Vital Speeches Editor Sez: ‘No Reading Speeches Off Your Cellular Telephone!’

My old pal Steve Crescenzo was on a Zoom call with a prospect the other day, a young woman. “About ten minutes into the 30-minute call, she appeared to wipe her mouth. But it LOOKED like she was hitting off a joint,” Steve wrote on LinkedIn. “I ALMOST made a joke. Something like: ‘Ha ha. For a second it looked like you were vaping or smoking a pot pen or something! Ha ha ha!’ Thank GOD that for once I kept my mouth shut (a rare occasion). Because about six minutes later, she did it again! She WAS vaping! I’ll be damned! I have read all the articles about how insidiously addicting these vape pens are. And just about EVERYONE of a certain age does it. But how do we feel about doing it on a business call?”

On behalf of exactly everyone over the age of that young woman I can say: We don’t dig it.

Nor, I’ll add while I have you here, do we dig people reading a speech off a cellular telephone. My wife and I found ourselves at Chicago’s great Gene Siskel Film Center one night last month, to see a documentary by Frederick Wiseman. As you might predict, our 55-year-old asses were among the youngest in the room—except for the stripling Siskel Center staffer, who introduced the film with a 10-minute lecture delivered with a series of frequent glances at his phone.

Young man, I know there’s nothing inherently wrong with reading from notes on your phone—and if you’re conservation-minded, a lot that’s right with it. Still, lad: Know that your audience cannot accept this. We have lived many long years in a world where, if you had something important to say to a large group of people, you either memorized it because you were a genius or you wrote it down on a piece of paper, and referred to that. None of us will live long enough to learn to happily receive a lecture that’s read off a phone.

Luckily, you and your generation will outlive us, and for the latter part of your professional careers you will be able to read speeches with a phone in one hand and a vape pen in another. But by then, you’ll have your own bugbears, and your own gathering sense that no one takes anything seriously enough anymore.