How to Write a Compelling TEDx Script: Revise, Get Feedback, Repeat

I just finished writing a script for a TEDx talk and I am certain I have never before put in so many hours into such a short piece. 

I chose to write a script instead of speaking from an outline. The talk needed to be 12 minutes or less and the best way to ensure that would happen was to write a script.

As an academic, writing a TEDx script is like exercising a whole new muscle. I write all the time but had never done this particular form of writing. Learning how to do this well took a lot of time and feedback. Thus, I did something I have never done before: I got a speaking coach who read and listened to multiple drafts.

The first draft of my TEDx talk was similar to talks I have given in academic venues. The talk had place-based and historical references. It explained policies like redlining, White flight, and slum clearance. Here is my attempt at explaining why what I was saying in the talk was novel:

"If you read The Color of Law, then you know that federal policies created racial segregation. If you read The New Jim Crow, then you know that Black communities were devastated by mass incarceration. And, if you read How to Kill a City, then you know that gentrification has led to the displacement of working class and Black people from cities. Now, what you might not know is that segregration, incarceration, and gentrification are connected. My research into the neighborhood where I grew up has taught me that policies that created segregation laid the groundwork for mass incarceration, which in turn made gentrification possible."

I shared a version of the talk with this verbiage with my speaking coach. After listening, she told me she felt like she had just attended a fascinating academic lecture. But, that is not what a TEDx talk is. I needed more storytelling. I needed to cut some of the policy descriptions to make room for the stories. I needed to slow down and tell those stories. I also needed to cut the paragraph above because most people have not read those books.

I also reached out to a developmental editor I’ve worked with in the past, Audra Wolfe, as she has done some work on podcast and radio editing. She told me I needed to tell the stories in a way that evokes the senses and emotions. This was hard. For an academic, I might be a pretty good storyteller, but this was a whole new level. I wasn’t ready to invoke smells. But, I could try sounds. And, I knew I could invoke the visuals. I decided to describe the bus ride from my house in a primarily Black neighborhood to my school in a primarily White neighborhood.

I then presented the talk to a group of generous colleagues. My humanities colleagues, however, told me I needed to slow down and really tell the stories. This meant telling more of my own story as well as that of my friends. It meant providing more details and texture to the stories. This meant cutting even more of the policy discussions.

As a sociologist, I endeavor to strike a balance between storytelling and structural analyses. To tell more stories, I had to cut some of the policy discussions. This was hard as it all seemed so important!

I cut the part about how the Washington Real Estate Board’s code of ethics promoted racial segregation, about how White people were able to access federally-backed loans to open businesses in the 1940s, and about how only 2% of the loans insured by the FHA went to Black borrowers. I also had to cut the part about the wealth gap – DC’s White residents have 81 times the wealth of DC’s Black residents. I had to cut those because I didn’t have the space to explain them fully. There is no use giving a random fact if you can’t flesh it out.

I went back to my speaking coach with my revised script. She suggested I focus and really tell the stories I did tell. I cut the story of a family who left during White flight so that I could flesh out the other stories.

My speaking coach also said I needed a call to action for the conclusion. This was very hard. What should I tell listeners to do?

After a gut-wrenching discussion of the violence of disinvestment, lives lost, and people displaced and imprisoned, I couldn’t think of any policy suggestions that did the topic justice. More affordable housing? Changing lending laws? Providing jobs to formerly incarcerated people? None of these did the topic justice.

I reached out to my brothers, who share my politics and are not academics. I had come up with something about lessons learned and how White supremacy is encoded into laws. My brother Sean said: “Why just acknowledge the harms? Why not abolish the police?” My brother Ian said: “You wouldn’t end a talk enumerating the harms of chattel slavery by vaguely talking about profits over people and the deep roots of White supremacy, right?”

They were right. I had to stay true to my message and my values.

I revised the conclusion and ran it by my colleague and friend, Crystal, who suggested I end by calling back to the stories I had mentioned earlier. So, I did that.

I then gave the talk to three of my closest friends from Washington, DC who are not academics. They suggested I add in at least one uplifting story, so I did that. I ran it by my other brother, Justin, and his girlfriend, Tina. They suggested a couple of points that needed explanation.

I don’t know if you’re keeping count, but I definitely called in a lot of favors for this talk. I asked at least 27 friends and colleagues to either read the script or listen to the spoken version. I haven’t even mentioned everyone here. My colleague Anthony also read it and provided great feedback. He gave great tips on how to phrase things and where to slow down for more impact. My mother gave me feedback on an early version. She told me I needed to narrow down the points I was trying to make. My friend Christina told me I needed to make the argument clearer.

Once the script was done, it still wasn’t over. I needed to rehearse and to figure out how to perform the script. There was a part of the script that was very hard to deliver effectively because of the emotional ride in that part. I reached out to a friend and colleague, Nicole, who is a theatre professor and she stepped in and generously gave me some amazing tips on delivery.

My university agreed to professionally record the talk, so I delivered it on a stage. I got a student to help me with the graphics and the university’s media team put the video and graphics together. It thus looks a lot better than just me in front of the zoom screen.

I didn’t tabulate the hours I put into this effort. But, I know I worked on the talk at least 10 hours a week for 8 weeks, so at least 80 hours of writing and revising. I also spent at least another 40 hours practicing it. I listened to it and practiced it out loud every single day on my afternoon walks.

Was all this effort worth it for the TEDx talk? Watch it here and let me know!

If You Want to Do a TEDx Talk, Start Preparing Now

Exciting news: My TEDx talk "How to Kill a Neighborhood and Make a Profit" will be released on January 23, 2021! 

I have long thought about doing a TED or a TEDx talk. (TEDx events are independently organized TED events.) Thus, when I heard of a local opportunity, I applied immediately. That was in February 2020. As you can imagine, that event was canceled due to the pandemic. 

Once I applied, however, I started giving some serious thought to what I would say in a TEDx talk. To apply, I had to tell the organizers what I would say, so I had already come up with a throughline: Disinvestment in Washington, DC made gentrification possible. 

The throughline is the argument on which your entire talk is based. If you imagine your talk like a tree, the throughline is the trunk and you use the branches to fill the argument out. 

Your throughline should be based on your expertise. I am writing a book on this topic, am a Washington, DC native, and am a sociologist of race. For academics, the expertise and credibility part is straightforward. However, I also wanted to choose a topic I have personal as well as academic interest in. I could have given a talk based on one of my other areas of expertise, but this topic is the nearest and dearest to me because everything I discuss in the talk happened in the neighborhood where I was raised.

Your throughline also should convey something novel or unexpected like Barry Schwartz’s TED talk, which explains that more choice makes us less happy. That’s unexpected, right! 

Tanya Golash-Boza delivering her TEDx talk

The novelty doesn’t have to be something only you know, but it should be novel to a broader audience. For my topic, academics who study gentrification know that gentrification requires disinvestment. However, most people have not thought about the fact that racist housing practices and policies like redlining and blockbusting led to disinvestment in Black communities and made gentrification possible. Another twist in my talk is that the community I discuss is a Black middle-class community, which adds another novel dimension to the conversation on gentrification. 

Once I had my throughline in place, I began to think about which stories I would tell – both from my own story of growing up in a neighborhood that has gentrified and from my research. There are so many stories to choose from, so I had to decide which stories would be the most compelling 

On November 17, 2020, the organizers from the TEDx UC Merced event reached out and told us they decided to go virtual so the event was going to take place in January 2021. And, the script was due on December 23, giving me less than five weeks to prepare. 

Luckily, I had already begun working on the talk because five weeks is a very short time to come up with a compelling script. So, the first lesson in all of this is: If you want to deliver a TED or TEDx talk, start working on it now so that you are ready when the opportunity arises. (There are plenty of opportunities to deliver a TEDx talk – this website lists several events every day!) 

Come up with a throughline and a full outline before applying. First of all, you need a good throughline to apply in the first place. And, secondly, this will give you a head start on preparing. 

When I received my invitation to give my virtual TEDx talk, I had my throughline and a very draft-y version of the talk prepared. Only a few lines from that original draft made it into the final version, although the throughline stayed the same. I worked on my talk every single weekday (and some weekends) between November 17 and the date I delivered it: January 11, 2021. 

I will write a couple more blog posts in the coming days to provide more TEDx related tips. So, please comment below if you have questions!

And, please watch and share my TEDx talk!

How to Deliver an Outstanding Public Lecture

The public presentation of your ideas is an integral part of academia.

It also is a part of academic where we receive minimal training. For many of us, our training in public speaking consists in the opportunity to present research in graduate seminars, and, if we are lucky, the chance to have our “job talk” critiqued by esteemed members of our department.

In a previous post, I provided guidelines on how to deliver an effective presentation. In this post, I will focus on how to deliver an outstanding public lecture.



Why, you might ask, would an academic want to learn to give a memorable public lecture? I can only speak for myself. From my perspective, I work hard at coming up with ideas that I hope will change the way people think about social issues. If these ideas are only shared with other academics, then my work will have limited value. In contrast, if I can learn to translate my ideas into more widely-read pieces, then, perhaps I will have a chance to actually change the way we talk about social issues I think are important. That is the reason I decided to learn how to write OpEds. (By the way, I have had some success this year publishing OpEds!!)

My desire to be relevant is also the reason I decided to work on becoming a better public speaker.

For me, becoming an outstanding public speaker is still a work in progress. I continue to hone my skills and to look for examples of ways to become exceptional. Along the way, I have learned a few things that I will share with you.

Becoming an Outstanding Public Speaker: Style and Content

First of all, I have learned that there are two separate areas you have to work on: 1) Learning to be an engaging speaker; and 2) Having something memorable to say.

I will deal with each of these separately.

Style

Your presentation style is important. An excellent public lecture will have many of the following qualities.

• Evocative images. One of the best presentations I ever saw was about social isolation in Chicago. I saw this presentation over ten years ago and can still remember the photos of children playing in empty lots.
• Don’t read your paper. Or if you do read your paper, make sure no one can tell you are reading. It can be very difficult for audience members to listen to you read a paper.
• Add in some humor. This can be difficult when you are talking about depressing topics, but a joke or two can do a lot to keep your audience listening.
• Tell a story. This can be a story about yourself, about the data, or from anywhere else. The point is that stories are engaging and you should tell one or more. You can organize your whole talk as a story. You can begin with a story. You can use stories to demonstrate points.
• Practice your presentation until you are completely comfortable with it.
• When you go to public lectures yourself, take note of what works and what doesn’t work. And, emulate those talks you find most provocative.

Content

Presentation style is important, but you will not impress an audience if you do not also have substance. This is a bit trickier to describe, but you should aim to make your presentation memorable. Here are a few ideas.

• Your presentation must include information that no one in the audience already knows. If you are presenting based on a book you have already written and some people may have read, then include something extra that did not make it into the book. Or include a backstory. No one should leave the room and think they learned nothing.
• Your presentation should make people think. The audience wants to be engaged. They want to know more. You have made them think about things in new ways. This is awesome.
• Your presentation should have a clear argument. When people leave, they should be able to say: “I went to this outstanding public lecture, where the speaker argued ….”

Those are my thoughts on what makes an outstanding public lecture. I have given dozens of public lectures, yet I continue to hone my skills.

I look forward to hearing your thoughts and seeing the resources you are aware of for giving great talks. Please let us know in the comments section.

PS: I recently came across this post on Lifehacker that has some great tips on giving a public lecture.

How to Create a Power Point Presentation from a Finished Paper

Academic presentations are often based on research in progress or unfinished work. However, sometimes we may find ourselves creating presentations based on full drafts of papers.

What happens when you have completed your 8 or 10,000 word article and now you have to create a 15-minute presentation on the basis of your paper? Luckily, there is a fairly straightforward system you can use to create a presentation from a full paper.



I once heard someone say that a presentation should be viewed as an advertisement for a paper, rather than an attempt to present all of the information in the paper. Keeping this in mind will help you to focus on what’s important and avoid the temptation to attempt to convey all of the rich information in your paper in a brief presentation. Unfortunately, trying to cover too much often means you fail to highlight what’s important.

In my field – Sociology – there is a straightforward formula for giving presentations. I am sure that there is one in your field as well, and it may be very similar to the formula in Sociology. In Sociology, presenters often use Power Point, and presentations often look like this:

• Introduction (1 slide)
• Research Questions/Hypotheses (1 slide)
• Literature Review/Theory (1 slide)
• Methods & Data Collection (1 slide)
• Data Presentation/Findings (3-5 slides)
• Conclusion (1 slide)

Admittedly, many people use many more slides than this, but I advocate for sticking to the rule of no more than one slide per minute. I also think it is important to focus most of your attention on your findings, and as little as possible on other people’s theories and findings. And, you will bore people tremendously if you spend too much time on your methods and data collection. There are many exceptions of course – if your paper is all theory or primarily methodological, then it will look quite different.

To create a presentation from a full-length paper or article, you can pull out the most important parts of the article, based on the above list – or based on the subheadings in your own article.

For the introduction, you can use the same compelling introduction you use in your paper. If you are using Power Point, try and find a provocative image that conveys the point of your paper.

Your next slide should contain your research questions – which your introduction should point to.

Then, spend no more than a minute contextualizing your research questions and project within the literature. Don’t make the mistake of spending too much time reviewing what others have written about your topic. Spend just enough time on the existing literature to make it clear that your work contributes to existing research in the field. People don’t come to conferences to hear literature reviews – they come to hear about new research like yours. The purpose of the literature review is to establish the importance of your work, not to show you have read every relevant article.

Once you have established the importance of your project, explain just enough of your methods and data collection to establish your ability to speak on the topic. Think about the questions people might have – what data set did you use? How many interviews did you carry out? How many months of participant observation did you complete? How many newspaper articles did you code? What is the timeframe for the data? Give just enough information to validate your findings.

Try to get through all of the above in the first five minutes so that you can spend as much of your time as possible sharing the rich detail of your own data and analyses. If you have ethnographic data, you can tell one story from the field for each point you want to make. For statistical data, you can present a table with findings for each finding you wish to highlight. For interview data, you can use one interview quote for each theme you plan to highlight.

Once you have chosen the parts of your findings you wish to highlight, you can leave a minute or two for your conclusion.

As you make each slide, remember to put as few words as possible on each slide, and place an image on each slide to convey your points visually.

How to Give a Fabulous Academic Presentation: Five Tips to Follow

One of the easiest ways to stand out at an academic conference is to give a fantastic presentation. If you have ever been to an academic conference, you should be able to see my point. The majority of presentations at conferences are not very good. This makes it fairly easy for you to be impressive.

In this post, I will discuss a few simple techniques that can make your presentation stand out. It does take time to make a good presentation. However, it is well worth the investment.

Tip #1: Use PowerPoint Judiciously

These days, most good presentations make some use of visuals. The extent to which you should use visuals will vary a lot depending on your field. Nevertheless, there are a few basic things you should know if you will be using PowerPoint or another method of showing visuals.

• Never use less than 24 point font. If you use smaller font, people will not be able to see your information and you will have too much information on the slide.
• Use bullet points. PowerPoint slides do not need full sentences, and should never have a paragraph full of information.
• Use images effectively. You should have as little text as possible on the slide. One way to accomplish this is to have images on each slide, accompanied by a small amount of text.
• Never put your presentation on the slides and read from the slides.
• Do not have too many slides. Definitely do not have more than one slide per minute of presentation.

Tip #2: There is a formula to academic presentations. Use it.

Once you have become an expert at giving fabulous presentations, you can deviate from the formula. However, if you are a newbie, you need to follow the formula. Again, this will vary by the field. However, I will give an example from my field – sociology – to give you an idea as to what the format should look like.

• Introduction/Overview/Hook
• Theoretical Framework/Research Question
• Methodology/Case Selection
• Background/Literature Review
• Discussion of Data/Results
• Analysis
• Conclusion

Tip #3: The audience wants to hear about your research. Tell them.

One of the most common mistakes I see in people giving presentations is that they present only information I already know. This usually happens when they spend nearly all of the presentation going over the existing literature and giving background information on their particular case. You need only to discuss the literature with which you are directly engaging and contributing. Your background information should only include what is absolutely necessary. If you are giving a 15-minute presentation, by the 6th minute, you need to be discussing your data or case study.

Tip #4: Practice. Practice. Practice.

You need to practice your presentation in full before you deliver it. You might feel silly delivering your presentation to your cat or your toddler, but you need to do it and do it again. You need to practice to ensure that your presentation fits within the time parameters. Practicing also makes it flow better. You can’t practice too many times.

Tip #5: Keep To Your Time Limit

If you have ten minutes to present, prepare ten minutes of material. No more. Even if you only have seven minutes, you need to finish within the allotted time. If you will be reading, a general rule of thumb is two minutes per typed, double-spaced page. For a fifteen minute talk, you should have no more than 7 double-spaced pages of material.

Good luck!