I understand you should express love and appreciation for spouse and children in private, not from the pulpit. Also, the spray method of asking for forgiveness doesn’t cut it. Again, do that in private with the person you likely know you offended.

just my thoughts

Jon

Some of these pieces of advice (that everyone in the thread has been giving) are going to get thrown out at the last minute, though. I *can’t* talk if someone asks me to speak last minute: I suspect I may have been skipped over for talking in Sacrament because I flat-out refused to give the opening prayer one day. I really, truly, freeze up if I don’t have time to prepare, and I have to have it written out, period — if the Spirit has been telling me to ‘wing it,’ I’m afraid the abject terror has been too loud for me to hear it.

I’m also pretty sure that if I tried looking up scriptures or telling a joke that I’d rip the paper or accidentally say something blasphemous. For the last ten years I’ve been working on the “make eye contact” thing: practicing on my CTR-8s has helped (yes, I get nervous making presentations for second-graders, and moreover ones that I see every single week.) Once I have that mastered, I plan to go back to working on “go slow enough for people to hear you,” as I think I blew that today, and I also nearly called Jesus Christ the son of the eight-year-old getting baptized. Sigh.

In any case, I hope that your fireside will have a presentation for the folks who collapse into a pile of weepy despair at the mere thought of being asked to speak, and who don’t recover until two to three days after the event. I’m actually still twitching from today, and I only just recovered from my December Sharing Time anxiety. ^_^

Nicely said.

- When it was that you got asked to speak.
- When it was that you wrote your talk.
- What happened to you this week.
- Any quotes from a General Conference talk longer than a paragraph.

I’d make a list of what I hear nearly every week but that would be redundant.

I think having a fireside on how to give better talks is a great idea. Many of us could us the help. If everyone is going to be asked to speak then everybody should get some minimal training.

I will add, though, that I recently heard a talk where the speaker introduced himself with a wonderful joke about plural marriage of all things, and it was both a great joke and a great talk.

However, let us not forget that expressions of humility or incapacity as the result of a lack of preparation or sinfulness, weakness, etc. have a long tradition, particularly in a religious context, and are a rhetorical skill like any other that can be used to good effect.