How to effectively present in English in the 21st Century

Just came across this 5 minute podcast on preparing for your presentation. While it is not perfect, it does not talk about the importance of planning your material, it does give you some pointers on what questions you should ask before you give your presentation:

these questions include:

What does your audience want?

What do you want?

What do you want your audience to take away from your presentation?

You can link to the podcast directly here:

I had a good listen to many of Stever Robins’ podcasts yesterday at the Get it Done Guy’s website and recommend that you all have a look through as there are a lot of useful ideas and tips here.

There is a right way and a wrong way to present using images. The first thing to know is randomly taking images from the internet is not only unprofessional, but in most cases illegal. Most images that you find on the internet are copyright protected and if your presentation is recorded or published online anywhere you could find yourself owing the owner of those images a lot of money. Best advise; don’t do it.

Secondly, most images from he internet are of poor quality and really do not help to make your presentation look professional.

There are many places where you can obtain good quality images, legally, that are free. The best place is Flickr. Flickr has a category called “creative commons” and what this essentially means is that the images are made available by the owner for you to use for non-profit purposes. Non-profit purposes means they cannot be used in product materials where the intention is to sell something, or in a book or magazine article where your direct purpose is to make a profit. However, if you want to use the images in your presentation, then generally this will be OK as long as you make sure that you credit the owner for the image in your presentation.

How To Use Images

Once you have selected your images, just randomly placing the images in your slide is unlikely to have the impact you desire. As will all things design there is a right way and a wrong way to make your point. Let’s look at an example:

In this example, the image has a white background, but the slide has a graduated black to grey background. This is a common error many presenters make. To give this image more impact you could change the background to white and resize the image to fit the slide.

There is also another problem with this image. The main speaker is facing away from the words so your eyes are drawn away from the words. Try to make sure that the main person in the image is facing the words to give them greater impact.

Now the image takes centre stage and the impact of the slide is greater. “a picture paints a thousand words” and it our job as presenters to make those pictures paint those words.

A word of warning here…. If you have a low quality image, then resizing to fit your slide could distort the image and this looks very bad. So when it comes to using images, search for good quality images that will allow for some resizing.

In his blog, Presentation Zen, Garr Reynolds shows some excellent sample slides on other ways you can or cannot use images. Click here to view

Personally, I like images where there is a lot of white space for text. Here is a sample slide where there is plenty of space for text.

In this slide you can see there is a lot of free space on the right side of the image to place some text or words. The slide is not busy, or cluttered and it makes for a nice, clean, calm image.

So, next time you set about creating your presentation, remember, the images you use will make a huge difference to the professionalism of your presentation.

Here’s a quick one for you.

I have spent many years trying to figure out why some people appear to be naturally good at English, while others always seem to struggle. And while I do not pretend to have a secret formula (one does not exist anyway) I do know that the way you treat English in your life does determine how well you speak and hear English.

The one common denominator of all good English speakers that I have met is they use English as a tool, and not as an academic subject. They make English a part of their life, rather than just another subject to study. When you take English away from being something you study to something you use in your everyday life, then English begins to open up a whole new world of possibilities to you.

Here in South Korea, the main search engine is Naver.com . Naver is a great website for all things related to Korea, and for some things not related to Korea, yet it is a Korean language website. Naver’s strength lies in it’s Korean content and not its English content. Sadly, most Korean students of English only use Naver, and not allow the skills and resources they have learnt in English to make good use of English websites like Google or Yahoo

What really amazes me is that candidates preparing for an English interview, or even an English presentation use only Naver or another Korean website. Surely, the logical thing to do is to use Korean websites for Korean related things and English websites for English related things.

Once your English ability reaches such a level that you are able to present in English, it really should be a logical step to use the English resources you have around you to make your presentation, interview or whatever else you are preparing in English.

Making English a part of your life does not mean abandoning your favourite native websites, what it does mean though is making use of all the tools you now have, that all the hard work and money you have spent on your English work for you. This can only enrich your life and help you both in your personal and professional life.

I know there is a lot of information out there on the world wide web, in textbooks and what we are in school and university. But when it comes to presenting it really is as simple as following a simple plan.

Here is a chart I drew that describes the simple components of a standard presentation.

And really by following this simple guideline when you are planning your presentation you should find that all the various parts fall in to place.

Here’s a quickie for you guys out there.

Google launched their  new smart phone the Nexus One. Rather unfairly if you ask me, the way the phone was presented at the launch was heavily criticised by the media. Over at the Decker blog, Kelly Decker has posted this little critique. Very interesting and something we can all learn from.