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Story from Karen Carleton, MEd, MS
http://ca.linkedin.com/in/karencarleton
I was with a consulting company and some hunting outfitters were giving presentations to natural resources board to back up their claims disputing government research that animal populations were dwindling, to maintain their businesses and livelihood (or delay closure of their businesses).
One guy (a crazed rogue outfitter who wasn’t even a local resident) had 45 mins for a presentation and read from 14 point font on 300+ slides (based on questionable sources/research I might add), with a poor font/background contrast, for over 2 hours!! Death by PowerPoint exactly! He ruined the whole meeting agenda, and was already disliked my several people (including the board) to begin with.
In the end a PPT I prepared with visuals, minimal transitions, about 30 slides, given by the pleasant, well-spoken daughter of one of the outfitters was successful in delaying the (initallly proposed) immediate closure of their industry. I had also coached her and developed speaking notes in advance. Being empathic, mindful of learning preference differences, and respecting the audience’s time and attention, are all key to avoiding Death By PowerPoint.
In a survey of over 300 businesses, 89% of employers stated that they want colleges to place more emphasis on oral and written communication. That was a higher percentage than any other skill, knowledge, or ability. This comes from the Association of American Colleges & Universities‘ LEAP initiative.
You can find the PDF of the results here.
Why are oral and written communication so important? By comparison, why would only 81% mention critical thinking and analytical reasoning skills? I think it’s because when a person communicates in a clear, comprehensive manner, many other skills (such as critical thinking and analytical reasoning) are required and included. The communication is the final output, but there are many inputs.
People at work judge you by how you communicate. And, as I often say when I give talks to students, employers don’t care much about how you write e-mails unless they’re pretty awful. And most employees don’t write long reports very often. Finally, employers don’t notice much about your one-to-one communication, since by definition that’s usually private. What they see is how you speak in a group. This is your public persona and it says a lot about you.
Of course, speaking in a group is just another way of saying “presentation skills.” Not all presentations involve standing up, PowerPoint, or a projector.
What are you doing to improve your presentation skills? What resources do you recommend to others? Have you found that improving your presentation skills has helped your career?
I just found a great article by Sandi Mann in The Guardian, called, “Why do 60% of students find their lectures boring? (Dr. Sandi Mann is senior lecturer in occupational psychology at the University of Central Lancashire in the UK.) You can probably guess what’s coming.
“One of the main contributors to student boredom is the use of PowerPoint. PowerPoint slides are a powerful aid to today’s lecturer, who can use it to easily prepare dozens of slides to accompany a lecture. And that is the problem – lecturers tend to prepare too many slides, pack them with too much information, and whizz through them in a manner that obliges students to spend most of the session attempting to copy copious amounts of text from the screen, while bypassing active processing of the material.”
What a great follow-up to my webinar last week on “Presenting to Teach & Inform: PowerPoint for Education & Training!”
The research Sandi did (with co-researcher Andrew Robinson) showed that almost 60% of students say that at least half their lectures are boring, and about 30% say that they find most or all of their lectures boring!
What do students do when they’re bored?
Daydream – 75% of students
Doodle – 66%
Chat with friends (electronically, perhaps) – 50%
Send texts – 45%
Pass notes to friends (the non-electronic version of chatting) – 38%
Over a quarter of students leave the lecture at the mid-session break!
Perhaps the culture is different in the United States. It’s almost certainly different in India; in fact each region probably has its own statistics. But I think that the research applies generally to many places in the world. It’s pretty shocking. After all, education is supposed to be stimulating and enlightening!
How can we change this terrible situation? Do you have a suggestion for educating educators?
The next webinar is Slide Design for Non-Designers. I love this topic, because it’s close to my heart—I’m definitely not a designer. Yet I can create stunning slides (or so people tell me).
My story is that my slides used to look awful. After some painful feedback, I read books and studied slides that I thought looked great, noting the techniques and layouts they used. I’ve learned from some of the top designers in the country at the PowerPoint Live conference. This webinar will put everything together for you, giving you techniques that you can put to use right away.
The webinar comes with a crazy bonus. Thinking about it now, I can’t believe I did this. I’m offering a free slide makeover for everyone who submits a slide to me. Where will I find the time? But I decided not to back out on this one.
Everyone who has to design his or her own slides and who isn’t artistically inclined should take this course. How many people like that do you know? Share the news! Here’s the URL: http://www.ellenfinkelstein.com/estore/training_webinar_slide_design_non-designers.html.
Meanwhile the last webinar, “Presenting to Teach & Inform: PowerPoint for Education & Training,” was a great success! The recording is now available.
An excellent blog post by Suzanne Bates on using visuals and PowerPoint.
Too many words.
TOO MANY WORDS!
Do you have to fix up slides that other people made a mess of? I do. For some reason, I get a lot of slides on which people ignored the Layout feature of PowerPoint; instead, they inserted text boxes anywhere on the slide—in a different location on each slide!
Often, the first thing I do is to check the layout of each slide, change it if necessary, and reset the slide. Why is resetting so valuable?
When you make changes on individual slides, PowerPoint remembers them. As a result, even if you change the layout, the changes remain. Often the best way to get such a presentation into shape is to reset the layouts. When you do so, PowerPoint moves the placeholders into the position specified by the slide master.
On this slide, the title placeholder was probably in the original location, but the text placeholder that contains the bulleted text was centered. The slide has no alignment, so the eye has to move in a disjointed fashion. Talk about stress on the brain!
 Original slide In short, it’s a mess. By resetting your slides, you can start with a consistent layout, and work from there.
To reset in a slide, follow these steps:
- Right-click the slide and choose (Slide) Layout, then choose the Layout you want. (Tip: Select as many slides as you want in the left pane, right-click any of the slides and do the same, to change the layout for all those slides. No need to go slide by slide!)
- Right-click the slide and choose Reset Slide. (In PowerPoint 2003, click the selected layout in the Slide Layout task pane, click the down arrow, and choose Reapply Layout. (Again, you can select several slides at once.)
Here you see the result after resetting the slide and left-justifying the title.
Of course, now I can make other changes. In this situation, I ended up replacing the text with a SmartArt diagram, but at least I had a presentation full of slides that were consistent! Here’s my final slide.
(I want to mention that this presentation was about research done on children with ADHD and the effects of teaching them the Transcendental Meditation (TM) technique. If this presentation had been created for the purpose of presenting the research at a scientific conference, I would not have made the last slide; I probably would have left the slide with the bulleted text. But this presentation was made to show parents of children with ADHD the research on the TM technique. For a non-technical audience, the last slide was more appropriate.)
So, when you need to quickly whip a presentation into shape, reset the slides!
Related tips:
I recently read two books on speaking and thought I’d review them together. TJ Walker’s Secret to Foolproof Presentations was sent to me by the Jess Todtfeld, complete with a sticker that says, “Autographed by the author.” My understanding is that Jess and TJ are partners and the book cover includes “with Jess Todtfeld” under TJ Walker’s name. Jess asked if I’d be willing to review the book. I said yes, so he sent it to me.
Confessions of a Public Speaker by Scott Berkun simply arrived in the mail a couple of months ago. No e-mail, no note, nothing. But I was traveling to my parents’ house, so I took it along.
Both books contain valuable information, but they couldn’t be more different in tone and approach. But in the end, most good advice on speaking is pretty similar, so there’s a lot of overlap in content.
Secret to Foolproof Presentations
TJ Walker teaches presentation skills classes and to some extent the book is an advertisement for his business. He also does a clever thing: at the end of each chapter, he invites you to his site to get more information on the topic. This requires registering, so he’s also building his e-mail list. That is a great marketing idea and I must admit I’m jealous.
TJ Walker has a brash, up-front tone that I liked. For example, in explaining that you should videotape yourself practicing, he says, “I will warn you, if you have never seen a video of yourself speaking, you will not like enjoy watching one. Tough! Your audience has to watch you; shouldn’t you know what they are seeing and hearing?”
In the Introduction, he gives away is one big secret to giving a foolproof presentation: “Develop an audience-focused perspective rather than a speaker-focused perspective.” Then he explains that the way to find out what the audience wants to hear, whether your slides work, and so on is to simply ask them.
Each chapter title is a question. Some samples are:
- What is the best way for me to start my presentations?
- Should I use PowerPoint or other technology to enhance my presentation?
- How do I connect with my audience?
- How do I get rid of my “ums” and “uhs”?
TJ is big on finding a way to become more memorable, that is, making sure your audience remembers what you said. He’s mostly talking about business presentations that are meant to persuade an audience. He talks a lot about sales presentations.
The book is a quick read and contains lots of useful advice for people who need to give effective presentations, that is, presentations that have the desired effect on the audience. And TJ and Jess are great marketers!
Confessions of a Public Speaker
I’ve never heard of Scott Berkun. I’m not too clear on what he talks about; I think he talks about learning and creativity. He’s done some training as well. He also has an interesting marketing technique: at the end of the book, he asks readers to review it on Amazon, write about the book in their blog (which I’m doing now), recommend the book, go to his web site, etc. Why don’t I think of these things?
But the tone of his book is very different. Scott thinks of himself as a thinker and that shows. The tone was much more personal. I found some of the stories boring, but he has some unique insights that seem to have come from reflecting on his own experience. Nevertheless, he has read a lot on the topic of speaking and shares quotes from other books.
Here are some of the ideas in his book that I found interesting and useful:
- If you have a few people in the audience in a large room, ask them to move forward to get them together and create a “more intimate space.” His tips to get compliance: “Make it a game. Offer a prize to the person who gets up first. Ask the audience members if they need more exercise today, and when they all raise their hands … tell them you have just the thing for them to do.”
- Make sure you have something valuable to say. “It is possible to become an eloquent speaker, who makes beautiful slides and has a great vocabulary and perfect diction, without having much to say…The problem with most bad presentations I see is not the speaking, the slides, the visuals, or any of the things people obsess about. Instead, it’s the lack of thinking.”
- Think and prepare before you speak. “Making a point, teaching a lesson, or conveying a feeling to others first requires thinking, lots and lots of thinking, before the speaking ever happens.” He continues a bit later, “If you can’t spend 5 or 10 hours preparing for them, thinking about them, and refining your points to best suit their needs, what does that say about your respect for your audience’s time?”
- The title of your talk is important. The author gives lots of examples and tips for creating a title that will get people interested, actually communicate something, and even ehlp you construct the rest of your talk.
- It’s OK to use a simple outline or short list (but you probably shouldn’t write it on your hand). No, he didn’t say that last part.
At the end are two great chapters with quick advice, “What do do if your talk sucks” and “What do to when things go wrong.”
There’s a lot more in the book, so I recommend that you read it, especially if you do public speaking.
I had to share this comment from a discussion going on in the LinkedIn Learning, Education and Training Professionals Group group. There have been many great comments, but I got permission from Dr. William Brantley to share this one:
“The worst PowerPoint presentation I ever attended was given by a senior professor in the Education department of a major university. His speech, ironically, was on how to gain and maintain student interest in the classroom. He left the slideshow in the normal view which made the slides small and displayed all of the menu bars.
“The professor spoke in a condescending monotone for over half-an-hour. Each slide was a paragraph of text centered in the middle of slide. The professor read each and every word while spending most of his time with his back to us.
“He gave out such nuggets of wisdom as ’show enthusiasm,’ ‘engage the student,’ and ‘make the lecture interactive.’ At the end of the presentation, the professor asked for questions. The first question was rather rude but summed up the audiences’ reaction. ‘Why didn’t you follow your own advice when giving this presentation?’
“The professor’s reaction was essentially, ‘Screw you. I’ve got tenure and they can’t fire me for bad lectures.’ Another argument for abolishing tenure.”
Dr. Brantley wrote me, “Your audience may find it unbelievable and I would have too if I hadn’t been there.”
What has your worst experience been, either watching or delivering a presentation?
If you missed it, we had a great webinar last week on Animation and Video in PowerPoint—Advanced Techniques. It was jam packed with 10 techniques and attendees also got a 14-page handout with detailed instructions and the presentation itself, containing all the techniques!
You can now purchase the recording for $24.95, or buy all 5 webinars for the price of 4 for only $98. If you buy all 5, you’ll get the recording (plus the instructions and presentation) and access to the rest of the training webinars live.
Read more about the webinar. Scroll down to the bottom to find the Buy Now button for the 5 for the price of 4 option.
There’s a great discussion going on at The Official Toastmasters International Members Group on LinkedIn. Because you can’t access the group unless you join, I thought I’d summarize the opinions and see what you think. Here’s the question the sparked the discussion:
“In my home [Toastmaster] club, it has been generally accepted that the speaker does not thank the audience at the conclusion because it diminishes the impact of the ending and it is somewhat trite. The belief exists that the audience should be thanking the speaker for taking the time to prepare and share their thoughts.
Recently, one of our members has pulled me aside and indicated how rude he thinks it is for the speaker to assume that the captive audience should appreciate being held hostage without a thank you. We have another member who feels similarly.”
 Do you say "thank you" at the end of a presentation? Opinions that you shouldn’t say “thank you” at the end
Official TM stand on thanking the audience after the speech: “Don’t end by saying “Thank you.” The audience should thank you for the information you’ve shared. Instead, just close with your prepared ending, nod at the Toastmaster of the meeting, and say, ‘Mr. [or Madam] Toastmaster’ – then enjoy the applause.’”
I find “Thank You” a weak ending especially when a speech deals with emotions/persuasion. I prefer to pause for a few seconds (2-3) after a power-ending before handing over the control to the Toastmaster.
The audience remembers the last sentence best, so what do you want them to remember— the point you are making, the thing you want them to do, or thank you?
If it’s just a regular speech, closing with “thank you” just sounds like “thanks for not walking out.”
This concept has become so ingrained in me that I don’t think I could close that way if I tried. If you go back and watch videos of excellent speeches, I don’t believe you’ll find many (if any) that close with ‘thank you.’
Opinions that you should (or can) say “Thank you”
It is speaker’s preference. I usually do say thank you because I believe it is the polite thing to do.
Outside of TM world, “Thank you” is fine as part of the close. You’re not thanking them for sitting and hanging on your every word, rather for inviting you, organizing the event, contributing questions, etc. It MUST be sincere and not a throw-away line.
At conferences I attend, it is usual and courteous to thank the audience at the end. The two best conference speakers I’ve heard (who get invited all over the world to speak) not only say “Thank you” at the end of every speech, but even end with a “Thank-you” slide. There’s nothing wrong with that — you’re thanking the audience for being attentive, asking good questions, laughing in the right places…. Then they thank you back, by applauding.
I usually try to put a thank you in the transition leading to the conclusion – that way I make my personal thanks known (and signal the audience that the end is near) without muddying the conclusion.
Opinions that it depends on the circumstances
For TM speeches, and especially for contests, I would not say “Thank You.” For speeches outside TM, I agree that saying “Thank You” is OK, especially if you have been giving a long seminar. However, a good alternative would be to (sincerely) wish the audience well with whatever the topic of your speech has been. That is a clear signal that the speech is over and should leave them with a favorable impression.
When speaking at TM, you generally do not thank the audience. If I were giving a seminar, or other training, I would ALWAYS thank the audience. At Rotary, at a professional venue, or any public presentation, I would ALWAYS thank the audience.
If you NEED to thank the audience, (for going out of their way to hear you, or for them giving you an opportunity to speak), you can do it towards the end, but it shouldn’t be the last words.
What I think
I almost always thank the audience, but I don’t think I did so when I was in Toastmasters. The situation was different:
- The audience wasn’t paying to hear me speak
- The audience didn’t choose to come and hear just me (they came as part of the meeting and for their own learning experience)
- Toastmasters is a very formal atmosphere. Yes, you end with Mr. (Madam) Toastmaster and a handshake at the end. Who does anything equivalent in the business world?
I do like the idea of not making “thank you” your last words, though, and leaving the audience with a final, uplifting point. For example, I might say, “Thanks for your attention and remember that you CAN present complex data clearly!”
If you’re giving a sales presentation, you would always thank the audience. Why should they thank you when you’re trying to sell them something? If your CEO gave you some of his precious time to hear a pet proposal of yours, of course you should thank him or her.
See my earlier post, “What goes on the last slide?” for a related discussion.
What do you think? How is the answer different in different situations and for different types of content?
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