reading 1 bizcommch8 presentations excerpts
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CHAPTER 8 :
BUSI NESS PRESENTATI ONS
WHY ARE PRESENTATIONS SO IMPORTANT?
WHAT MAKES A GOOD PRESENTATION?
WHAT DOES IT TAKE TO GIVE A GOOD PRESENTATION?
A t t i t u d e a n d e thos Techn ique
Yo u m u s t b e h e a r d
You m us t be seen
Yo u m u s t c o n n e ct w i t h p e o p l e
You m us t he lp you r au d ience to fee l good
You m us t deve lop your m a te r i a l so tha t peop le can easi l y
unders tand i t
Yo u m u s t w o r k w i t h y o u r v e n u e an d t e c h n o l og y
HOW DO YOU DESIGN A GOOD PRESENTATION?
Organ isa t ion and Cont en tCo l l ect i ng the m ate r i a l
Organ i s ing the m ate r i a l
D ec id i n g h o w t o t a lk t h e m a t e r i al
Eve ry pa r t i n a l l t he o the rs
DesignI m a g e s o r t e x t ?
Para l le l i sm
Sl ide t i t l es
Del ivery Nerves
Pro j ec t i on and voca l va r i e t y
Phys ica l p resence
Q& AThe de l ica te a r t o f t he conc lus ion
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Chapt e r 8 BUSI NESS PRESENTATI ONS
We had snakes in Raiders of the Lost Arkand bugs in Indiana Jones
and th e Temple of Doom, but supposedly mans greatest fear is
public speaking. Thatll be in our next picture. Steven Spielberg
In the above quotation, the illustrious director and presenter from one of the worlds
biggest presentation factories (Hollywood) is referring to a very famous statistic about
what people fear most; apparently, the fear of getting up and speaking in public is
usually greater than the fear of death, which comes in second.
Why do people get so anxious at the thought of giving a presentation? Ask yourself
how you feel about giving presentations.
Do you enjoy it? Is the thought of doing it worse than actually doing it? Is it the preparation that worries you? Why? How do you feel when youve finished a presentation?
Again, think about the nervousness attached to giving a presentation. Why do you feel
agitated, with butterflies in the stomach, sweaty palms, thumping heart, dry mouth; why
do you quiver and shake, keep taking deep breaths, and why do you feel like going to
the bathroom, maybe even feel slightly sick?
Is it because you feel that theres a lot at stake when you get up in front of people?
Before we consider some of these questions in detail, lets think of presentation-
anxiety from another perspective: why do you think seasoned business people often
dread attendingpresentations?
Many people do in fact find attending presentations fraught with risk. They run a
high risk of being bored, confused, and having their time wasted. So often they find
themselves sitting in a darkened room (depressing already, or are we here to watch a
movie, or go to sleep?), with some disembodied voice reading out a lot of confusing
information and ideas from a screen, often as if it were a list:
one bullet at a time.
(The stultifying effect of too much information delivered in a series of bulleted lists is
often jokingly referred to as dying of boredom in a hail of bullet points.) Very often
they will not find out exactly why they are being subjected to the whole thing, nor will
they know exactly what they are supposed to do as a result. They find themselveshaving to struggle to make sense of what they see, or even to catch what they hear.
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They sometimes feel mildly insulted when someone is speaking to them, it would
seem, without looking at them. The speaker is reading the list right off the screen (they
can do that themselves), and sometimes they dont know whether they should listen or
read (they feel that they may as well read the boring handouts, since theyre lost
anyway). The worst offender here is the presenter who says, Its too small for you to
read, so Ill read it for you.
They sometimes get embarrassed for some poor soul fumbling with the computer,
forgetting where he or she is in a slide-show, forgetting what he or she wants to say
about a slide or a chart, and just plain suffering. It can be painful to have to feel sorry
for someone; this is the emotion, so often linked to pity, that can lead to contempt.
They can feel irritated, or even agitated, by fancy colours and too much movement
on the screen . . . too many silly animations. As a result, they can feel irritated with the
person who has given the presentation. And this cantbe good for that person!
So going back to our earlier reflections on why giving presentations makes us
nervous, maybe were right to fear presenting! Maybe our anxiety is just plain, common
courtesy. Perhaps we have a natural aversion to the idea that we might inconvenience
people, bore and irritate them? Or maybe we fear them judging us as boring, irritating
time-wasters!
Maybe our nervousness is natural. Of course it is! Sweaty palms, trembling,
increased heart-rate, flushed face, dryness of the mouth, and possibly nausea are
actually side effects of adrenalin in our bodies. Adrenalin is a hormone secreted into our
blood streams in response to a sense of danger, urgency, or intense sexual attraction.
Its function is to enhance our physical performance, primarily to help us avoid danger orachieve an extra burst of physical effort, to help us catch our quarry or defeat our
enemy (its known as the fight or flight hormone). It sharpens our senses, diverting
blood to the heart and brain, increases heart and respiratory rates, and releases glucose
into the bloodstream, giving us more energy. Some people become addicted to it (and
some people simply lovedoing presentations).
So lets now think again about our earlier questions about why we feel
uncomfortable anticipating a presentation we have to give, and why we feel nervous
before giving it. A presentation is both a threat and an opportunity!
Its just not natural or sensible to stand up alone in front of lots of people, exposedlike that. You cannot really see clearly what these people are doing or thinking, or
whether or not they pose any threat to you. Instinct tells you that this kind of exposure
is potentially dangerous. Keep a low profile, keep close to the ground, and keep quiet
much safer that way. Think of the famous political assassinations: many were
perpetrated when the victim was exposed in front of a crowd, presented to the people
in some way.
Sometimes the stakes may only be as high as having someone go to sleep on you,
or laughing at you, or feeling sorry for you, or being bored by you. But at other times
they may be as high as losing a bid or an account, or not getting a promotion, or just
not being thought well of. It could be that the main reason the idea of giving
presentations makes us so anxious and makes us want to avoid doing them, is our fear
of failure.
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For many people, the real threat is that of failure to realise an opportunity!
We know how hard it is to stand up in front of people and talk to them as if we knew
them well, and as if we were having a conversation with them, to connect personally and
vibrantly with dozens of people at once, to inform and delight them, to change themsomehow. Its an art, a skill; it takes charisma and confidence, dramatic flair and
practice, doesnt it? We know how much a good presentation is admired, and how its
deliverer appears to have been put at a great advantage. But when its our turn to think
about doing a presentation, we may actually fear that we will not be up to the challenge.
We fear this because we know how important presentations are today. Despite the
fact that countless hours (and money) are wasted all over the world on ineffective
presentations (and conferences and meetings), they can be the most highly effective
available means of bringing together information, analysis, critique, commentary,
insight, speculation, questions, answers, objections, support, and, most importantly, of
bringing all these things together with people.
It is this social dimension of the presentationthe fact that people are brought
together to talk and listen to each other about tasks, jobs, issues, problems, challenges,
and opportunitiesthat makes it a great opportunity for highly efficient communication.
The extra demands of the social experience of the presentation, where so much
focus is brought to bear on the variety of communication skills it requires, can be
daunting. So, in this chapter, after some general discussion of why presentations are so
important, what makes a good one, and what you need to think about and work on in
order to prepare and deliver one, we shall elaborate a four-part method for preparingpresentations. The idea is to provide you with a systematic approach that can help you
feel more confident about ordering all the complexity of the form. There is a lot to think
about and master; but if you can just follow these four stagesstrategy, structure,
design, and deliveryyou can be confident that you wont miss anything, and so you can
just get down to business and prepare a presentation that can help you meet the
challenges of any situation in your own unique way.
W HY ARE PRESENTATI ONS SO I MPORTANT?
Presentations are important today because there is so much information available and
such a great need for it, and so many ways of receiving and processing it; there are so
many ideas and pitches, so many angles and options, subtleties and nuances to things,
that people need other people to help them think through it all.
Thats why people want you to present to them. They want you to process
everything they need to know about something, so that they can easily understand it, in
a way that they can use it. They want you to talkto them about it, and they want to be
able to ask you about it.
A presentation is certainly a highly formalised form of communication, but its valueis that it reproduces, in a special way, the most natural of human communication
events: conversation. Dialogue and human contact are the most direct ways of finding
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out what you want to know. In fact, the more complicated an issue, the more likely you
are to want to go and talk to somebody about it.
The presentation is the form of communication in business that best tames all the
complexity of the more sophisticated forms in which information and ideas are found and
processed. Being able to access all this complexity (and often volume) in the form of akind of conversation, in which someone just stands up and tells you what you want or
need to know, is a great advantage.
And of course, because this is the case, if you can actually do this, if you can reduce
volume and simplify complexity for people, you will be noticed.
W HAT MA KES A GOOD PRESENTATI ON?
Weve already referred a little to what makes a bad presentationbasically, it wastes our
time. We dont learn much, we are bored, and we are confused and/or irritated, in any
combination of these.
A good presentation, on the other hand, tells us something useful, in a way that we
enjoy. This enjoyment may not be a matter of fun, but it will be the feeling we get
when we know that were doing what we should be doing, or that things are working
well. Even if it is hard work, if we manage to process the information presented to us in
an effective way, we feel good. We may even feel energised and stimulated. We may
want to find out more; we may feel that we now have some kind of advantage.
Above all, we feel more connected. We have been put in touch with information,knowledge, insight, and with people. We are brought into a loop of responsiveness,
along with the rest of the audience. We respond to the presenter and whatever he or she
is presenting.
The presenter responds to us also, and thus a dynamic interplay occurs. We become
engaged with all aspects of the presentation, its multimedia format; our imaginations
and our senses are activated. Thus we feel more alive, more involved with our work and
with the work of others. We are awake and alert!
Specifically, such a presentation has:
Content that is relevant, interesting, and useful to us.
S t r u c t u r e that helps us to follow it, and to understand it; it will have a logical flow,
and a beginning, a middle and an end.
Packag ing that makes it easy for us to get the content, and that allows the
structure to work to best advantage. It may even have style and flair.
Persona l i ty that makes the whole thing come alive; there will be a person
associated with it.
A good presentation involves a whole lot of good communication.
W HAT DOES I T TAKE TO GI VE A GOOD PRESENTATI ON?
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As is the case with so many demanding skills, good presenting looks and feels easy and
natural. But we know, and our nerves tell us, that its not.
We have to master four groups of things, all of which are closely interrelated. In
fact, preparing for and delivering a presentation involves us in an extended process, by
which we manage our relationship with each of these factors:
1. Ourselves
We cannot communicate naturally when we are overcome by the sideeffects of adrenalin.
We cannot communicate effectively if we treat a presentation like anormal conversation (even though we have to make it feel like one)
we need to speak and move in a different, artificial, trained and
deliberate way, and yet appear natural.
2. Others We must establish a dynamic relationship with each member of our
audience; we need to connect with them.
We need to know who they are, what they know, what they feel, whatthey want.
We need to make them want to take what we have to give them.
3. Our topic
We need to know what we are talking about
We have to reduce it so that it fits into the space of the presentationwe know a great deal, and its not all going to fit in this space, so we
have to condense our material in order to do what we need to do with
it, in the time available.
We need to understand how our topic is related to our audience (whichis why we have to present on it in the first place), and then we have to
figure out how to show them how it is related to them.
4. The means at our disposal
We should make sure were talking the same language as ouraudience.
We must familiarise ourselves with the technology we use. We should try to become familiar with the venue we share with our
audienceits lighting, acoustics, seating, dimensions (and the location
of the emergency exit?).
We need to be highly aware of time constraints.
If we have all of these things under control, we will be making the most of the
presentation form. Usually, a particular presentation is related to our jobs, so it gives us
the chance to understand more about our relationship to our work. And since we have to
communicate with others about this particular facet of our work at this point in time, weare putting them in some kind of relationship with this work. So, in principle, each
presentation is an opportunity for us to develop ourselves professionally: it gives us a
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chance to think about and develop our understanding of our own jobs and the way they
relate to the jobs of others, either inside or outside our own organisations (depending, of
course, on whom we are presenting to). The more important the presentation, the more
this is so.
But is being a good presenter more a matter of nature or of nurture? Are goodpresenters born or made? Is being a dynamic and compelling presenter a matter of
genetics or personality, or can it be learnt?
We could debate this topic forever; but, obviously, we firmly believe that, while
some people have a gift for attracting peoples interest and holding them spellbound
(just as some people have a gift for ball games or singing), by observing a few simple
principles, and working on them carefully, anyone can be a great presenter.
Furthermore, people who fully engage in the process of preparing and delivering an
effective presentation will develop themselves not only professionally, but also
personally, since a presentation involves so many social, interpersonal and human
dynamics.
If you do two sets of things, you will be very good:
1 . W o r k o n y o u r a t t i t u d e a n d e thos :Respect your audience, know your material, and be yourself.
2 . W o r k o n y ou r t e ch n i q u e :
Connect with your audience, relate your material to them, and involve yourself
fully in the whole process.
A t t i t u d e a n d e th o s
When you present to people, you do expose yourself to quite some degree. People see
and hear you, the way you move and talk, the way you dress, the way you relate to
people. They see something of your personality, whether youre a bubbly, extroverted
sort of person, or a quiet and serious type.
They also learn a lot about your work, about what it means to you and how you
relate to it, about how you do things. And so, in this mix of your personality and your
work, they see something of your professional ethos. Ethos is the same as character. Itswhat people know and recognise you for; it gives you your reputation; its a bit like your
personal brand.
You develop it over your whole life and career. Your decisions and actions are guided
by it and contribute to it. A strong ethos is a long-term project, and must be nurtured
carefully. But at any given point in time, and in the short term, there is no more
emphatic, economical, or intensive way for you to show your professional ethos or
character than in a presentation. Your voice, your style, your attitudeall these things
are articulated with the very stuff of your professional life, which is the content of your
presentation. And there you are, relating all this to your audience.
Furthermore, the exercise and discipline of preparing a presentation provide an
efficient way to become conscious of and to develop your ethos. As you prepare, you
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have to state clearly to yourself what the content of your presentation means to you.
This cannot be stressed enough, and its not as easy as you think: you must be very
sure of what it is, exactly, that you are trying to say, or do.
In a presentation, what you are saying, and the fact that its you saying it, are
inextricably linked. This double relation, of both you and your content to your audience,is what makes presenting so tricky, and so dynamic. And its what makes understanding
what youre saying and doing in a presentation less easy than youd think. You have to
show your audience something of that special relation to your content that you have,
and that they do not.
Again, we see here that everything about communication is about relationships. In
preparing a presentation, the process of coming to decide how to relate your material to
your audience is also a process of your coming to understand your material even better,
of understanding your work, and what you have to dowith it.
Techn ique
All the basic principles of communication apply to presentations in a heightened way. To
maximise the opportunities that presentations offer for communicating, and to manage
the impediments that they throw up to your doing so, you have to think strategically
about all the elements that make up the communication situation.
A presentation is a multimedia mode of communication. It involves sight and sound,
speech and text, writing and reading, emotion and sensation, light and movement,
things and people. To do what you intend doing, you must develop your ability to work
with these elements so that they will do what you want them to do.
Yo u m u s t b e h e a r d
You need to know how to project your voice properly, so that everyone in the room can
comfortably hear you.
But its not enough that people merely hear what you have to say, they must feel
how you are saying it: you have to be able to use your voice to colour what you are
saying, to give people a feeling for how you relate to what youre saying, for what it
means to you, and therefore, what it might mean to them. You need to use your voice to
emphasise differences, and to give order to the different levels of meaning in what youare presenting.
This gives what you say an audible texture, and makes for an interesting aural
experience for your audience. It helps keep people awake and alert. Variety and
difference do this: they signal to people that things are changing, and that theyd better
pay attention.
Your voice is your primary apparatus, and there are some quite clear and simple
training methods you can use to help you get the most out of it, such as voice and
projection exercises (to which well refer again later).
You m us t be seen
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In a presentation, you are the focal point for all the complexity of the material you have
been working on for your audience, and for peoples attention. For people to fully
appreciate this fact, you must appear, in a very physical way, to be this focal point. You
need to know how to show yourself to best advantage.
You stand clear of other things, like tables and lecterns, computers, projectors, sothat you are the centre of attention. You learn to use light to put yourself more in the
picture, more clearly in peoples centre of vision.
And then, you recognise that people are looking at your second most important
apparatus: your body. It is your body that helps articulate some of the visual texture of
what you are saying. You move, you move your arms and hands, and these become
extensions of your voice. They help you blend the aural and visual elements of what your
audience experiences in your presentation.
Just as you have to use your voice differently when you are talking to a large group
of people to the way you do when you are talking with a friend over coffee, you use your
hands and body in different ways when you are presenting. In natural conversation, your
hands move spontaneously in time with what you are saying; they help you shape it,
tease it out and extend it to the person you are talking to; they are part of the whole
process of articulation. In a presentation, you have to learn to control this to some
degree, and you can train yourself to do so; you develop technique. Again, more on this
later.
Yo u m u s t c o n n e ct w i t h p e o p l e
Talking to people, gesturing to them, these are all helping you connect with them. And
the single most important bodily apparatus, the one that coordinates this activity, is youreyes. Making eye contact is the single most important way of making people realise that
you are paying attention to them.
It is how you and they both confirm, at the same time, that you are sharing the
same environment, and potentially, the same meanings. Peoples eyes do a lot of
communicating: they show understanding, express emotion, make queries. They really
are the windows to the soul, and to the mind. If you dont look people in the eye,
however briefly, they will simply not understand, fully, that you are talking to them, and
they will lose interest in listening to you.
That eye contact is so important is evidenced by the fact that in some cultures,
particularly Asian cultures, how much eye contact you make with someone can be a
sensitive issue. Some people consider too much direct eye contact to be impolite,
especially in conversation with superiors. In Australia, if you dont look people directly in
the eye, you will most likely be considered shifty, or untrustworthy. But then again, just
a little too much eye contact with the wrong person can also get you into a lot of trouble,
in some situations. But in presentations, youll be unlikely to find yourself looking at any
one person too much (well, you shouldnt, anyway); just connecting with people visually
is all you need to do.
And again, practice helps you become familiar with this very concrete and deliberate
action of looking at people. You have to connect with people before you can connectthemwith your material.
You m us t he lp you r au d ience to fee l good
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If you have connected with your audience, and let them know that you take them
seriously, that you dont want to waste their time, that you have something interesting
to say to them, they are already in the frame of mind to cooperate with you in your
presentation.
This is one of the basic laws of human and civil society. We observe it all the time:generally, if you treat people well, they will treat you well also. Smile, and, more often
than not, people smile back at you. Its a proven fact that smiling alone, a physical act,
is accompanied by the release of endorphins, which make you feel good (adrenalin and
endorphinsa powerful cocktail).
This is a very simple technique, and once you learn its principle, you know how to
develop the other, related people skills that can help you do your job in a presentation.
Smiling is the single most representative sign that you are with people; that things are
going well; that things are as they should be.
And even if they are not, there will be a correlative act. Lets just say you are tasked
to give a presentation in which you must announce to workers that they are losing
benefits, and to explain to them why. Not good news; smiling would make you look like
an idiot. What do you do? You make signs that youre all in this together; you make
empathetic facial gestures, probably even something like a sad smile, or a smiles
opposite, a sombre expression, showing a serious attitude. But you use your face to let
people know that you are with them. They will be with you, and sharing makes people
feel good. You never know, you may even be able to see the bright side by the end of
the presentation, and manage to join in somekind of smile or laugh with your audience
(Well, weve still got our jobs, eh? Lousy jobs they are too, no wonder they dont pay so
well.)
This is all part of the good humour that helps a presentation so much. Humour
doesnt have to be hilarity, and it neednt be about jokes. In fact, jokes are best avoided
in presentations, unless you can make a joke that is quite pertinent to your subject
matter; most jokes are their own little stories, and often appreciation of the incongruities
that drive them can be hard to control, being so much a matter of personal taste.
Humour is about sharing the moment with people, so that you can make some remark,
or some gesture, to give people a sense that you understand the situation as they do,
that you are in things together.
You m us t deve lop your m a te r i a l so th a t peop le can easi l y unders tand i t
The expectation in business these days, especially in Singapore, is that you will present
using PowerPoint. We shall start talking about this in more detail soon, but for the
moment, just imagine that you are going to give a 15-minute presentation without any
visual aids.
You have to arrange it in a special way for the circumstances of oral delivery: people
cant see it or read it, and they cant go back over it to check that theyve got it. They
will miss bits and forget bits, and their attention will wander.
And this is just the audience. Very few people can simply recall what they need tosay in an orderly and organised manner, unless they memorise it, which is time
consuming and difficult. Certainly, you need to prepare in advance all that you need to
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say. How are you going to organise it all so that you can know how to recall it for your
audience? You cant just write a script and read it. Obviously, you will need note cards.
But how are you going to use them successfully, so that you can do the important work
of connecting with your audience?
The techniques you need here serve both the purposes of helping you arrange yourmaterial for yourself and for your audience. You have to make your material available to
your audience in chunks, which people can handle in a flexible way. Its much easier,
both for you and your audience, to handle and arrange, say, four separate sections of
ideas and points rather than one big one. Well get down to this soon.
The same kind of technique applies to visual aids, and to PowerPoint. You have to
know how to arrange and organise ideas, concepts, and pieces of information so that
they can be spaced out through the presentation in such a way that the audience can
quickly relate to them.
There are three sets of related techniques that will constitute the core of the
method of presentation preparation that we want to develop with you in this chapter.
1. You must arrange your materials visually so that your audience can grasp
them in the way you want them to.
2. You must arrange and connect your materials so that you can use them to help
you progress through the presentation.
3. You must deliver this arrangement, which will be a very physical thing, to your
audience in such a way that you maintain your connectionwith them.
The secret here is preparation, and this will be the main element of our method.
Yo u m u s t w o r k w i t h y o u r v e n u e an d y o u r t e c h n o l og y
Youve got your PowerPoint slides all working brilliantly, you know your stuff, you know
who youll be talking to, youve done your voice exercises, youre dressed beautifully,
you feel good. Theres only one thing thats bothering you slightly.
Youve never been to the venue in which youll be presenting. But you know the drill
about venues, so this is why youre only slightly bothered (and you know that you do
need to worry about this, so this is good too; it shows youre on the ball).
You think it will be OK. Youre in the taxi now, and youre very early. Youve done all
that you could. Youve spoken to the right person about the venue. Youve establishedjust what sort of projector will be there, and that youll be able to hook your laptop up to
it, and that someone will be there to help you with technical things (but you still want to
try it out beforehand, to make sure your colours workyou know that no two projectors
are the same).
You know roughly the size of the room and how the tables and chairs are arranged.
But you need to make sure about this, you need to see it for yourself. You need to know
how you can move, how you can position yourself in relation to your audience, and how
everyone will best be able to see you.
You need to check the lighting. Youve been told that there are a couple of lightsnear the projector screen, but youre not sure just how close, or whether theyre going
to cause glare or reflection. Youve been told that there are dimmers in the main room,
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so you want to try them out, work out the best combination of screen, stage, and room
lighting. Youve got a really nice shirt on, and you want people to see that youve taken
some care today.
So, youre in control, you think, but all these unknowns are adding to your
nervousness. And so they should. The venue is terribly important to a presentation. Justas you show that you have good technique by being able to handle yourself, your
audience, and your material, you need to be able to show that you can take control of
the physical environment of the work space.
Always try out a room beforehand, where possible, and if this is not possible, be
ready to manipulate the situation to your advantage on the spot (within reasonable
limits of politeness, time, and physical possibility). Ask if you can move a table here or
there, or if people present wouldnt mind helping you with the room layout. Ask your
audience if they can hear you at the back; do you need that microphone? People will be
impressed by your confidence in taking charge. It goes without saying that you need to
know how to work your computer; reallyknow.
HOW DO YOU PLAN AN D CRAFT A GOOD PRESENTATI ON?
(For information on planning a presentation, please see slide show 2, Week 1: 2-SCM for
Management Present ations)
This excerpt now presents some thoughts about c o m m u n i c a t i o n o u t c o m e , aud ience
and ob jec t i ves
Sometimes, the requirements of your audience will limit what your communication
outcomes can be, but very often you will have some freedom to set and achieve your
own as well. For instance, your audience may be a project team of which you are a
member, and you may have to present an update on your contribution. Naturally, people
will be expecting information and perhaps assurance that you are on track and in sync
with them. But you may also decide to use the presentation as an opportunity to show
just how creative and reliable you are, and that you are capable of much more than
people might know, perhaps so that key team members might think about co-opting you
for other projects. Thus your desired communication outcome goes beyond simply
fulfilling the task at hand.
Sometimes, you will have a clear and simple message, and the communication
outcome you want will simply be to make sure your audience understands and accepts
it. You may be required to give a presentation to a group of new hires in your firm about
safety requirements on the shop floor, for instance. In this case, the communication
outcome will be fairly fixed for all audience members they must be familiar with the
safety requirements and be able to follow them.
Often, you will have to adapt the communication outcome very much to the
character and identity of your audience. For instance, you may have to promote the
services of your firm to a potential client; in this case the outcome you want to achievewill be for your audience to understand just how your service matches their
requirements. Thus the communication outcome could well change for each potential
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client, unless the service is a very basic one (such as cleaning; but in this instance there
would be no need for a presentation, really). This is because different people have
different needs, and just what you can do for them will need to be elaborated according
to these differences.
And very often, you may want to achieve a certain communication outcome with aspecific audience, perhaps not quite knowing as much as youd like about each of its
members, and just what message would be best delivered to achieve this aim is an open
question. For example, you may need to give a motivational address, to improve the
performance of a team in your firm that is not performing as well as it should, and you
are an outsider, sent by someone from above. You dont know all the facts, or all the
people: maybe some people are doing well while others are freeloading; maybe the team
is not being given enough resources to do its job. You need to do a lot of research, and
figure out just what kind of message or messages will help you best achieve the
communication outcome you want.
Who i s you r aud ience?
Usually, the audience is the most important factor in any presentation, so its a good
idea to start thinking about this dimension now.
This kind of analysis will help you get started thinking about how you might best
begin relating to your audience. That is, as you prepare your presentation, you will becontinually trying to work out how you can relate your knowledge and experience, your
sense of what youre working on, to the experiences and concerns of your audience.
Depending on what you establish about your audience, you will then start thinking
about conditioning your relationship to them, which will be the basis for your
communicating with them.
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On the basis of what you know about your audience, you can start to answer the
above questions for yourself.
1. If, say, you are giving a presentation that might help you get a job, and your
audience includes the people who might decide to give it to you, you want to
be someone that these people want to work with.
2. You thus want to convey the ethos that best suits the job that they have and
you want (if you want to get a job as sales representative, for example, youd
better be able to show an open and personable demeanour).
3. How can you show, specifically, that you would make a credible sales person
(for instance) in a presentation? By demonstrating some product knowledge,by being able to connect with this audience about it, and by showing what
youve done in the sales line in the past.
You will want to change your audience in some way or other. This is why you need to
know what your audience thinks, knows, believes, or does beforeyour presentation. You
then formulate your communication outcome, what they should think, know, believe, or
do after your presentation and during yoru presentation, you try to lead your audience
from the beforeto the after.
What a re you r ob j ec t i ves?
Even if youre required to do something, as a matter of duty or routine, there is always a
personal motivation that you can attach to any task (if you dont have one already). You
can always find some faint line that personally connects you to what you have to do. And
the more aware you are of this, and the more clearly you can connect yourself with your
work, the more you will be able to align everything to greater effect. Above all, know
what you want to do.
As with every other form of business communication, in presentations you need to
have a very firm idea of why you are doing what you are doing. This may seem obvious,
but it is amazing how often people giving presentations appear not to know what they
are really trying to say. They find themselves tasked with presenting what they know or
can find out about a certain issue or topic, and they start to do so before having
adequately clarified for themselves exactly what their relationship to the issue or topic is
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or could be. They overlook the possibility that they can set up this relationship
themselves, and that doing so is the first step towards organising their message(s)
effectively, in a way that can help them achieve their aims.
Keep orienting yourself to your basic communication outcome. At every step of the
preparation process, ask yourself what you are trying to do. A good rule is: be able tostate clearly and simply what the aim of your presentation is in a single complete
sentence (even if only to yourself).
To help you achieve the communication outcome you want, consider that generally
speaking, any presentation will have one or more of the following kinds of objectives:
I n f o r m a t i o n a l: you want to tell people something, give them knowledge,information, intelligence, instruction.
P r o m o t i o n a l: you want to sell something, persuade people, convincethem of something, make a proposal, make a bid.
T r a n s f o r m a t i o n a l: you want to motivate people, inspire them, leadthem. Rela t iona l : you want to develop relationships. All presentations require
that you relate to people, but sometimes this can be the whole purpose of
the presentation.
On the basis of what you identify as your main objective, you can decide how best to
construct the feel, or tone, of the presentation. For instance, will it have lots of visuals
and charts, which may be needed in a highly informative presentation? Will it have none,
being solely about making a deep personal connection with your audience, which could
be the case in a transformational or primarily relational speech? If you have the option,
will you ask people to leave questions till the end, or will you allow interruptions and
questions as you proceed?
In a purely informational presentation, you will have total control over your
material, and require less interaction with the audience. But there are presentations
when interaction with the audience may be more important, when you really want to find
out what people are thinking. This may be the case in presentations where you have to
persuade your audience. In such situations, you will have to be able to think on your feet
and expect potential surprises. Such presentations can be highly interactive and fluid,
and things can happen that you cant control; this can be exciting, and take you places
you hadnt expected to get to, but it can also be quite tricky at times.
Its often up to you to determine the levels of interaction with your audience. You
are giving the presentation, although your freedom may be circumscribed by what your
boss wants you to do. But you have to figure out the best way of achieving the outcome
you want, no matter how much this is constrained by the requirements of others, with
the means available to you.
ORGANI SATI ON, DESI GN AND DELI VERY
In most circumstances, there are many ways to go about achieving the requirements of
a particular presentation and any number of arrangements of information, data, ideas,
appeals, references, or discussions that you could come up with to get your point across.
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Just what forms of organisation and design you come up with will depend on your
audience and the communication outcome you want.
First of all, the basic fact you have to deal with in a presentation is that its an
ephemeral affair; its over before you know it!
You start talking, your slides roll, and time takes its toll. People cannot turn back a page
(unless theyve got your handouts in front of them, and if theyre turning back the page,
theyre not listening to you), they cant rewind the tape, and they generally do not
simply interrupt you to ask you to repeat yourself if they havent heard or understood
you.
You have to do your utmost to figure out the best and most effective way for you to
deliver your message so that people relate to it, and you, in the way that you want them
to.
Here are a few tips:
As weve already observed, a presentation is a multifaceted affair, with lots of sight,
sound, subtle cues, unpredictable little events and interruptions, unexpected
interventions, noise, distraction, humour, hunger, tiredness, excitement, the constantthreat of boredom. In the midst of all this action, and in other situations when theres
lots of movement, people most readily and easily respond to visual cues. This is why you
use visual aids and slides (and well come to this very important point later on, when we
talk about design).
So it pays to think of your presentation, as a whole, in visualterms.
Think of your presentation as something through which you are showing people
what you want them to understand. You are helping people to see what it is you are
saying to them. This is why stories and images are so important. They involve people,
they help them conceptualise things as wholes, as integrated units of meaning.
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And think of presenting your message in manageable, graspable, visible units, or
chunks. In terms of a basic beginning-middle-end structure that people should be able to
see, you should:
Begin firmly and clearly; a solid beginning helps people see something of what
theyre in for, and lets them feel that its worth paying attention to you. It shouldsignal that theyre not going to have their time wasted.
Be de l i be ra te about stating your main point, and make sure everything that
takes place in the middle of the presentation is clearly related to it; repeat it in
different ways. A good rule is: be able, at any point in your presentation, to recap
just what the main message of your presentation is, in less than thirty seconds.
Give a conc lus ion that clearly lets people know youve finished. Make it
emphatic, make it summarise what youve said, and make it twice: once when
youve finished the main part of the talk, and again, in a slightly different way, at
the end of Q&A, if there is one.
And during your presentation:
And finally, to make quite sure that people know whats going on, over the whole course
of the presentation, observe the 3T rule:
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After your presentation, you should always try to assess whether or not you have
achieved your communication outcome. Ask yourself:
Did the audience get my key message? Did I manage to advance the aims of my organisation? Did I satisfy the needs, answer the questions, and reduce the uncertainties
of my audience?
Devising a sound plan for your presentation is most important of all. Its the point at
which you come to understand what you need to do overall; organisation, content
selection, design and delivery are really just about implementation.
Organ isa t ion
At the planning stage of developing a presentation, it sometimes feels as if were still not
getting down to actually preparing it. But we have been preparing our imagination of
how the presentation is going to work; we have been imagining the big picture, with
most of the details remaining very sketchy or unformed. At the organising stage, we are
starting to put things in place, in a more concrete fashion.
Think about how you prepare a presentation now:
Do you prepare a few core slides, with all your essential data on them, andthen just hope to get up and talk about them?
Do you write down your main ideas, and then group your information anddata around them?
Do you write out a draft of what you want to say, word for word, and thentry to translate that into code on your slides?
Do you outline the whole thing in your head, and get some information onsome slides, and then go along and just do it?
For the method we are outlining in this chapter, there are three steps to preparing a
presentation:
1. Collecting the material
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2. Organising the material
3. Deciding how to talkthe material
The last of these is really the most important part of the whole process: determining
how your presentation comes across to your audience. But the first two steps are
essential also; its just that theyre not particular to presentations. They could just aseasily apply to report writing.
1 . Co l l ect i ng th e m ate r i a l
So we wont spend long on these first two steps. Well presume that you already know
how to collect your material, and that you know something about how to do any
research and analysis that might be necessary. Just what you collect and how you collect
it will be guided by the strategic decisions youve made about your presentation:
What do you want to do with it; what is its main purpose? Is information more important than inspiration; or will it be more
important to know what will move your audience than what will inform
them?
Do you need to get only enough ideas together to get your audiencetalking?
All these kinds of questions should guide your research and material gathering.
2 . Organ i s i ng the m ate r i a l
Again, what you do here will depend on your sense of your own intentions and purpose,and of your audience.
You will have collected, and possibly already know, a great deal more about your
topic than you can possibly put into the presentation.
You have to filter what you have, decide what is relevant or not, according to this
purpose and this audience. You may even find, depending on what you have collected
and filtered, that you need to adjust the communication outcome you want to achieve.
You may find that these adjustments may require you to do further research. This is the
beginning of the backward and forward movement that characterises the development
process for a presentation.
It will probably help you to use a concrete form of organisation for your material.
Munter & Russell (2009) detail some of these methods in their book, Guide to
Presentations, and you can find them discussed and elaborated in many communications
textbooks. They include traditional outlines, idea charts, mind maps, storyboards, or any
combination of these.
The point is to start visualising your material and to start chunking it, to distribute
it into groupings that you can present in digestible form to your audience and refer to in
your talk.
This is the point at which youve got to start thinking about the next step, how its
going to come out as talk. And again, ask yourself what it is, exactly, that you want to
say or do with all this stuff youve collected and are trying to arrange in an orderly
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fashion. Recall your objectives: ask yourself, again, about your communication outcome,
and about the essence of your message.
You are trying to distil your main points into very clear and reduced form onto your
slides, and to understand very clearly how this form relates to the overall outcome you
aim for, and to all the details of any data you have. You have to make sure that yourdata doesnt get in the way of your key message: that it helps promote it and make it
visible and graspable by the audience.
Once you start appreciating the value and principles of good grouping and chunking
of materials, you can play around a bit with what you have. And you can be quite
systematic: you can embed sections within sections, and you will find that this kind of
system or organisation works well with the PowerPoint form.
In the diagram below, think of your whole presentation as the bigger black box (1).
Then think of your beginning, middle, and end sections as the three rectangles inside
that (2). Then imagine, say, three main points to each section, each as one slide (3).
Then imagine three points on each slide; these might be bullet points (4).
Usually, of course, your middle section will be longer than the other two; you may
have only two slides for your beginning and five for your middle. But the point is tobreak your talk down into discreet sections, parts that can be represented visually. Any
amount of structuring can then be done. In principle, the kind of structured embedding
represented in the diagram can go on and on; but of course, there are limits to how far
people can follow it. Nevertheless, the main idea is that it builds a pattern, and patterns
are guides to comprehension.
If people see a pattern emerging in the way a process unfolds, they can start to
form mental structures of their own to complement the unfolding one. By carefully
building patterns into your presentation, you are guiding and aiding your audiences
perceptions.
Obviously, issues of organisation are starting to merge into issues of design here.
Shortly, we shall take a look at how best to build your actual slides to complement your
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deeper structures, but for the moment, lets continue to think about developing ways in
which you can get up and relate your organised ideas to your audience in oral form, in a
way that feels like dialogue and conversation.
3 . D ec id i n g h o w t o t a l k t h e m a t e r i al
This is a matter ofhow you prepare. You have to prepare verycarefully: not every word,
but the natureof what you need to sayits feel and tone, the inflection you put on itso
that you can relate your point or points, organised in the way you have decided and in a
way that comes naturally to you, to your audience.
This is the only way to handle slides properly, the way to use them.
Here, organisation meets delivery; and well return to this later. Its the point in our
preparation where we set up our own relationship to our material, in advance, so that
when the time comes, well be able to manage our audiencesrelation to this material.
This element of preparation will determine whether or not the room will be
dominated by the slide-show, and whether or not you will be looking too frequently at
the projector screen, maybe even reading from it (a disaster). It will determine whether
or not you get lost in your own presentation.
It involves going over and over the material you have, and reducing it to its barest
form. This will give you a sense of how to handlethe material in its crystallised form on
your slide, and on the screen. This is how you get it to the point where you can
communicate about it.
And to do this, you have to prepare your argument so that, once youve got it
established for yourself, it can be reduced until it becomes highly portable, malleable,
and flexible. You can then put each component of it as a fixed object on the screen.
What appears on the screen functions more as a set of signs pointing to your ideas and
arguments, rather than text containing them. It becomes something that both you and
your audience merely glance at. People see it, they dont read it.
Because, rather than reading, they are listening and looking, and you are looking
and talking. If either of you is reading, neither of you is relating or communicating.
The form of the message on the screen is just a thing, and a relatively simple one atthat. The content of your message is what you need to be concerned with, and you can
just keep the thingson the screen up there where they belong, while you devote most of
your faculties to connecting with your audience about the message.
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As you prepare, keep trying to develop your relationship to this content youll
deliver; this will make it easier for you to tell the story you have to tell. Keep working to
reduce your arguments and ideas to their simplest, boldest, purest form, so that they
can be made manifest in an objective way on the screen. This way, youll really be able
to know them, handle them.
Keep asking yourself:
How can I talk the key ideas in different ways? How can I show the key ideas in different lights and from different angles? How can I show them to, and talk about them with, my audience?
In general, this reduction exercise involves making some hard decisions about what
to cut out and what to leave in. And isnt it so, when you find it hard to know what to
leave out, and have to agonise over this cutting exercise, that you have a much better
understanding of what you finally leave in? And again, since what you have left in will
take a pure, short, crystallised form on the screen (or perhaps, for you, on the computer
monitor), a mere glance will tell you where you areno need for notes.
Its a good idea to start working on your material with a view to how its going to
end up as you talk early in the preparation process, because it will give you a sense ofhow the nature of your ideas and material is going to fit on slides; how youre going to
talk it through; and how long this is going to take for each slide. This will give you a firm
grasp of your material, a certainty about it that will help you keep your talk bouncing
along, and have people really connect with you and it.
As you work your material into the slide-show, actually stand up and rehearse at
each slide. Try to say aloud, as if you were talking to your audience, what you think the
slide is about. In the early stages, you will find yourself quickly sitting down again,
because it doesnt make sense, or because you find that youre trying to say something
in the wrong place.
Think hard about what the material means to you and about what you want it to
mean to your audience. In this process, you are really coming to understand your
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material, and you understand it asyou prepare slides for it. In this way, you can come to
know it so well that a mere glance at your laptop monitor will tell you whats going on
so you shouldnt have to refer much to the projector screen unless you do so
deliberately. This would be the case where there are points you want to emphasise and
have people remember, so hearing them, and seeing them on screen helps people really
get them. In this case you might actually walk up and touch the screen as you turn toyour audiencethe touch and turn technique.
But mostly, and ideally, all you need are a few emphatic ideas and key points, to
help the audience see the bones of your argument, and to help make the key ideas
memorable. Once you think youve got it all worked out, go over the whole lot again,
and make sure that youve got a clear beginning, middle, and end.
And make sure your preview slide is an accurate representation of the overall plan,
and that your concluding slide sums everything up in an emphatic way. And that you
have adequate signposting and transition-marking slides throughout, so that people can
see the distinct elements of your material, and know where they are at any point.
Every pa r t i n a l l t h e o the rs
A final word about organisation: everything must hold together. A well built building is
one in which you know where you are at any point, in relation to the whole thing. You
can recall how you got to where you are, if its a large building, and you know how to get
to any part of it. There is integrity and consistency about the way it all fits together, and
every part feels like it belongs to the whole. It seems to be made of the same fabric,
even if it contains lots of variety of texture.
Its the same with a presentation. Every part of it should feel like all the other parts.
The beginning should have threads that are picked up in the middle, and the end should
pick up the threads from both the beginning and the middle, tying them all together. The
middle should have something of the beginning and the end in it, the middle should be
prepared for in the beginning and prepare for the end, and the end should refer back to
both the beginning and the middle.
Design
Just as during the planning stage you were probably already considering how to deliver
the presentation, organisation and design are also very closely related.
The design stage is where you think about how your slides will look to people, how
they will help them see your presentation.
Once you can see for yourself the deep organisation of your presentation, you then
start fiddling with its surface appearance, its ability to be used effectively by the
audience. Just as you are aiming for firmness and clarity in your thinking and in your
arguments structure, you need to aim for visualclarity.
So, in everything that the audience sees, try to achieve focus and clarityavoidclutter and overcrowding. Slides should flash their import quickly, making it easy for
people to see their content. Busy and overloaded slides make it hard for people to see
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their main components, and to relate the slides to the context and point of the
presentation. Without lucid slides, its very hard to see a presentations deep structure.
Even if the content is good, the more people have to work to discern it in the slide
(to see the wood for the trees), the more their concentration is impaired. Their ability to
focus is weakened by fussy fonts, too much artwork, complex charts that cannot beeasily explained, long paragraphs, and too much to r ead.
If people are reading, theyre not l istening to you. If you have lots for people to
read, use the notes page on each slide, or hidden slides, and distribute this material as
handouts before or after the presentation. Slides should be visual prompts,
reinforcement of what youre elaborating in your presentation.
The visuals are like the skeleton: your talk is the flesh and blood.
I m a g e s o r t e x t ?
In stressing that slides are visual aids, it is worth noting here that excellent
presentations can be given using only images on slides. In fact, the whole concept of the
slide is derived from the technique of projecting 35 mm photographic slides in
presentations; people usually did this only if they had pictorial images to show. Images
and graphics can be very effective in quickly giving people a concrete sense of what
youre talking about.
For instance, if you are going to be talking in very general terms about the design,
manufacture and distribution of a certain product, it could be quite feasible to have three
slides only, each one showing a photograph or graphic of each of these stages. Or if youwanted to talk about risk or danger as a significant factor in a project, some kind of
image representing this idea could be very effective as a way of highlighting the point
(using, say, a danger sign).
In a sense, the design issues for images are simpler than they are for text, even
though there are complex aesthetic and graphic design principles in play that are often
seen as the province of professional designers. Images do their work of signifying in a
more direct, although sometimes more subtle, way, and in this sense the question of
how to manage them in a talk is not as tricky. But because talk is like text, and the
processes of reading and listening can clash in a presentation, we are focusing more in
this chapter on slides that use text.
These are the specific things to bear in mind when designing your text slides:
State points concisely with key words and phrases (if you cant talkthrough an idea, dont put it up on a slide).
Limit points, preferably to five to seven lines of text (less is more). Have only one main idea per slide. Develop a consistent and unified look to your slides (build internal
convention and patterning).
Present readable text (20 point at least), applying relevant documentdesign and readability principles (e.g., avoiding large blocks of text, solid
capitals, underlining, centring, bolding, extensive italics, variations of
font).
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Use sans serif fonts (e.g., Arial, Tahoma), which make for a cleaner, moreopen slide, rather than serif fonts (e.g., Times New Roman).
Use animations sparingly, if at all, and avoid complex colour schemes,patterned design templates and pre-packaged Microsoft graphics
(especially WordArt).
Strive for clarity, simplicity, and ease of use.In general, two or three slides with less on each are better than one slide that is
overloaded. Here are a few slides to help demonstrate these points:
PowerPoint offers many more options for arranging and displaying text on slides
than we actually need, and perhaps many that are completely useless, or worse. Some,
like animations and special effects, are there to enhance the delivery of the slide (and
add flair to a presentation), but many are trivial and distracting. The only animations
that are of any real use are the build or dim features, whereby you can introduce
points or images gradually onto a screen, and perhaps the motion paths. Sometimes
these same features can be used to add useful tracking devices to slides as they
progress, so that people can see at a glance the progress of the presentation.
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Other text-management features, like the levels of bullet points, can be very tricky
to handle, and are more related to how you structure what you want to make visible to
your audience.
PowerPoint lets you take a single bullet point four levels down; that is, after yourmain point, you can have a sub-point, a sub-sub-point, and a sub-sub-sub-point.
For example, the slide implicated in the disastrous decisions that led to the
destruction of the Columbia space shuttle contains a crucial observation that is featured
only as a level four sub-point, thus reducing the visual sense an audience might have of
the importance of the point. For this reason, we suggest that if you need to break a
single point down into more than one set of sub-points, you should think about
redesigning how you present your ideas in your slide sequence.
Before going on to discuss presentation delivery, lets recap on these last two
sections, organisation and design, by demonstrating how to prepare part of a
presentation (a discussion of colour in slide design) in terms of organising and designing
the way your points appear. And in doing so, well also focus on two further important
elements of slide design that are very closely related to the patterning or structuring of
your ideas, and how they appear to people on a slide: parallelism and slide titles.
Para l le l i sm
Parallelism means that when things are alike, they are patterned in the same way, and,
at the same time, are clearly separated, just as one line is parallel with another.
When we aim for conceptual parallelism, we try to get our ideas grouped and
arranged properly, in the proper order, in terms of priority and level. We want to
separate main points clearly from sub-points, and headings from points that belong
under them.
We also aim for grammatical parallelism, so that we make the form of similar
phrases, for example, the same. If a phrase begins with a verb, we make sure all
phrases that are in the same order also begin with a verb. If a bulleted list contains only
noun phrases, it should not contain one bullet item that contains a verb (also see the
discussions on headings and lists in Chapter 9).
Grammatical parallelism is easier to grasp. Consider the examples of weak and
strong parallelism in the slide below1
1These examples are taken from Munter and Russell, 2010: 7274.8
.
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Colour can support structure Colour can create favourable aesthetic effects Apply colour to aid comprehension Identify similar items consistently Key points highlighted Similar items belong together Colours must be chosen carefully for contrast Colour can distract
Youll note that some of these points are more closely related than others. Some are
complete sentences, some are just phrases, some are in the imperative mood
(commands), some simply state a fact. Some look like headings, some like sub-points.
Lets apply the concept of parallelism to order them.
Note how the above bullet points are not parallel: the list puts all of these different
kinds of phrase, assertion, command, sentence in the one list, as if each item were the
same kind of thing. This is what a bulleted list is supposedto do: it suggests that each of
the bullet points is of the same order. But because they are not, the list is slightly
confusing. When ideas brought together like this are not rendered parallel, a pattern,
and therefore a reason for their being grouped together is hard to discern. Its almost as
if we are let down; the form of the list leads us to expect patterned meaning, but its
content doesnt quite deliver. There is a mismatch between what our minds come to
expect and what we actually perceive.
Just take the first three of the above points. The first is more like a heading, while
the second and third are more like points to be considered under the heading.
Lets consider some possible ordering for this list, and how we might possibly put
them on two slides devoted, in a presentation on slide design, to the issue of using
colour on slides.
First youll note that the titles of each of these slides are slightly different in
grammatical form, which gives a slightly different feel to each slide. This is deliberate.
Our plan here will be to talk the first slide by elaborating on what colour can do,
specifically. We may even be able to flash a couple of demo slides, if we have time. In
general, we would be referring back to points we had made earlier about patterning and
grouping in relation to structure, and we would be using this discussion on colour to
illustrate it.
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This first slide, then, because it concerns specifics, has a slightly more complex structure
than the second. But note the grammaticalparallelism. Each point has two verbs
separated by and, and a noun to which the verbs refer. The second slide has one verb,
which helps spell out a general principle, for each bullet point.
The two slides are conceptually parallel in that they have separated and grouped
more specific functions of colour in one place, and more general principles of colour use
in another.
Now, we could have reversed the order of the slides, talking about the general
principles for using colour in slide design first, and then talking more specifically about
how to apply these principles. But we would have been tempted to elaborate, in an
actual presentation, on each of the three more general points, thus leaving us nothing to
talk about with our second slide. In this case, during our preparation rehearsal, we may
have decided to delete the second one altogether, just talking through the general
principles as we talked through the single slide on colour use.
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However, we want to say what you can do with colour, and then say why you can
do this. This is because we want to emphasise that you have to use colour carefully. We
want to say, as we run the second slide, that colour can be a great aid, but it can really
muck up your presentation if you get it wrong. After having made the last point on slide
two, we would probably show demonstration slides, one with a dark font on a dark
background (not readable), and one using colour to enhance readability.
So, you see, thinking about how your slides look, and how they do their job, is really
a part of thinking strategically about what you want to do in a presentation, and thus
about the way you need to structure it. If you get your slides right, youre well on the
way to getting the whole thing right.
Sl ide t i t l es
We mentioned in the list of design tips above that its a good idea to have only one main
idea per slide. This principle helps you orchestrate your whole presentation as a
sequence of ideas that follows the procession of your slides. Each slide becomes a signreferring to the whole complex package of potential meanings that you can talk about in
reference to this main idea.
So the slide has to be semantically efficient. That is, it has to indicate meaning in an
economical way, so as to refer to the import of what is being discussed, and do it
quickly. And the most important part of the slide is its title. Now, as for headings, slide
titles do more work if they talk. A common mistake is to give slides titles that are
much too general, and this can lead to a number of problems. Two common types of
mistake that follow from this lack of specificity in slide titles can be seen in the following
examples.
Now the slide above isnt a bad slide. It could be an option, if you wanted to deal with
colour quickly; youd probably want to bring in the two main points one at a time, have
the first appear alone, and then clicking in the other one by a simple animation.
However, there is more than one main idea on this slide (there are two bullet points,
each with three sub-points). Colour is not an idea, its a huge topic.
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This slide contains two main groups of ideas, which are related, certainly, but which
would be more easily articulated alone. By putting them in the same place, under the
same general heading, you are blurring them somewhat, making it harder to distinguish
them in order to make specific points about each. And youre making your audience work
just about as hard as you could expect them to in order to make sense of a single slide.
Whats more, it would probably take just as long to talk through the single slide as itwould to talk through the two, the difference being that the single one would not give
you as much flexibility, and would be harder work for you and your audience.
In the original two slides, which have the more informative titles, two main ideas are
presented in two distinct slides, in which the idea articulated by each title is elaborated
by the points below it. As is the case for talking headings, you could just about read
through the titles of all the slides in the presentation that these might feature in and get
a good idea of what the presentation was about. But if you have titles, like Colour, that
are too general, you cant see much by just looking at the title. And when people look at
slide handouts, they will be grateful if they can just skim through the titles and know
roughly what the presentation contains.
In the following two slides, we can see a single topic area broken into two slides,
each containing a single idea. However, there are two problems here. First, we are still
given the impression that a single idea is being broken up into a numbered sequence, so
we are being set up to get our memories ready: we know were going to have to
remember this colour point 1, even if its just to connect it to a single subsequent idea,
colour point 2. This is more mental effort than we need to be making here. And
secondly, there are actually two headings to each slide: the title, and the main point.
Then there are the sub-points. Again, this makes the slide appear more complicated than
it need be, and can result in our becoming ever so slightly distracted.
Why not simply put the main idea as the slide title? Theres no doubt that were
talking about colour. The only thing that we would want to do would be to somehow
signal the transition from the idea that preceded the first one about colour. And this
would depend on how we had decided to structure and organise the presentation.
Another common mistake appears in the two slides below. Each slide has only one
bullet point (and three sub-points)! Theres no such thing as a lone bullet point (to have
a list with one item on it is just as nonsensical); the purpose of a bullet point is to
visually distinguish it from other points on the same list, page, or slide.
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The mistake of using a single bullet point on one slide usually goes hand in hand with
that of having an inadequate slide title. Whenever you find yourself with a single bullet
point on a list, ask yourself if that point should be your title. You cannot have two titles
to a slide. If you have a significant title and a significant lone bullet point, you need to
think hard about what the main point of the slides is, and decide how the two would-be
titles relate to one another. Maybe they should actually both be bullet points, with
another overarching term as the title?
So, here again, we see how thinking about how your ideas appear, and designing
this appearance carefully, can affect your whole understanding of what it is you think
youre saying in a presentation.
Lets imagine the short presentation on slide design that two such slides as those
above might belong to. We can preview the whole presentation on a single slide, such as
the one below, that we can use to tell the audience how our presentation is organisedand what it will contain. We would let them know that once wed done with the issue of
titles, wed be moving on to discuss colour. So when the time comes, and the first slide
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on colour appears, we simply say something like, And now, finally, lets have a quick
look at using colour. Then we might conclude the presentation by making some remarks
to the effect that colour should be used like everything on a slide: to help and support us
in talking with our audience.
Del ivery
When you come to deliver your presentation, you are bringing to life all the other
aspects we have been discussingstrategy, structure and design. Your structure and
design are dynamic functions of your strategy, and your delivery is a dynamic function of
your structure and design. But of course, its this bringing to life element that is all-
important at this stage
Weve already considered, earlier in this chapter, the most important things about
delivering presentations, when we thought about attitude (or ethos) and technique,
especially as these involve the way you are heard and seen, connecting with people, and
achieving your purpose. Here, to finish off this chapter, well revisit some of these
concrete, bodily, aspects of delivery in slightly more specific detail, starting with where
we began it, with nerves.
Nerves
Presenting isnt natural, and your body knows it. Weve already observed something
about the important functions of the nervous system: it is a remarkable mechanism that
helps you find your way around the world. Your nerves help you sense and interpret your
environment, and when you need to perform, what we call nervous response helps you
do so. So if were nervous before giving a presentation, then all is well and good. But
of course, its no good if we are disabled by our nervousness; so we do need to manage
it.
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Managing your nerves is the first thing you need to do in order to start managing
your body and its role in your presentation. And one of the most important techniques
for managing all your important physical apparatus, particularly your limbs and voice, is
controlled breathing.
Not only does breathing feed your brain and muscles with oxygen through the blood,
but the controlled flow of breath from the lungs through the larynx, or voice box,
produces the vibrations that, when amplified primarily by the nasal cavity and then the
neck and chest, give your voice its aural character. The best kind of breathing fills the
lungs completely, from the bottom (expanding the tummy first), by conscious use of the
diaphragm, as opposed to the relatively shallow breathing that fills the top of the lungs
only, by merely lifting the rib cage (making the chest appear to expand). Once the lungs
are full, start releasing the air immediately, from the bottom of the lungs, so that your
tummy appears to deflate first, then your chest (its good training to hold still for a while
before breathing in again; but donthold your breath immediately after breathing in).
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Pro j ec t i on and voca l va r i e t y
Practising your breathing like this can help you project your voice. You need to speak in
a much fuller and more accentuated way, when you are presenting, than you do when
you are speaking naturally in a conversation. Again, you can develop your technique
here. You shouldnt shout, but you should try to become aware of your voice, know whatit can do. Heres an exercise that can help you become aware of how your voice works.
Stand up to experiment with saying the following words as forcefully as you can.
Pay attention to the vibrations in the face, particularly at the nasal bridge, with the m
sound (you should sense a slight buzzing effect). Then concentrate on using the force
of that vibration to project the vowel sound to the back of the room, or the wall, or
whatever the sound waves will hit (listen for the sound bouncing back to you). Keep
experimenting with the kind of sound each part of the word makes, and what parts of
your face, mouth, neck, and chest are vibrating when you do so with each of the
different words. Experiment with them individually, then in rapid sequence (you will
need to take a breath before each utterance). In doing the sequence, you should
become aware of how much work your whole vocal and breathing apparatuses are
actually doing. (Each sound is accompanied, in brackets, by a word indicating the kind of
vowel sound that should be made.)
MOO (shoe) MOH (top) MAW (paw) MAH (pa) MAY (pay) MEE (he)
After you realise what your voice can do, you will be much better equipped to give your
delivery more vocal variety. You can be more deliberate about changing your pace, and
about the different emphases you can put on different words. You can consciously make
vocal shifts that correspond to shifts in your ideas or your points.Giving aural texture to your presentation helps keep people interested and engaged.
Phys ica l p resence
Just as your voice contributes to the aural texture of your presentation, so there is
much you can do to manage the overall tone and feel of the whole physical context, or
space of your presentation, by using your body to visually articulate yourself. Your own
body and presence are vital components in this overall arrangement.
Of course, how you look is important in managing peoples impressions of you, of
your character and attitude. But even more than this, the way you look and move yourbody is a vital part of how you communicate, how you articulate what you say.
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Control your body. First, control your feet, and dont shift or move about in a restless
manner. There is a good base position in this respect. Stand with your feet only as