All presenters should Twitter, to practice compressing an idea into 140 characters. More clarity, more impact. End of post.

Blather.

If you watch any speaker long enough, you notice interesting patterns in their behavior.

Here’s Annabel Crabb’s lovely analysis of Kevin Rudd’s range of hand gestures, including the ‘Dead Spider’,'Bidding For Erotic Drawings At Sotheby’s’, and my favorite, ‘Trying To Catch Evasive Frog With Upturned Pint Glass’.

“Good morning and welcome, ladies and gentlemen.”

Pic Great Beyond

Victoria Beckham has reportedly taken acting and elocution lessons so she will come across as ‘more human’ when she steps into Paula Abdul’s seat on American Idol.

And she shouldn’t be mocked for this: actors spend lots of time with vocal coaches, and that’s why they’re interesting to watch on the screen. Some people have it naturally, others need more work.

Barack Obama is human, Kevin Rudd… well, you can practically hear the whirring of the tiny servo-motors and sophisticated vocal synthesis circuits that make his performances so reasonably human-like.

Naturalness is a desirable quality in your presentations, but it’s hard to do in an environment as unnatural as the stage. Here are five quick tips to help you come across as more human.

1. Open With A Story About Yourself

Humans have weaknesses, and we have a subconscious distrust of people who come across as too perfect. So open with a story that opens a little window into you, the person, rather than you, the Human Resources Director or whatever your title might be. Thanks to social media, the whole world is broadcasting its personal life into the public arena, and sharing a little of it helps breaks the ice. Obviously it’s important to keep it relevant. ‘Here are some photos of my new baby niece’ won’t cut it.

But if someone can make a bestselling book and movie out of life lessons they learned from their Labrador, you can draw on your adventures with your family, dog, salamander, neighbors or clients for a few interesting anecdotes that will lighten up your subject.

2. Vary Your Vocal Tone

Flat, monotone delivery robs your delivery of naturalness and makes you come across like a corporate robot. Concentrate on varying your tone up and down. The secondary benefit of this is that the effort of doing it shows in your face, giving you more energy and a wider range of facial expressions. Watch TV presenters and see how they vary tone and pace.

3. Break The Rhythm

Normal human communication goes back and forth randomly. Speeches tend to follow a rigid routine: talk, click, talk, click, end, any questions? Pause from time to time, and ask the audience questions. Create a conversation rather than a broadcast. It’ll break you away from your pre-prepared answers and give things a more relaxed feel.

4. Don’t Fear Contractions

Some speakers come across like they’re reading a letter from a lawyer, because they believe that contractions sound unprofessional. So they say ‘We could not believe what we had seen’, rather than ‘We couldn’t believe what we’d seen’, which is how you’d normally say it. Cautionary note - this doesn’t extend to dropping your g’s, as in ‘We’re fixin’ to deliver them cost cuttin’ initiatives’.

5. Leave The Lectern

Audiences judge naturalness the same way nature does: by watching, listening, and sniffing the breeze. They look for signs of openness, like open palms, eye contact, smiles, a confident stance. Lecterns block all of that from view, leaving you as just a head poking up out of a box. If you want to come across as more human, loosen that death-grip on the lectern and come out where they can see you. That’s why experienced reality show judges rise up out of their chair when they want to get their point across.

I wouldn’t suggest you go this far, though, all that noise and teeth-baring can be seen as a threat in the animal kingdom or corporate world.

I’m working my way through a digital box full of Chaser episodes I missed while travelling, so apologies to readers in Australia for month-old news, but it’s important for our international visitors to see a world-class language mangler at the lectern.

I refer, of course, to Prime Minister Kevin Rudd.

Orwell foretold his arrival half a century ago in when he wrote 1984, in which language was an important tool in keeping people under control. In Newspeak:

“Any word in the language . . . could be used as either verb, noun, adjective or adverb.”  *

Watch Kevin as he pulls out an invisible sock puppet and drones out this stream of Kevspeak to the German media:

“It’s highly unlikely that you’ll have anything emerge from the MEF by way of detailed programmatic specificity.”

God knows what they would have made of that, given that Germans all speak much better English than this. Probably something like:

“Why does this man not use a professional speechwriter like every other leader in the world?”

Inspired by Will.i.am setting Obama’s words to music during the US Presidential campaign, The Chaser recruited a batch of prominent Australians to do the same for some classic Ruddisms.

Forget Yes We Can. Never have Appropriate Processes or Natural Complementarity carried such emotional power

* Nicked from this informative article about Orwellian business language in the New Statesman.

After his naughty TV swearing slip-up on the weekend, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd was visibly pulsating with illicit pleasure. He looked like a small boy who’d just discovered where his dad kept the Playboy magazines.

“I’m in real strife here, Lindsay, dig me out,” he beamed.

I’m one baaaad mother of a Prime Minister, he was thinking.

The studio audience of sacked Pacific Brands staff thought it was great.

Most people see the PM as a guy with the swearing vocabulary of Ned Flanders. If he’d said “goshdarn it to heck“, nobody would have been surprised.

These mild expectations gave his outburst much better impact, like Clark Gable’s “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn!” at the end of Gone With the Wind.

The arguments over whether the Rudd slip was pre-scripted will go back and forth, but so what if it was?

When you’re trying to communicate with any kind of audience, particularly in a situation where empathy is really important, it’s helps to show your human side - a point lost on most CEO’s after they’ve announced mass layoffs.

The swearing was a welcome relief to defuse a difficult situation that the PM isn’t going to be able to fix. If that was part of a plan, then well done for having a plan that worked.

According to those who were there, the sacked workers ‘felt like he actually cared about us.’

That’s an achievement for a proven language mangler. To pick a line at random from tonight’s news - “We’re in the middle of a jobs consequence flowing from the global financial crisis.”

Mistakes humanize us, particularly if you’re presenting from a position of power.

A lot of people plan their presentation on the premise of how can I avoid making any mistakes? The result is an hour or so of defensive dullness.

Much better to approach it asking how can I make this really interesting for everyone? and embrace the possibility of the odd mistake.

“And cue the Barry White CD…”

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Really great presenters understand the power of imagery, using words to conjure up vivid pictures in the audience’s mind.

Like Barack Obama’s recent:

“To those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent, know that you are on the wrong side of history; but that we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist.”

That final line leaves a very clear image that will remain with the listener a long time.

Other images make you feel a bit, well, uncomfortable.

Regardless of how you feel about Kevin Rudd, nobody could accuse him of being a sexy man. Calm, methodical, in control, that’s what we expect from Kevin Rudd.

Over the car radio this morning came this news item:

“Kevin Rudd is set to unveil his stimulus package in Parliament today.”

Unveil? Stimulus? Package?

Please, think of the children. As we head further into difficult times, we must find different words for this sort of announcement.