172 8.3 GatherinG and UsinG sUpportinG Material
the United States has doubled every year since 1950. Joel Best, author of
Damned Lies and Statistics: Untangling Numbers from the Media, Politicians, and
Activists, points out that actually doing the math quickly demonstrates how
wildly inaccurate this statistic is. If one child was killed in 1950, two in 1951,
four in 1952, and so on, the annual number by now would far exceed the
entire population of not just the United States but also of the entire Earth.^20
Both as a user of statistics in your own speeches and as a consumer of
statistics in articles, books, and speeches, be constantly alert to what the sta-
tistics actually mean.- Make your statistics understandable and memorable. You can make your statis-
tics easier to understand and more memorable by dramatizing, compacting,
exploding, or comparing them, as described in Table 8.2. - Round off numbers. It is much easier to grasp and remember “2 million” than
2,223,147. Percentages, too, are more easily remembered if they are rounded
off. Most people seem to remember percentages even better if they are ex-
pressed as fractions. - Use visual aids to present your statistics. Most audience members have diffi-
culty remembering a barrage of numbers thrown at them during a speech.
But if the numbers are displayed in a table or graph in front of your lis-
teners, they can more easily grasp the statistics. Figure 8.3 illustrates how a
speaker could lay out a table of statistics on how private health care in the
United States is distributed among various age groups. Using such a table,
you would still need to explain what the numbers mean, but you wouldn’t
have to recite them. We discuss visual aids in Chapter 14.
Table 8.2 Ways to help Your audience Understand and remember statistics
Strategy How to Do It Example
Dramatizing Get listeners’ attention by strategically
choosing the perspective from which you
present the statistic.Listeners might pay greater attention if you say that genetics
exposes 90 percent of people to the risk of a disease than if you
report that 10 percent of people have a genetic variation that
protects them from the disease.^21
Compacting Express the statistic in units or limits that are
meaningful or easily understandable to your
audience.A fairly common way to compact a statistic is to express a
staggering amount of money in terms of cents: “We have
accumulated over 3.2 trillion dollars in unsecured consumer debt.
With an estimated 237 million adult citizens, that averages out to
$13,500 for every American adult.”^22
Exploding Add or multiplying related numbers—for
example, cost per unit times number of units.
Because it is larger, the exploded statistic
seems more significant than the original
figures from which it was derived.“... lowering the growth rate of health care costs by
1.5 percentage points per year will increase the real income of
middle-class families by $1,500 in 2020; $10,000 in 2030; and
$24,300 by 2040. That’s real relief for real people.”^23Comparing Compare your statistic with another that
heightens its impact.“The [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] recommends
fluoridating water between 0.7 parts per million (PPM) and 1.7
PPM... To put PPM into perspective, 1 PPM is like 1 cent in
$10,000.”^24Copyrighted by pearson education, Upper saddle river, nJ