How to present in English

In his 2005 Stanford University Commencement address, Steve Jobs spoke about how things you do in your early life, quite often can help you in your later life. He spoke about how some of the things he learned whilst being a ‘dropout’ at university, enabled him to design the user interface we see on all Mac computers (and PC’s) today.

For example, Steve Jobs attended a calligraphy class, and here he learnt about the beauty of fonts and writing styles.

Now, as a presenter, I wondered how I could illustrate the idea of “connecting the dots” so that an international audience would be able to clearly understand the idea.

Below is my attempt to illustrate, using a slide and a little animation, how connecting the dots led me to begin this blog and to get in to the process of writing a book about presenting in English. It also shows how I became interested in photography, which led me to become interested and learn Photoshop and eventually how I became interested in presentational design.

Here is the original speech given by Steve Jobs

As it’s the Christmas season, and many of you have some time to take a well earned rest. I thought it would be useful to give some do’s and don’ts of presenting. Many of these do’s and don’ts are obvious, but I do believe that these are always a useful reminder when we set about presenting.

1. Do always prepare in your own language first – on paper

I have written about this before, but it really is important to put down on paper your thoughts, ideas and topics in your own language before you open any kind of presenting software. The reason for this is that you obviously think better in your own language, your ideas are formed in your own language and the ‘story’ of your presentation is formed first in your own language.

2. Don’t apologise for “poor English”

When you stand up to do a presentation in English, apologising for your poor English skills will put your audience into a deep sleep before you begin. If you have prepared well, practiced and remembered to speak slowly, then there is no need to apologise.

However, if your English really is not very good, then to be perfectly honest, you should not be presenting in English in the first place. Remember, the reason to give a presentation in English is to communicate your message, whatever it is, to an international audience and to communicate you need to be understood.

3. Do smile

OK, a little obvious, but it is amazing how many times when we stand up in front of an audience, the nerves and the heat of the moment often leads us to forget the obvious things. When you first stand up, welcome and thank your audience – smile. It will put your audience at ease with you and it will put you at ease with your audience.

4. Don’t speak for longer than 40 minutes

There is a good reason for this. Audiences hate presentations. It is hard to accept, but they don’t. It is your job to get your audience to enjoy the presentation, to have a little fun and to learn something they did not know before they heard you speak. If you have to speak for longer than an hour, then your audience will be bored and quite possibly asleep.

5. Do move about

Standing still, not moving and and even worse standing behind a lecture is a huge turn off to an audience. It makes you sound ‘stiff’ and it makes the presentation sound stale. Use gestures, move around and relax.

6. Don’t read your presentation

Reading a presentation is the single biggest turn off for any audience. If you need to read your presentation then you have not prepared enough. NEVER read a presentation. There is no excuse for this.

7. Use good quality images

A sign of a badly prepared presentation is images that have clearly been taken directly from a website, and then enlarged in the presentation software. It looks bad, and it will make your presentation fall flat.

8. Don’t put too much text on a slide

Similar to number 6. Because you should not read your presentation, this should not be an excuse to put your words on your slide. Audiences cannot listen and read at the same time. Always think that if your words are on the slide then you do not need to be there.

9. Do make eye contact

Eye contact allows you to connect to your audience. Connecting with your audience makes your presentation memorable, and helps to make you feel more relaxed. Your audience never wants you to fail and they will help you if you get in to difficulties. But you do need to connect with them first.

10. Don’t ever be afraid

Speaking in public is a scary thing to do for most people. But speaking for the majority of us is a natural thing. Things will go wrong sometimes, we all know that and your audience do not want to see you fail. Most of your audience understands that speaking in public is hard, they are willing for you to succeed. Just relax, remember to speak slowly and try to enjoy yourself. Interact with your audience, move about on stage and smile.

On a personal note. I like this logo

It is a warm, sultry day in July 2005 in Singapore. Delegates from 5 different countries are gathered in the main hall to deliver their final bid to the International Olympic Committee (IOC). The London delegation know they are laying in 4th place. Between them lies 3 countries and a final presentation to the IOC. The odds of London winning the 2012 Olympic bid looks very thin, and most of the world are expecting the winner to be either Paris or Moscow, the two favourites.

Sebastian Coe, the former Olympic 1,500 metre gold medallist and 800 metre silver medallist rises to his feet. He has the task, as the lead person for the London delegation, of delivering the final presentation. He delivers, what has been described as one of the best speeches ever given to the IOC for an Olympic bid.

Several hours later, the delegates are all gathered again in the hall. The Chairman of the IOC fumbles with the envelope containing the winning bid.

As we all know now, the winning bid was London. The question. How did London come from 4th place to win the bid in one last presentation? The answer is a compelling, personal story.

Sebastian Coe was recently featured on the BBC’s Desert Island Disk’s radio programme. During that show he was asked about his speech.

Here is a transcript of the speech:

Kirsty Young: When you won the Olympic bid then in July 2005, of course it was a team effort, but key to the winning, so I believe from what I read, was a very personal speech that you gave yourself about a moment for you. Was it the 68 games?

Lord Coe: Yes it was, in Sheffield

Kirsty Young: And you were watching it on the TV. How old would you have been then?

Lord Coe: I was barely 12.

Kirsty Young: And what was it you told the Olympic committee about watching that?

Lord Coe: It was a very simple story about being dragged in to an assembly hall, in my school in Sheffield, and we watched the highlights of the games, the night before or the day before. Two local athletes in Sheffield; John and Sheila Sherwood. John got the bronze in the 4 hurdles, and Sheila narrowly missed the gold in the women’s long jump. And I just looked at this and I thought that this was the most extraordinary thing I’d seen. And I was sucked in by it.

In the Wikipedia entry for Sebastian Coe it is written “Coe’s presentation at the critical IOC meeting in July 2005 was viewed by commentators as being particularly effective, and the bid won the IOC’s blessing on 6 July.^”

Finally, here is a not so good copy of the official Olympic bid video.

One of the biggest mistakes a presenter can make is in the planning stage.

After sitting down and writing a great outline, a great story, and gathering all the right images and data, the presenter then opens up his or her Powerpoint programme. Then without thinking, just starts writing their slides. No thought about colour schemes, fonts or layout.

One thing you need to know when you present to an English speaking audience, is that the very first few slides will determine whether you are able to keep your audience listening, or whether they will just go to sleep.

Designing your slides is a very important part of planning your presentation. Standard colours like a medium blue background is a definite no no, so is white. Standard fonts such as Times New Roman and Arial are also a definite no no. Your computer comes with a selection of fonts, and if you do not like the alternatives, you can download some free fonts from 1001 Free Fonts so use them.

The above slide is an example of a slide that has no thought given to the design, or for the audience. It has a very boring blue background, with a standard font (arial) It also has the company’s logo placed at the bottom, which just does not go very well with the background.

Together with the use of bullet points, this slide is not only bad, it is also guaranteed to have your audience sleeping within the first 3 minutes.

Here is an example of a much better slide. There are no bullet points, the background is interesting, and the font used is Helvetica. It also makes use of “blank space” (sometimes called “white space”) It gives the same information as the previous slide, but it does so in a much more interesting way. You could also add a little animation to the slide by moving the timeline forward as you speak.

This slide is a very common slide in most presentations. What is does is tells the audience what you are going to talk about. Whilst telling your audience what you are going to talk about, I personally choose to say this rather than make a slide for it. However, if you choose to put a slide up with what you are going to talk about, the above slide is not the way to do it.

Like the first slide, it is boring. No audience is going to be inspired to stay awake and listen to you with a slide like this.

Here is a much more interesting way to present the topic of your presentation. Again, like the previous example, you could animate it and have the coloured boxes moving forward as you tell you audience what you will be talking about.

Once again, this slide uses colour to make the slide more interesting. It is not busy and it links very well with the previous slide.

Taking a little time to think about design can be the difference between an outstanding presentation and just another boring presentation.

There are many resources on the internet that can help you with inspiration. One of the best resources for presentation inspiration is slideshare.net It is free and you can spend hours there just hunting around for some great ideas. – Go on have look, and release your creative talents. And remember, when designing your presentation, have fun!!

Are you trying to use too many ‘buzz’ words in your presentations? If you are, and if you think it makes you sound more clever; think again.

According to The Plain English Campaign - an organisation with aim of making English more simpler – the use of these words is becoming more and more frequent, and they do not make you sound more intelligent or clever. In reality, they make you sound boring and unoriginal.

‘Buffling’ – becoming familiar with and consistently using business-related ‘buzz’ words – is endemic in many business presentations. Sadly, when you use them, you lose your audience’s attention and this ultimately hurts your presentation.

Many of these so called ‘buzz’ words actually have no meaning at all. For example: what is “360 thinking”?  – logically, the expression does not make sense.

Here is the list compiled by The Plain English Campaign – My advice? If any of these words are in your presentations – take them out and replace them with more simple words.

The ‘buffling’ list of shame.

Thinking outside of the box

Touch base

At the end of the day

Going forward

All of it

Blue sky thinking

Out of the box

Heads up

Singing from the same hymn sheet

Pro-active

Downsizing

Ducks in a row

Brainstorming

Thought shower

360o thinking

Flag it up

Pushing the envelope

At this moment in time

In the loop