Posts tagged as:

stories

7 ways to keep audience attention during your presentation

November 18, 2009

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.”
A one-way presentation is one of the worst possible ways of transferring information from person [...]

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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 [...]

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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. [...]

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New research: warning about story-telling

January 2, 2009

The guru of multimedia learning Richard Mayer has just published a new paper that all presenters should take note of. The paper is called “Increased interestingness of extraneous details in a multimedia science presentation leads to decreased learning”.
The research
Students received one of two PowerPoint presentations about how a cold virus infects the human body.
Both PowerPoint [...]

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How to tell a story like Malcolm Gladwell

December 20, 2008

I bought Outliers two days ago. And though I’m familiar with many of the stories that Gladwell tells I’m still entranced. They work on the printed page and they’ll also work for you in a presentation. How does he do it?
Here’s my analysis of Gladwell’s storytelling techniques - illustrated by Chapter Five of the book.
1. [...]

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Six lessons in public speaking from Obama

November 9, 2008

America has elected the greatest political speaker for a generation.
You may think that there’s nothing for you to learn from Barack Obama’s speechmaking skills – that speaking to 200,000 people at Grant Park, Chicago is too far removed from the presentation you might give to your staff, to your management team or to potential clients. [...]

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How to say nothing in your next presentation

September 30, 2008

Have you sometimes gone along to a presentation -it may be entertaining and enjoyable – but at the end of it, or a few days later, you think to yourself – what did I get out of that presentation? It’s easy to fall into the trap, as a presenter, of saying nothing in a presentation.
What [...]

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6 Major Distractions to Eliminate in your Presentation #2

August 11, 2008

Yesterday I talked about 4 environmental distractions which cause people to stop focusing on your presentation.
But it’s also easy to distract your audience by what you say (or don’t say) and by what you show on your PowerPoint slides.
5. What you say (and don’t say)
This is the major cause of people starting to think about [...]

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Are our brains wired to enjoy stories?

August 2, 2008

Presentation experts extol the power of telling stories in presentations. A recent Scientific American “The Secrets of Storytelling” explores why stories are so powerful. It looks at three theories from the fascinating field of evolutionary psychology.
Stories are simulations for real life
Keith Oatley, is a professor of applied cognitive psychology and a novelist. So he’s got [...]

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The power of anecdotal evidence

July 26, 2008

In your business presentations, you may be tempted to stick to hard, proven facts and statistics to persuade your audience. But a powerful anecdote can trump objective facts.
The power of the anecdote
1. Vaccinations and autism
A recent Scientific American article by Michael Shermer “How Anecdotal Evidence can Undermine Scientific Results” discusses the medical controversy over vaccinations [...]