Public speaking competitions
Why?
I really mean that - why bother with competitions. I honestly and genuinely can’t see the point. I don’t want to be rude to people who are entering (and doing will in such things - see here, for example) but to me it seems to be akin to such things as
- competitive ironing;
- combat yoga.
You see, to me, a competition in public speaking and/or presenting seems to defeat the whole point of speaking in public - you’re not (or at least you shouldn’t be!) doing it for yourself. If you’re doing it for anyone at all, it should be for the audience. That said, personally I think you should be speaking for the sake of your subject. “Don’t speak unless you can’t not” would be a good Yoda-like mantra, wouldn’t it?
If you’re speaking to compete, almost by definition you’re doing it to see if you can do it better than the other people there - and that’s just plain ol’ ego, isn’t it? Well not entirely, but I’m sure you see what I’m getting at, even if I am overstating my case. You’re certainly speaking to speak, not speaking to say something. You’re even being marked on things like technique!
Now don’t get me wrong, I believe in good technique - good techniques makes it easier to give a good presentation - but it’s not an end in itself… it’s a means to an end. You can deliver damned good presentations with only mediocre technique, somtimes.
Seriously, I can see that there’s a use to “low-level” competitions - they’re a bit of fun and they give some focus to improvements and so on (they’re also a harmless hobby, of course!) but when it comes to things like a World Championship I’m a bit lost.
Quite apart from the innate pointlessness of it all, it gets worse because of the necessity of imposing rules (such as a seven minute time limit). That’s arbitrary. By all means speak for seven minutes if that’s how long it takes to say what you’ve got to say but if it takes four, take four. If it needs nine, take nine.
Add to that the self-referential elements of it (quite a few of the presentations are simply about making presentations 
) fact that the “world championship” only involves Americans and it really does start to sound like not my cup of tea.
One of the big things my teachers were always going on about at school, when the exams came around was this - when it comes to getting decent marks make sure, make very, very sure that you read the question carefully. If you don’t read it, you might not answer it.
Every now and then I talk about graphs in presentations so I’m going to spend some time talking about Ducks and Golden Ducks. No, not terms for cricket batsmen who fail to score but types of graph. Put simply, a duck is a graph or graphic which doesn’t contain any information. A Golden Duck is the same but worse - so much worse, in fact, that it manages to draw attention to itself and what it’s doing. It shouts at you that it’s a waste of space on the page, screen or whatever.