Ten tips for the Presentation Battlefield
Author:
Barry Brophy
Making a presentation is daunting for most people, and positively terrifying for many. If you only have to do this once or twice a year the anxiety will be more acute due to the lack of practice. Here are ten practical tips that could be of use when you next have to get up and speak.
1. Look at the audience
If someone stopped you in the corridor and asked you a question, you would turn to that person, look them in the eye and answer it. So it should be in a presentation. Eye contact is the single most important factor in engaging with your audience. See the presentation as a conversation, where you have a number of points to make. Raise each point, and with the help of yourvisual aids, talk around it.
Remind yourself to glance around the room, briefly catching people’s eye. You can’t, and don’t have to, look at everyone but if you pick out people in this way, the whole audience will feel involved, and it will also make you feel more comfortable in what you are doing.
2. Encourage questions
If an audience is active, it is very hard for them to be bored. Questions are often the best part of a presentatio so you should prepare for them thoroughly and build time into your talk to take them when they arise. If you find that you are getting bogged down, then you may have to politely suggest leaving the remainder of the questions until the end. But stating this at the outset is a little didactic and off-putting to the audience. And far worse than getting asked too many questions, is getting asked none at all.
3. Start with a chunk The first minute of a presentation is the hardest.
The best way to get through this is to begin with a single item that will allow you to keep going on autopilot for a minute or two, such as: a story, an interesting fact, a picture, a quotation, a question to the audience, or a demonstration. This, of course, should be related to your talk, not just a gimmick to get the audience’s attention and get yourself out of the blocks. A story is the simplest and most effective of these. A knowledgeable speaker (you won’t be asked to speak if you do not possess knowledge that is of value to the audience) relating a relevant professional experience to an audience is the most natural and memorable form of communication.
4. Apologise for nothing
This guideline is not as aggressive as it sounds. The basic idea is that, despite the fact that you may fear giving a presentation and thus fear your audience, they are, in fact, rooting for you. They want you to be interesting and useful; why wouldn’t they? Presenters often apologise. They apologise for slides that are unclear, or material that is boring, or for running over the allotted time. By doing so you are drawing attention to your own failings instead of simply eliminating them during the preparation stage. You should focus your energies into getting up and getting on with it. Basic, simple conviction will enthuse your audience and keep them interested.
5. You do the verbal; the slides do the visual
Don’t be distracted by your own visual aids. Use them only when you need to, like a salesman pulling samples from a suitcase. Put very little text on the screen as this will encourage you and your audience to read rather than listen to you. Wordsaren’t visual aids in any case. There is a simple division of labour regarding visual aids: you do the verbal, let the slides do the visual. Focus on the audience, not the slides.
6. Don’t make your slides like posters
This is a subtle but a very important point. Many people array their slides like posters, with graphs, thumbnail pictures, bullet points, a title, a company logo and even some footnotes. This might look well composed when you stand back to behold it but it does not make for an effective visual aid. Visually and cognitively, audiences can only focus on one feature at a time. If you wish to show a graph, show the graph and the graph alone, don’t reduce it in size and subsume it among other items (Illus. 1). PowerPoint is very good for stepping through visuals, so it makes little sense to show them all at once on a single cluttered slide.
7. Don’t use the slides as handouts
One of the most frequently cited excuses for having numerous wordy bullet points on slides is that these same slides will be printed out, photocopied, stapled together and used as a handout to compliment the presentation. There is no good reason for doing this. Making the slides and the handout one and the same will either compromise the slides or the handout, or both.
8. Be very, very careful with graphs
Often presenters use the expression, ‘As the graph clearly shows’ when in fact graphs seldom clearly show anything. A graph, like a picture, tells a thousand words but are you in control of all of these words? Can the audience pick out the key detail from amongst the many other possible interpretations?
Graphs are powerful communication tools as they take large sets of numbers and turn them into easily interpretable patterns and forms. But you have to be clear on the function of each. Make a single point at a time, highlight each one (PowerPoint will help you do this), and allow the audience plenty of time to inspect this and digest the point for themselves.
On even a simple graph you need to direct attention to the key feature. In Illus. 2 the peak value is the focus and should be highlighted, but for it to make sense to the audience, the quantity on the y-axis and the scale and range of this axis must also be communicated.
9. Don’t just present facts, interpret them
This ties in with point seven. You have to ask the question: what can I do with this presentation that I couldn’t do through any other
means? Presenting slides filled with text will add no value to the handout, which itself might also be just slides filled with text.
End of year accounts can be distributed easily by email. As a presenter, you are adding value to raw data by interpreting and explaining it. You are the expert. As such, you should focus not on the facts but on the insights and explanations that bring the facts to life.
10. Be creative
There are a thousand ways to communicate any idea. Making a presentation is one of the few very creative things that you have to do as part of your job. Take a few minutes to think about how you are going to approach the task. Better still, bounce ideas off a colleague over coffee. You will generate some ideas that you would never have thought of alone. When you have decided on the points you wish to make, try and find analogies, examples, stories or demonstrations to bring each concept to life. Be bold in how you do this.
Many presentations are unnecessarily dull, and your audience will thank you for any efforts to be innovative.
UCD Lecturer, Barry Brophy, is the author of The Natural Presenter published by the Institute of Chartered Accountants in Ireland.