Watching the convention coverage reminded me of one random brush with near-celebrity I’ve had in my life: In grad school, I took a seminar on Faulkner in which Jill Biden was a fellow student.

I wish there were something more to the story, but that’s about it. I believe she used her maiden name during the class, and then for some reason, the professor told us that she was Biden’s wife on the last day. This was before Anita Hill, before the plagiarism scandal, before the aneurysm; Biden was known but not yet notorious.

That seminar was memorable for me, though, because we had to present our papers orally–a little prep for the thesis defense toward which we were ostensibly headed–and it was the first time in my life that I actually enjoyed speaking in public. I was socially awkward and insecure in the extreme, but something about my paper topic lit my imagination, and I found myself eager to deliver it to the class. It was the first time I ever lectured rather than reading a prepared paper, and I really enjoyed the sensation of holding people’s interest with my words. That was the day I decided to become a teacher.

(Some day I’ll have to write a blog post about the day I decided to give up being a teacher. It involved a vice principal who told me I couldn’t fail a kid who had plagiarized a paper. And maybe he was right; we have a vice-presidential nominee who is a well-known plagiarist. And another who is a former beauty queen!)

After I left teaching, I continued to speak in public as part of my job. I am not a very polished speaker. I have an unpleasant, crackly voice and no rhetorical flourishes to speak of. Still, I get a lot of positive feedback on my presentations, and if I were to give advice to anyone nervous about public speaking, I would say that you’ll be a raging success if you do these two things: 1. Speak LOUDLY and 2. Have something interesting to say.

The first is easily, if rarely, done. (Amplification is irrelevant; when you speak loudly, miked or not, you sound interested in your topic, and if you sound interested, your audience will be more interested.) The second is considerably harder. Most presentations I hear are either too general or too specific for the audience. And even if you have the right level of detail, you have to arrange those details to create a narrative arc for your listeners. To do this, you have to edit ruthlessly. Personally, I tend to be too pedantic; I feel a responsibility to share every detail, when my listeners only care about the highlights.

In this country, we don’t emphasize oratory in our educational system, which is probably why as a nation we respond to it so readily. Think about it: it’s relatively rare to hear someone like Obama who can string two coherent thoughts together in public. He’s taken some flack for it, and I heard he even toned down his acceptance speech to mitigate concerns that he’s all style and no substance. But I’m looking forward to having a president who is a statesman. I think it would be terrific if we had something akin to the British tradition of having the Members of Parliament question the Prime Minister right there on the house floor, so he’s forced to give impromptu speeches on a regular basis.