Alliteration is a particularly powerful presentation tool
Acting is merely the art of keeping a large group of people from coughing.
--Sir Ralph Richardson
By: Stephen D. Boyd
Delivering an effective presentation to 20 or to 200 people is difficult. Because listeners have better access to information since the internet became commonplace, audiences expect more content from speakers today. In addition, because of the entertainment slant of most media today, audiences want a presentation delivered with animation, humor, and pizzazz.
If you would rather spend your time preparing your content than reading a book on public speaking, this is an article especially for you! From my experiences in delivering over l500 speeches during the past 20 years, here is a quick guide to giving an effective and interesting presentation your very first time.
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More items like this, and others that you can use in your speeches and poweroints, at the Pivotal Just for Fun pages
The origins of the use of Power Point were solidly grounded in good intentions. Remember slides? People put pictures on them, or graphs -- visual aids. They were intended to act as accompaniments to lectures and presentations.
The whole idea was that the speaker would talk for a while, and then occasionally show a slide that illustrated a point with a picture or a striking image, or made a set of numbers clear with a bar graph or a pie chart.
Slides were time-consuming to create, and difficult to change. So most people used them sparingly. I once saw a speech by a National Geographic photographer that included a hundred slides, but each one was a uniquely wonderful picture he had culled from thousands, literally. He was entitled.
Then came Power Point.
More on Using Powerpoint on the Pivotal PowerPoint Pages
Gestures are reflections of every speaker's individual personality. What's right for one speaker may not be right for another; however, if you apply the following seven rules, you can become a dynamic, confident speaker who uses gestures well.
Your conclusion should do much more than simply tell your listeners that your presentation is over. Your entire presentation, in fact, can hinge on the final impression you make. It's that last impression that can linger the longest. So preparing a strong ending to your presentation is every bit as important as preparing a strong opening.
A FRIEND RECENTLY joined a multinational company where she was required to undertake several business training courses. In one particular course, she emailed her assignment as a Word attachment. The assignment was promptly
returned ungraded because she didn't "effectively answer the question".She was, however, invited to resubmit the assignment, which she did and shot straight to the top of the class.
It was a remarkable turnaround by any standard - all the more so because, aside from the addition of two or three extra sentences, the content of the resubmitted assignment was identical to the original. The only significant change she had made was cutting and pasting her assignment into a PowerPoint template. Unless PowerPoint makes you more intelligent - and it's a safe bet that it doesn't - the lesson of the course was that form trumps content any day.
Loved by some, loathed by many more, PowerPoint has become a byword for much that's wrong with contemporary culture.
From the Shameless Self Promoter
I suspect some folks do put up the charts and bullet points and text-dense slide for the simple reason that they believe the information will speak for itself, so they won't have to do all that pesky work of presenting it in an interesting and useful way.
Here's a hint: IT WON'T.
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