Reading the audience.Smart is something that you can define in many definition. This is because smart is measured by many activities in human life. Here I want to tell you what is smart in public speaking.
Imagine all the people in the world are in one place. Let's separate the (sorry) stupid people, because here we're talking about the smart one. So now we got the smart poeple in public speaking left. Here are 3 types of smart people in my definition:
1st. People who got smart thoughts, but cannot deliver it well. They got brilliant ideas but it is only hanging around inside their head and cannot change the world. This is maybe because they are too shy or got no talent in conversation.
2nd. People who got smart thoughts, can deliver it well in a charming way, but they cannot read the situation infront of them. We can find these people in college. Their thoughts are amazing and how they deliver their thoughts are fantastic. They use good language in a good sentense. The thing is, they cannot read how interest the audiances are about their thoughts. The audiances are not always interested in our thoughts. Maybe they are tired, or got many things to do, or maybe they only need something to get their spirit back. But these smart people in my 2nd definition doesn't understand about it. They got brilliant ideas, good in delivering it, but doesn't realize that the audiances cannot give attention to them. Sometimes these people are too enjoy with them self in delivering their thought. They spend too much time doing "bla bla" without knowing how's the audiances. It means nothing. These smart people are just the same talking to a kitten.
3rd. This is the last one: people who got smart thoughts, can deliver it well in a charming way, AND they can read the situation infront of them. They can read how interested the audiance are, figure what are the important things they should deliver without wasting any time, and understand how to make the audiance listen to thier thoughts. Maybe they got 5 arguments which they might deliver, but because they know that the audiances are not interested, they only use their 2 important arguments so the audiances can get what is the point without wasting of time.
Unfortunately, only a few of smart people in this definiton.