The sciences and engineering have, on the whole, done better on this score than the humanities. Science and engineering students learn early in graduate school to give short, snappy presentations, heavily spiced with helpful visual aids, in direct, ordinary language that focuses on memorable conclusions. Yet even in these fields, many people still have a lot to learn about the skills of public speaking. One reason this has happened is the dominance of written language in academic culture. Although writing and public speaking are very different arts, it has become acceptable to treat public speaking as the mere reading of a written text.
Stage fright is something everybody has to handle in their own way.
But academic culture is something we can deliberately change. This article reviews the principles of academic public speaking, in hopes of contributing to the long-term improvement of our norms. In our obsession with persuasive argumentation, academics sometimes forget about the third item on this list. Some people think it follows automatically from the first two. Some even scoff at the goal itself.