Today I am analyzing a Ted Talk given by Linda M. Collins at a TEDx event at Pennsylvania State University entitled "Reducing Smoking Deaths: Is it Rocket Science?". In her talk Collins presents behavioral interventions, like counseling, to meet the goal of lowering the amount of people who smoke in the United States to 12% by the year 2020. She uses the example of NASA's successful moon landing to detail a way to design interventions methodically and analytically so that we can be sure the interventions are working to lower the number of smoking adults. After all, NASA met there goal of putting a man on the moon in ten years, why should this goal be any different?
The title of the speech sets up the subject quite nicely. From the title the audience, and I, knew she would be talking about the smoking epidemic in this country. Everyone knows that smoking is bad, and they should try to quit. But because so few do quit successfully, the audience was expecting the speech to lay out a new method to encourage stopping tobacco use. This she did, but she also criticized the way that clinical trials that try to determine the way to help people stop smoking are run. I, for one, also did not expect the use of the NASA example, however I thought it tied in nicely to the lesson of the talk.
The ideal shape of a presentation
I think that the speaker did a very good job of setting up the contrast between what is and what could be. She begins by setting up why smoking is bad. She puts the statistics in terms which her audience can understand, saying that "the equivalent of the entire population of Atlanta dies because of cigarette smoking" and "the equivalent of the entire undergraduate population here" die because of second hand smoking every year. That created a jaw-dropping moment, because it put the statistics into tangible amounts the audience could grasp. People on the campus of Penn State know how massive the undergraduate population is (about 46,000 students according to Google). She then contrasts our failure to lower these numbers with our great success of landing someone on the moon. She jumps back and forth from how we currently help people quit smoking and how we worked to get to the moon to show how, if we applied the same concepts to smoking, we might get the same results. She then presents utopia, the study she is collaborating on to determine behavioral interventions that have the greatest chances of helping someone stop smoking. She talks about how this study could also be applied to help those with substance abuse problems or other disorders. This helps the audience to see her solution as the ideal way to approach the future.
her facial expressions do not convey excitement about her ideas
I think that Collins could have improved this talk by working on her delivery. For most of the speech her face was impassive, and, although she spoke passionate words, her vocal inflection did not reflect passion. She also shifted awkwardly on the stage as she spoke, and this left the impression that she felt uncomfortable. She also had no visual aids. I feel that some graphs depicting the smoking trends in America, or even a picture of an early NASA prototype would have helped the audience have a clearer understanding of the message. Improving the nonverbal aspects of her speech would help Collins become a more effective speaker and share her message easily.
This applies to my service learning organization because Kentucky Center for Smoke-Free policy routinely works on clinical studies to help people quit smoking. Many of Collins' ideas would be helpful for them to utilize as they work towards a smoke-free tomorrow. If you would like to learn more, you can visit the Kentucky Center for Smoke-Free Policy here.
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