How Can a Man Clam?

I found this quote today in an article by Henry Lous Gates Jr. that I was assigned to read for Methods of Critical Analysis, and I thought it was particularly appropriate since we'll be talking about oral presentations next week. Bear with me, it's a bit long...(he is talking about an incident when he was giving a talk to a college honors seminar on Frederick Douglass)

"Everything was neatly schematized, formalized, analyzed; this was my Sunday-best structuralism: crisp white shirt and shiny black shoes. And it wasn't playing. If you've seen an audience glaze over, this was double glazing. Bravely, I finished my talk and, of course, asked for questions. 'Yeah, brother,' said a young man in the very back of the room, breaking the silence that ensued, 'all we want to know is, was Booker T. Washington an Uncle Tom or not?'
The funny thing is, this happens to be an interesting question, a lot more interesting than my talk was. It raised all the big issues about the politics of style, about what it means to speak for another, about how to distinguish between canny subversion and simple co-optation-- who was manipulating whom? And while I didn't exactly appreciate it at the time, the exchange did draw my attention, a little rudely perhaps, to the yawning chasm between our critical discourse and the traditions they discourse upon."

Okay, so if anyone is still with me after that mouthful...I just think that it is a great example of someone not taking their audience into account. This man felt very prepared, had everything organized and ready, but never thought about how the people actually listening to his speech would feel about it. Lesson learned.