7 ways to keep audience attention during your presentation
November 18, 2009
Reference: Hartley J and Davies I “Note taking: A critical review” Programmed Learning and Educational technology, 1978,15, 207-224 cited by John Medina in Brain Rules
Keeping audience attention is more important and more difficult than grabbing audience attention. A reader emailed me:
“What can I do to keep the audience’s attention through the whole of my presentation. There are always people who don’t seem to be listening.”
How to craft a memorable key message in 10 minutes
November 11, 2009
A key message is the number one thing you want your audience to remember or do as a result of your presentation. Some experts call it “the big idea”, the core of your presentation or the proposition.
Start planning your presentation by deciding on your key message. It will make the rest of your planning easy and straightforward. Steve Bent, one of my readers, said in a comment on a previous post:
“…[T]hat’s when I had the Eureka moment of the key message for that particular presentation. Then all previous thoughts, notes and parts of the presentation were easy to classify in terms of how relevant they were, and which step they fell into (if any).”
Why your presentation shouldn’t flow
September 8, 2009
When I ask people on our courses how their presentation went they often say “It didn’t flow.” I ask them to elaborate and they say “I stumbled, I had mind blanks, and I had to start sentences again because they didn’t make sense.”
I then ask the audience how they found the presentation – they often don’t notice the issues which loomed so large for the presenter.
It’s not pleasant to be stumbling your way through a presentation. You’d like to feel that your brain and mouth are perfectly in sync and that words are just flowing effortlessly out of your mouth. That may feel good to you when you’re presenting, but it’s not necessarily good for the audience. Don’t aim to replace your stumbles with a continuous flow.
How to create soundbites in your presentation
September 4, 2009
Max Atkinson claims there’s no magic to it. There’s no need to go to a quote book. Follow rhetorical principles and you can create your own quotable soundbite.
Twenty-five years ago Max Atkinson was an Oxford academic – his area of research was conversation analysis. Then he coached Anne Brennan, a woman with no speaking experience whatsoever, to win a standing ovation at the Liberal Democratic Party annual conference by using rhetorical techniques. Overnight, Max became an in-demand presentation coach and eventually left academic life to teach rhetorical presenting techniques to business people. In his book, Lend Me Your Ears he shares those techniques.
These techniques were first developed by the great Greek and Roman orators. Politicians have used them extensively throughout history. What Max does brilliantly in his book is to show how the techniques can be adapted for business presentations.
When can you break the “rule” of a three-part structure?
August 7, 2009
In my Presentation Planning Guide I suggest that you use a thee-part structure for your presentation. They work for novels and movies, and for presentations too.
But, using a three-part structure is not a rule set in concrete. Sometimes your presentation will be more effective with more points. There’s a risk though, that each time you add a point, you dilute the power of the points that came before. Hence the saying “more is less”.
So you need to be clear that more than three points really are necessary. Here’s the distinction to make: is each point part of a logical sequence? Or can each point can stand alone? [Read more]
How to create a “new” presentation from pre-existing slides
June 13, 2009
In a perfect world, every new presentation would be prepared from scratch, tailored exactly to the specific audience. But in reality, you sometimes have to cobble together a “new presentation” from pre-existing material.
How can you create an effective presentation in the shortest possible time using pre-existing slides from different sources?
There are two phases to this. First, organizing the content of the presentation and second, creating slides to go with it. [Read more]
Three levels of presentation openings – which should you use?
April 8, 2009
I get frustrated at presentation advice which says you have to do something clever or dramatic at the beginning of a presentation to grab your audience’s attention. That’s for three reasons:
1. You don’t have to grab the audience’s attention at the start. You have their attention at the start. The challenge is to keep it. (I’ve written about this a lot – see these posts on this blog The Attention-Getting Myth and Attention-Getting The Evidence and also a discussion between myself and Rowan Manahan on his blog).
2. It’s hard to pull off a dramatic opening when you’re nervous. And most people are most nervous at the beginning of a presentation.
How to present like Michael Wesch
March 20, 2009
Michael Wesch studies YouTube the way David Attenborough studies insects and lizards.
Along the way he’s developed a superbly engaging presentation style. I don’t often watch presentation videos to the end – but I was glued to the screen for the entire 55 minutes of this presentation:
4 reasons to spend time on planning your presentation
March 12, 2009
Devoting time to preparing a presentation is worth it. Here are four reasons:
1. The audience’s time
Balance the time that you will spend planning the presentation against the time of the people in your audience. Say you’re presenting to 10 people for 40 minutes. That’s 400 minutes of people’s time – 6.6 hours. Isn’t it worth spending a few hours to ensure that 6.6. hours of people’s time is not going to be wasted?
2. The impact you can make
8 Presentation Tips for beating Audience Boredom
March 4, 2009
I asked you, my readers, to tell me about the challenges you have with presenting on “boring” topics. Ann Hemplemann wrote to me:
Oh, Olivia, you are ringing my bell on this one! I’m an environmental engineer and educator, and my topics range from dull to confusing. I give presentations designed to help plant operations people comply with complex air quality regulations, which require a lot of technical detail. I can’t say I think the topic is inherently interesting, but I do thing the outcome – improved environmental performance at large facilities – is very important. Thanks for any suggestions you might have!
Amy Sutton is a Human Resources Manager:
I have to do presentations about company policies or new laws that impact the workplace. Often this is somewhat tedious subject matter.
