Book review: The Elements of Great Public Speaking: How to Be Calm, Confident, Compelling

Review by: G.A. 'Andy' Marken, Marken Communications:

We believe there must have been a run on getting us speaker assistance books recently because we had no more than put down (for the second time) Bert Decker’s 'You’ve Got to Be Believed' and a nice little paperback arrived that was going to take away all of our anguish, fears and concern whenever we stepped up on stage.

Macinnis does a very admirable job of helping people become comfortable and confident in their public speaking efforts. Each of the 18 chapters includes what we call “call to action” items that you will probably find extremely useful as you prepare your presentation and in your early efforts you’ll want to probably refer to them a couple of days before your next big speech or presentation.

The author covers most of the bases when it comes to speaking venues including weddings and funerals.

The Elements of Great public Speaking does provide simple, clear and direct information and assistance on your word choice and your body language. Actually we found the body language the most interesting and helpful, especially when you’re a panel moderator and/or handing question and answer segments of the presentation.

We’ve had the opportunity to hear Macinnis once in his 30 years of professional speaking and executive training and we do admit he took a boring subject and made it decidedly interesting.

We believe there is a lot to learn from Macinnis’ book if you get a little sweaty, weak in the knees, your eyes glaze over and your mind goes numb when you step up to speak.

We found The Elements of Great public Speaking interesting and informative. Unfortunately we had just put down Decker’s book which we found would help us in business as well as our personal life so we were only luke warm for Macinnis’ advice.

Both authors are good and have solid information to assist you. We would recommend though that you read one and then move on to a different category of self-help or relaxation reading before you read the other. Then you’ll probably find them both of assistance.



Andy Marken
Marken Communications
mailto:andy@markencom.com

October 2008

Buy 'The elements of great public speaking....' online at Amazon:
http://tinyurl.com/6fp6n2
and 'You've got to be believed' http://tinyurl.com/55r7s5