Becoming an author, and a question of accent
Yesterday I had the pleasure of speaking at the annual conference of the French chapter of the Society for Technical Communication. (Feel free to download the slides from my talk, "Beyond Technical Communications: Moving from Technical Communicator to Author", to learn a little more about how I got into this computer book writing lark.)
This was only my second public speaking engagement, and I'm sure it showed - not that I was nervous exactly, but I still need to learn to project myself better (and not forget some of the points I wanted to make). I only hope at least some people in the audience got more out of it than the gentleman who came up to me at the end and told me, in French, that he'd found my Scottish accent hard to follow and had missed about one word out of every five!
Comments
Stuart, as Program Chair of the STC France Chapter Conference, I thoroughly enjoyed your presentation - and I understood just about every word! Don't be so hard on yourself: It certainly didn't show that this was only the second time you've spoken in public, though I do agree that you need to stop apologizing and minimizing your achievements (which are considerable)! Oh, and one of the golden rules of presenting... nobody knows what you were going to say anyway, so if you forget to say something, just move on and nobody will be any the wiser ;-)
Stuart Culshaw | 01:57 , 8 2007