reading 1 bizcommch8 presentations excerpts

7/30/2019 Reading 1 BizcommCh8 Presentations Excerpts

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Business Comm unicat ion: Asian Perspect ives, Global Focus Page 1

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

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