WordCount is "an artistic experiment in the way we use language. It presents the 86,800 most frequently used English words, rankedin order of commonness. Each word is scaled to reflect its frequency relative to the words that precede and follow it, giving a visual barometer of relevance."

Five tips for overcoming public speaking nerves

Your mouth is dry, heart palpitating, and knees knocking. You go into panic, facing a dreaded public speaking assignment. It doesn’t have to be so. These five tips will give you some strategies to overcome those symptoms and have the butterflies flying in formation. 1. Deep breathing will pull in oxygen. Adrenalin, secreted to help you deal with the fear brought on by little doubts, causes breaths to become shallow, or causes you to hold your breath. Deep breathing will help your brain work to capacity, and forcing the slower pace will quell the panic. 2. Bluff. Stand tall, with shoulders back and chest out. Smile. Even though you don’t feel happy or confident, do it anyway. You will look confident and your body will fool your brain into thinking it is confident. This really works!! Bluff – body and smile 3. Keep you mouth and throat hydrated. Plan to keep a drink on hand while you are speaking., though this sounds impossible. Visualising how you will use it if you need it, and calling up the audacity to do such a thing will carry across to your attitude as you take your place to speak, placing your glass just where you need it to be. 4. Adrenalin sends the blood rushing to the fight/flight centres of your brain at the base of the skull. Place your hand on your forehead and press gently on the bony points. This will bring the blood to the parts of the brain that need it to present your speech best. 5. Know you are prepared. Obviously this depends on actually being prepared, so take every opportunity in the days leading up to the speech to prepare your material. Be familiar with the structure of the presentation, and the ideas to use. Memorise the most important parts, and the parts you are frightened of forgetting. I would memorise the opening of the speech and in the moments before presenting it, would reassure myself that I knew that part, and that would lead on to the rest. It worked!! Further articles to help you with your confident public speaking.

Communication vital to relationships

Once a human being has arrived on this earth, communication is the largest single factor determining what kinds of relationships he makes with others and what happens to him in the world about him." -- Virginia Satir

Verballing

I have to agree with Jay Cross in the post he called Verbals. Words alone really are "a clutzy way to communicate." words are sometimes a clutzy way to communicate. words lack precision. words require mental translation. words force us to play an internal game of telephone, whispering the message to ourselves, reverberating back and forth as the mind seeks patterns. the mind messes with the message as much as a chain of conniving, deceitful interpreters, misunderstanding & shaping & rejiggering the original into what they want us to hear. some educators tell stories to make an end run around the interpreters, to convey meaning even when a few details are out of whack. others turn to multiple media. if i hear it, see it, smell it, taste it, feel it, try it, practice it, challenge it, & teach it, the better the odds that i will learn it. all of which makes one wonder why we cling to words as if words are the only way to teach and to learn. But then in the communications business, particularly in public speaking, we are well aware of that. We use everything we can to harness a person's attention and to get the message across. We supplement verbals with all the body language, gesture and facial expression we can muster to support the message. We vary our pace, pitch and intensity. We use all the "multiple media" we can lay our hands on - judiciously, with forethought about the message, the media and the audience. And what makes him think that teachers don't?

Shock omissions from literary prize list

British author Julian Barnes was named hot favourite for the Booker Prize today, but the biggest shock was the omission of three literary heavyweights from the shortlist for the prestigious award. To the surprise of literary critics, the judges decided not to pick three previous Booker winners - Salman Rushdie, J.M. Coetzee and Ian McEwan - as finalists for the £50,000 ($92,000) prize. Article continues

Email addiction

Are you addicted to email? How much time do you spend checking your inbox? I was fascinated by this report from Media Post on that very subject. Some people are addicted to love, but most of us are addicted to e-mail. According to a new survey conducted by America Online, the average e-mail user checks e-mail nearly five times a day. Yes, that's right. AOL's E-mail Addiction survey examines our e-mail behavior and frankly, it's a little obsessive. The survey found that e-mail users rely on e-mail as much as the phone for communication, spend nearly an hour a day on e-mail, and that 77 percent of e-mail users have more than one mail account. Here are a few of the survey's more interesting findings: --Forty-one percent of e-mail users check e-mail first thing in the morning, before they've brushed their teeth or trudged to the kitchen to make coffee. --Forty percent of e-mail users report checking their e-mail in the middle of the night. (Downright obsessive, yes?) --More than one in four (26 percent) of e-mail users say they haven't gone more than two to three days without checking their e-mail. --Most e-mail users have two or three e-mail accounts (56 percent). The average user has 2.8 accounts. --E-mail users check for mail anywhere: In bed in their pajamas (23 percent); in school (12 percent); in business meetings (8 percent); at Wi-Fi hotspots, like Starbuck's or McDonald's (6 percent); at the beach or pool (6 percent); in the bathroom (4 percent); while driving (4 percent); and in church (1 percent). "Last time I checked God didn't have a Blackberry," says Chamath Palihapitiya, general manager and vice president for AOL's AIM. The survey results, he says, speak "to the fact that e-mail has become such a fundamental way that people communicate. People thought that e-mail was just a business behavior, but it is a social and commonplace behavior." Palihapitiya says it's the first time AOL has conducted a survey of this kind, probing the actual behaviors and habits of e-mail users. AOL recently launched its e-mail service Web-wide. "One of the things we took away from this is that people need accessibility everywhere. They may be at home, at a friend's house, at the office, in the street... one of the things we did with our e-mail product is we made sure it was accessible all over the Web," Palihapitiya says, adding "But just as important, we make sure that it works with your work e-mail. We allow you to use Outlook to get your AIM mail." That's important because the survey finds that 61 percent of all e-mail users check their personal e-mail at work at least three times a day. By syncing with Outlook, AOL mail becomes part of a user's normal work e-mail application. AOL plans to offer mobile e-mail access via Blackberry, mobile phones, and other handheld devices by the fall. AOL says its mail service supports advertising in the body of e-mails. "Our competitors don't do that," Palihapitiya says. It means that embedded ads won't be stripped out when e-mail is delivered in Outlook. The survey's results, Palihapitiya says, will help AOL develop e-mail features and applications that users may find useful. "One of the things that jumped out of us is that e-mail users are really interested in un-sending a message and knowing when a message has been forwarded." He says in AOL e-mail, a user can un-send right away and check the status of whether mail has been opened. AOL is working on a feature that would notify users as to whether a piece of mail has been forwarded to them. More survey findings: --Sixty-one percent of e-mail users check personal e-mail on the job an average of three times a day. About half of those who check personal e-mail at work (47 percent) check it sporadically throughout the day, while about one in four (25 percent) check it first thing when they arrive, 18 percent check it at lunchtime, 8 percent during an afternoon break, and 2 percent right before they head home. --Women are more likely than men to check their personal e-mail at work throughout the day (50 percent versus 44 percent), while men are more likely than women to check their personal e-mail first thing when they arrive in the morning (28 percent versus 21 percent). --Six in 10 of all e-mail users (60 percent) check their e-mail while on vacation, mostly for pleasure (47 percent) rather than business (13 percent). Of those who access e-mail while on vacation, 57 percent say it's very (21 percent) or somewhat important (36 percent) that they have access to e-mail. Get this, AOL has provided a quiz to determine your level of e-mail addiction. The survey was conducted with Opinion Research Corp., which conducted online surveys with 4,012 respondents 18 and older in the top 20 cities around the country to measure e-mail usage. Tobi Elkin is Executive Editor, MediaPost. Just An Online Minute http://publications.mediapost.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=30603

Teams debating - a natural high

Debating is exciting. It's challenging. And it's a great opportunity to work with other people in sharing the excitement, the challenge and the creativity. And team debating offers all of those. I love it. The adrenalin's a natural high and the achievement keep it high. But it also holds its own challenges - of following rules and of working with others far more closely. Loved our chance at it at Communicators Logan City recently, and it was great to watch those new to the whole deal, learning huge amounts.