Most public speaking—especially business speeches and presentations—has never entirely caught up with its audience’s changed expectations. Our ordinary speaking styles have become more conversational, but public speakers haven’t learned to deliver the physical closeness that mirrors the closeness and casualness we see all the time on television.
   
Moreover, the candid personal disclosure that we have grown to expect when we are seemingly so close to a televised speaker (they're in our family rooms and bedrooms) hasn’t become part of public presentations for the most part—especially, again, in business presentations. After all, no self-respecting CEO is about to pattern his or her presentations after the intimacy of Oprah.
   
So we’re left with some clumsy disparities in public oratory. There is the disjunction between the trappings of traditional public speaking—the podium, the large auditorium, the stage, the lighting—and a style of discourse that is now more conversational than declamatory. Even more significant, a yawning gap exists between an audience’s ingrained expectations, shaped by half a century of watching television, and the behavior of most business, educational, and governmental speakers. Even in the relatively intimate setting of a small conference room, the typical speaker is kinesthetically disconnected, though he or she isn’t physically distant from the audience. Instead of occasionally moving toward the audience to establish a personal connection, speakers usually move back and forth between the podium or projector and the screen in a weirdly hypnotic, solipsistic form of what could be called presentational dance – the Power Point triangle of Death. They might as well be talking to themselves. The audience sits watching in suspended animation through this faux-kinesthetic routine until the question-and-answer session at the end, when attendees are offered a brief chance to move and perhaps to speak.
   
Also, while the speaker’s tone may be more conversational these days, the audience’s intuitive expectation of a personal message delivered at close range usually goes unfulfilled. With the lights turned low so that slides can be seen, with little kinesthetic stimulation from the speaker, and with little opportunity for the audience to respond in turn, the crowd will gradually tune out. The overall, if unintended, effect is to disconnect the speaker from the message, the message from the audience, and the audience from action—the main reason for the oratorical effort in the first place.
   
In a word, it’s boring. And it’s boring because medium, style, and message no longer connect. We expect intimacy, like what we see on television, and instead we get poorly structured, unemotional corporate-speak. 
   
Indeed, given the skewed evolution of public speaking content and delivery against the backdrop of the enforced intimacy of modern media, the wonder is that speeches are ever interesting at all. The few speeches that do manage to ignite an audience’s passion are exceptions to a dismal rule of mediocrity.
   
How can we change this sorry dynamic? By learning to develop content that is appropriate to the aural genre of the presentation, by rehearsing it to find the kinesthetic moments—the opportunities for connection with the audience—and by learning how to deliver it in a conversational style that is compelling for audiences today. By developing, in short, the audience-centered rhetoric needed for the twenty-first century.