Overview

Desperately eager to reach his students, his sensitivities sharpened by his own past difficulties, Oppenheimer made it a point to pay as much attention to the troubles of his charges as to the intricacies of his subject. His language evolved into an oddly eloquent mixture of erudite phrases and pithy slang, and he learned to exploit the extraordinary talent for elucidating complex technical matters. ^[1]

Daniel J. Kelves

Simply put, speech is what you say in a presentation. A speech targeted to the audience is essential for a presentation's success. Consider J. Robert Oppenheimer's early lectures given at California-Berkeley in 1929. Only twenty-five years old, but already well known for his work on the quantum theory, Oppenheimer began his teaching that first semester with a class full of eager graduate students. Halfway through the semester, though, the number of students registered for his course had dropped to one. ^[2]

The principal reason that students dropped the course was that Oppenheimer did not target his speech to them. For one thing, Oppenheimer's pace was much too fast for the students. Interestingly, although the students considered the pace to be much too fast, Oppenheimer felt that it was too slow. ^[3] Another problem with Oppenheimer's speech was that he made "obscure references to the classics of literature and philosophy." ^[4] The combination of these two problems caused many of the students to complain to the head of the department. However, Oppenheimer was already aware of the problems and worked...