Why public speaking matters now more than ever 

The house lights dim. A woman, her palms sweating, her legs trembling just a little, steps out onto the stage. A spotlight hits her face, and 1,200 pairs of eyes lock onto hers. The audience senses her nervousness. There is palpable tension in the room. She clears her throat and starts to speak.

What happens next is astounding.

The 1,200 brains inside the heads of 1,200 independent individuals start to behave very strangely. They begin to sync up. A magic spell woven by the woman washes over each person. They gasp together. Laugh together. Weep together. And as they do so, something else happens. Rich, neurologically encoded patterns of information inside the woman’s brain are somehow copied and transferred to the 1,200 brains in the audience. These patterns will remain in those brains for the rest of their lives, potentially impacting their behavior years into the future.

The woman on the stage is weaving wonder, not witchcraft. But her skills are as potent as any sorcery.

Ants shape each other’s behavior by exchanging chemicals. We do it by standing in front of each other, peering into each other’s eyes, waving our hands and emitting strange sounds from our mouths. Human-to-human communication is a true wonder of the world. We do it unconsciously every day. And it reaches its most intense form on the public stage.

The purpose of my new book is to explain how the miracle of powerful public speaking is achieved, and to equip you to give it your best shot. But one thing needs emphasizing right at the start.

There is no one way to give a great talk. The world of knowledge is far too big and the range of speakers and of audiences and of talk settings is far too varied for that. Any attempt to apply a single set formula is likely to backfire. Audiences see through it in an instant and feel manipulated.

Indeed, even if there were a successful formula at one moment in time, it wouldn’t stay successful for long. That’s because a key part of the appeal of a great talk is its freshness. We’re humans. We don’t like same old, same old. If your talk feels too similar to a talk someone has already heard, it is bound to have less impact. The last thing we want is for everyone to sound the same or for anyone to sound as though he’s faking it.

So you should not think of the advice as rules prescribing a single way to speak. Instead think of it as offering you a set of tools designed to encourage variety. Just use the ones that are right for you and for the speaking opportunity you’re facing. Your only real job in giving a talk is to have something valuable to say, and to say it authentically in your own unique way.

You may find it more natural than you think. Public speaking is an ancient art, wired deeply into our minds. Archaeological discoveries dating back hundreds of thousands of years have found community meeting sites where our ancestors gathered around fire. In every culture on earth, as language developed, people learned to share their stories, hopes, and dreams.

Imagine a typical scene. It is after nightfall. The campfire is ablaze. The logs crackle and spit under a starry sky. An elder rises, and all eyes turn and lock onto the wise, wrinkled face, illuminated by the flickering light. The story begins. And as the storyteller speaks, each listener imagines the events that are being described. That imagination brings with it the same emotions shared by the characters in the story. This is a profoundly powerful process. It is the literal alignment of multiple minds into a shared consciousness. For a period of time, the campfire participants act as if they were a single life form. They may rise together, dance together, chant together. From this shared backdrop, it is a short step to the desire to act together, to decide to embark together on a journey, a battle, a building, a celebration.

The same is true today. As a leader — or as an advocate — public speaking is the key to unlocking empathy, stirring excitement, sharing knowledge and insights, and promoting a shared dream.

Indeed, the spoken word has actually gained new powers. Our campfire is now the whole world. Thanks to the Internet, a single talk in a single theater can end up being seen by millions of people. Just as the printing press massively amplified the power of authors, so the web is massively amplifying the impact of speakers. It is allowing anyone anywhere with online access (and within a decade or so, we can expect almost every village on earth to be connected) to summon the world’s greatest teachers to their homes and learn from them directly. Suddenly an ancient art has global reach.

This revolution has sparked a renaissance in public speaking. Many of us have suffered years of long, boring lectures at university; interminable sermons at church; or roll-your-eyes predictable political stump speeches. It doesn’t have to be that way.

Done right, a talk can electrify a room and transform an audience’s worldview. Done right, a talk is more powerful than anything in written form. Writing gives us the words. Speaking brings with it a whole new toolbox. When we peer into a speaker’s eyes; listen to the tone of her voice; sense her vulnerability, her intelligence, her passion, we are tapping into unconscious skills that have been fine-tuned over hundreds of thousands of years. Skills that can galvanize, empower, inspire.

What is more, we can enhance these skills in ways the ancients could never have imagined: The ability to show — right there in beautiful high-resolution — any image that a human can photograph or imagine. The ability to weave in video and music. The ability to draw on research tools that present the entire body of human knowledge to anyone in reach of a smartphone.

The good news is, these skills are teachable. They absolutely are. And that means that there’s a new superpower that anyone, young or old, can benefit from. It’s called presentation literacy. We live in an era where the best way to make a dent on the world may no longer be to write a letter to the editor or publish a book. It may be simply to stand up and say something . . . because both the words and the passion with which they are delivered can now spread across the world at warp speed.

In the twenty-first century, presentation literacy should be taught in every school. Indeed, before the era of books, it was considered an absolutely core part of education, albeit under an old-fashioned name: rhetoric. Today, in the connected era, we should resurrect that noble art and make it education’s fourth R: reading, ’riting, ’rithmetic . . . and rhetoric.

The word’s core meaning is simply “the art of speaking effectively.” Fundamentally, that’s the purpose of my new book. To recast rhetoric for the modern era. To offer useful stepping-stones toward a new presentation literacy.

Our experience at TED over the last few years can help point the way. TED began as an annual conference, bringing together the fields of technology, entertainment, and design (hence the name). But in recent years it has expanded to cover any topic of public interest. TED speakers seek to make their ideas accessible to those outside their field by delivering short, carefully prepared talks. And to our delight, this form of public speaking has proved a hit online, to the extent that, as of 2015, more than 1 billion TED Talks are viewed annually.

TED’s mission is to nurture the spread of powerful ideas. We don’t care whether this is done through something called TED, TEDx, or in any other form of public speaking. When we hear of other conferences deciding they want to put on TED-style talks, we’re thrilled. Ultimately, ideas aren’t owned. They have a life of their own. We’re delighted to see today’s renaissance in the art of public speaking wherever it is happening and whoever is doing it.

The campfires of old have spawned a new kind of fire. A fire that spreads from mind to mind, screen to screen: the ignition of ideas whose time has come.

This matters. Every meaningful element of human progress has happened only because humans have shared ideas with each other and then collaborated to turn those ideas into reality. From the first time our ancestors teamed up to take down a mammoth to Neil Armstrong’s first step onto the moon, people have turned spoken words into astonishing shared achievements.

We need that now more than ever. Ideas that could solve our toughest problems often remain invisible because the brilliant people in whose minds they reside lack the confidence or the know-how to share those ideas effectively. That is a tragedy. At a time when the right idea presented the right way can ripple across the world at the speed of light, spawning copies of itself in millions of minds, there’s huge benefit to figuring out how best to set it on its way, both for you, the speaker-in-waiting, and for the rest of us who need to know what you have to say.

Are you ready? Let’s go light a fire.

This post has been adapted from Chris Anderson’s new book, TED Talks: The Official TED Guide to Public Speaking, on sale now from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.