Poise is not some elusive or innate characteristic. It’s a series of choices, all of which can help you better connect with your intended audience. This course will help you identify those choices and teach you how to make them in a way that consistently enhances the clarity of your message and the effectiveness of your delivery.
This course is part of the Good with Words: Speaking and Presenting Specialization
Offered By
About this Course
No background is needed
What you will learn
How to hold the attention of a wide range of audiences
How to project a powerful combination of confidence, competence, and charisma
How to arrange your content in clear, memorable packages
How to use a well-tested suite of rhetorical rhythms to enhance your delivery and linguistic sophistication
Skills you will gain
- Communication
- Poise
- Advocacy
- Rhythm
No background is needed
Offered by

University of Michigan
The mission of the University of Michigan is to serve the people of Michigan and the world through preeminence in creating, communicating, preserving and applying knowledge, art, and academic values, and in developing leaders and citizens who will challenge the present and enrich the future.
Syllabus - What you will learn from this course
Week 1 | Poise: Vocabulary
Poise is not some elusive or innate characteristic. It’s a series of choices, all of which can help you better connect with your intended audience. This course will help you identify those choices and teach you how to consistently make them.
Week 2 |Poise: Speaking Studies and Speaking Exercises
We’ll follow up the “Speaking Stories” we learned about last week with a new, research-filled section called “Speaking Studies.”
Week 3 | Rhythm: Vocabulary
People who have taken our companion course Good with Words: Writing and Editing may remember some of the rhetorical moves we’ll be learning about this week, including anaphora, epistrophe, and the Rule of Three. But even if these techniques are new to you, I hope you’ll soon try to incorporate them into your various speaking opportunities. There are good reasons why everyone from John F. Kennedy, to Margaret Thatcher, to Martin Luther King relied on them to get important points across.
Week 4 | Rhythm: Speaking Studies and Speaking Exercises
Congratulations on making it to the final week of the first course in the series “Good With Words: Speaking and Presenting.” We’ll finish up with some additional material on rhythm and then get a chance to combine rhythm and poise together in a speaking exercise that involves a popular U.S. president, an acclaimed war correspondent, and the 1993 winner of the Nobel Peace Prize.
Reviews
- 5 stars66.66%
- 4 stars26.66%
- 2 stars4.44%
- 1 star2.22%
TOP REVIEWS FROM SPEAKING AND PRESENTING: POISE
Great course with a lot of additional resources to help improve skills !
It opened my exers to the patterns and structure of effective verbal communication.
About the Good with Words: Speaking and Presenting Specialization
Suppose you were good with words. Suppose when you decided to speak, the message you delivered—and the way you delivered it—successfully connected with your intended audience. What would that mean for your career prospects? What would that mean for your comfort level in social situations? And perhaps most importantly, what would that mean for your satisfaction with the personal relationships you value the most? This specialization is designed to help you find out. Based on an award-winning course and workshop series at the University of Michigan that has been taken by students training to enter a wide range of fields—law, business, medicine, social work, public policy, design, engineering, and many more—it removes the guesswork from figuring out how to communicate clearly and compellingly.

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