

Cat’s Cradle is the book that helped me find a way I could be a writer: it’s literary, but it plays with science fictional tropes; it’s funny, but there’s a point to it all. In it he invents a religion, Bokonism, that is both humane and ironic, and that puts the lie to all other human religions. He spoofs geopolitics as easily as he skewers human egocentrism. And he does it all with humour and prose that’s accessible and well crafted. It’s deceptively simple, in fact. You can’t help but be moved, and then you think, “How did he do that?”

The short chapters are perfect for today’s attention-deficit-disordered readers (at least, until we have our concentration chips implanted), so it works as a book that everyone at university could read.

Not to mention all the greatideas (foma: a harmless untruth) and kickass existential “Calypso” lyrics from the Book of Bokonon:

Tiger got to hunt,
Bird got to fly;
Man got to wonder, “Why, why, why?”
Tiger got to sleep,
Bird got to land;
Man got to tell himself, he understand.

I was first introduced to Trixie Belden in the 1970's. While I was a fan of Nancy Drew - and I'm sure I'll shelve her here down the road a bit - it was for Trixie and the Bob-Whites of the Glen that I reserved my most committed and unconditional adoration.

Trixie reminded me of me. Also a tom-boy, I skied and sledded and was involved in winter sports. My family mirrored hers, with a garden-crazy stay-at-home mom and a dad who worked outside the home (mine was a doctor, not a banker, but still . . . ). But Trixie had older brothers, something I lacked, but that I longed for, and her best friend, Honey, the poor-little-rich girl had a stable full of horses.

I spent years reading Trixie. I belonged to some kind of a mail-order book club, and one of them would arrive at my house every month. They were poorly made book club editions, with hideous covers, a school library edition of some kind, not a hard-back, but not a soft-cover either.

I read them into tatters. When I left home for college, I left them in a box and at some point they were water-damaged. When I returned home for the summer after my first year of law school, my personal life had completely self-destructed. I had performed well academically, but my marriage had fallen apart. I dug these out and read them, covers falling off, pages disintegrating in my hands, smelling of mildew. I credit Trixie, in a small way, with the survival of my sense of self after the failure that was my first marriage.

When the books were re-released for a new generation of readers, I bought them, ostensibly for my daughter. She has shown no interest, and is off to college, so that ship has likely sailed. I, on the other hand, will still reread them from time to time. I put them in a stack on the end table, and can read from the top of the stack to the bottom in a matter of hours. Reuniting with Trixie and Honey and Di, and Jim Frayne, my original book boyfriend, and Brian and the irritating Mart, is like becoming myself all over again.

Sometimes I think that people are the most themselves when they are around ten years old, before peer pressure weighs them down, and they start to question what they love, to edit themselves for an audience. When I was ten, I loved Trixie Belden. When I read Trixie Belden, I am ten. Again.