How to present in English

I have been coming under increasing pressure from my wife to just tell all my readers what I think are the top five things to know when you present in English. So in interest of family harmony, and of course to give the best tips I know to all you guys, here is my top five list.

1. Never read your presentation. I know I have mentioned this many times, but it is so important, that I will continue to mention it for the rest of time. The simple reason for not reading your presentation is because you focus more on your reading than you do on your audience, and then you end up boring your audience to death. Reading your presentation also means the tone, passion and enthusiasm in your voice is lost. You sound robotic and ultimately boring.
2. Use images not text in your slides. Whenever you put text on your slides, your audience will read it. One thing that scientists have proved is that the human brain cannot read and listen at the same time. So, when your have a lot of text on your slide, your audience stops listening to you and reads your slides. When this happens there is really no point in you being there. However, when you use an image that is related to what you are talking about, your audience uses their imagination to fit the picture with your words and they experience true understanding. So even if your pronunciation is not great, your audience can understand your words by the use of the image.
3. Step away from the lectern. One of the biggest problems for people who come from a more conservative, ‘polite’ cultural background is that they stay behind the lectern or table when they give their presentation. When you are presenting to a largely English speaking audience this makes you look very nervous and unsure of yourself. European and American audiences expect you to move around, use hand and arm gestures and express your passion physically. Standing still with your arms firmly by your side, looks wooden, boring and shows a lack of confidence. Next time you are presenting, move the lectern to one side and stand ‘up front and centre’
4. Speak slowly. Quite often when you are presenting to an international audience, many of listeners are non-native English speakers. If you speak too fast they will not understand you at all. Equally, as a non-native English speaker yourself, your pronunciation may not be perfect all the time, and your native English speaking audience members may not catch the word or phrase you use. To help your audience, speak slowly and carefully and use your slides to help you with difficult words.
5. Use simple language. Quite possibly the biggest mistake any presenter makes is to assume that their audience has the same level of knowledge they have. Understand something. Your audience does not have the same level of knowledge. Quite often you will use words and phrases that many in your audience will simply not understand at all. Here is a great example. In Korea, medical doctors learn the Korean word for a condition as well as the medical name in English. However, when you are presenting at a medical conference, there will be people in your audience who are not doctors, but for example, pharmaceutical sales representatives. They may not know that “carcinoma of the lung” means “lung cancer” or my favourite “myocardial infarction” simply means “heart attack”. Use the simple, easily understood word so that your presentation can be understood by all your audience members.

I know many of these tips have been mentioned before, but they are so important I felt that they needed to be emphasised. I do hope that you will find them useful.

In previous posts I have recommended that you find and download some different fonts for your presentations, so that you can avoid your presentation looking like another boring presentation.

But, when you do this, you will need to remember to take a copy of your font with you when you present.

The other day, I was preparing to use a presentation file. After I had opened my file, I got the above warning message. I then checked to see what the problem was and discovered the following:

I had used a font that was on my desktop at home, but a font I had not put onto my laptop computer.

So remember, next time you download a font, keep a copy of it on a USB driver or flash memory stick, so that if you are presenting on someone else’s computer, you will be able to put the font onto that computer without losing anything from your presentation.

MORE ON FONTS…

The wonderful website HongKiat.com features a list of 42 high quality fonts you can download for free. Check it out.

One of the main themes in Garr Reynolds’ book Presentation Zen, are the concepts of restraint, simplicity and naturalness. Garr does a great job in his book to explain these concepts and I want to try and explain how we can use these concepts when we present in English as a second language.

RESTRAINT:

Essentially, this means holding back. Keeping your slides and words to their core meaning and not using too much, whether that is a slide with too much information, or a presenter who is rambling with too many words, when fewer words and slides with less information are used, you message becomes clearer and your audience’s understanding is greater.

Sadly, in today’s business world, the pressure to pack in as much information as possible is high, and we often try to use far too much information, whether that is too much text on a slide or too many words spoken. We need to ‘restrain’ ourselves and use less. When presenting, less really does mean more.

This concept can really help us when presenting in a foreign language. It means we do not need to worry too much about how many English words we use, we just need to focus on the words that really matter. When we isolate the words that really matter, we can then ensure that these are incorporated into our slides to help the effectiveness of our presentation.

Above, you can see that the same message can be given by using less words, and by doing so you can create a more powerful slide.

SIMPLICITY

Simplicity does not mean simple – as in a lack of intelligence. It means simple to understand. One of the biggest mistakes presenters make is they quite often assume that their audience has the same level of intelligence as they do, that they understand everything the presenter does. This is not true. A presenter must remember that there will quite likely be a number of people in their audience who do not understand the technicalities of the topic.

A good way to manage this is to prepare your presentation as if you were preparing to give your message to your grandmother. If your grandmother can understand your message then your audience will. (unless you grandmother was a nuclear physicist – use your judgment)

The same applies to your slides. Do not over complicate them.

The slide on the left is much more complicated than the slide on the right. WHile the left slide does have a strong meaning, the one on the right is ‘cleaner’ and ‘simpler’

The language you use is also important. Simple words and short simple sentences have a clearer message than long sentences and long words. Trying to show off your level of English is a pointless exercise. You over-complicate your message and many in your audience (who also may be non-English speakers) will not understand. Aim your level of language to a person with an intermediate standard of English and remember to speak slowly.

NATURALNESS

Be natural in your delivery. This means be yourself and do not try to be something you are not.

When we deliver a presentation, it is important to be natural. If we read our slides we lose naturalness, we sound robotic and we lose character and personality. It is so important for you to actually learn your presentation in a way that you deliver your presentation naturally. Reading and reading and reading your presentation and learning it by heart will lose its emotional value. You need to learn it in a way that preserves its naturalness. For me the way to do this is to learn notes, not sentences. Learning notes means that I use the link words like “and”, “then”, “but” etc, naturally. And that is the way for any non-native English speaker should be learning their presentation.

For more information on the concepts of restraint, simplicity and naturalness, I highly recommend you buy a copy of Presentation Zen. THe book is available in many languages, so I am sure you will find a copy in your native language.

I had the great honour of attending the TEDx event in Seoul, last weekend. This was a shared event between TEDx Sookmyung and TEDx Myeongdong and the title was “Young Spirit , Visualize Your Idea”.

What was great to see was the seemingly complete move away from text based slides to a much more visual slide. Simple sentences and images say so much more than lines and lines of text, and that was demonstrated in abundance at this event.

The whole event was fantastically organised, with little intro videos before each speaker. This gave the event a feel of professionalism. Below, is a sample of one of the intro videos that was for guest speaker Bill Dresselhaus

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One of the great things about TED is the wonderful resources available on the main TED website. Here you can watch, completely free, some of the world’s best presenters talking passionately about what they truly believe in.
With the creation of the TEDx groups, you too can enjoy a TED event in your very own home town. So check out the TED website for a full list of TEDx cities and go along and watch some amazing presentations – you will not be disappointed.

One of the biggest fears presenters have is the question and answer session that follows their presentation. This understandable. Fear comes from not knowing whether you will understand the question, or whether the question asked is one that you know the answer to. However, there is a way you can prepare for questions before your presentation that can help to remove your fears.

During the planning stage you will need to think carefully about when or whether to allow questions. In general, the smaller the audience, the more difficult it is to avoid answering questions. If you are presenting to 2000 people, then answering questions would be impractical (although I know that in some cases there is a Q&A session after the talk) However, if you are presenting to around 10 people, it would be almost impossible to avoid having to answer questions.

The secret here is to plan for questions. You can predict the kind of questions you will be asked, and if you cannot predict them, have a colleague or friend listen to your presentation and have them ask you questions. You will be able to judge the kind of questions you will be asked from this short exercise.

When planning for questions, make a note of the questions you think might be asked. Anticipate what the subjects will be asked about. In a product launch, if you have not already told your audience, they will want to know the price of your new product. They may perhaps want to know what margin you will be giving them. There is no excuse for not knowing the answers to these simple and basic questions. So find out!

There will of course be times when you will be asked a question that you simply do not know the answer to. Be prepared for these questions too. Depending on the type of question asked, have an honest answer ready. If you do not know the answer, be honest. Tell the questioner that you will get back to them later when you have the answer. Do not try and answer a question that you do not know the answer to, it is unprofessional and you will be found out.

If you do not understand what the questioner asked, because they spoke too quickly, or their pronunciation is not very good, just ask the questioner to repeat the question more slowly. Saying “I’m sorry, could you repeat your question a little slower” is not embarrassing or telling everyone that your English is not good, it is polite, and professional.

If you are not sure exactly what the questioner asked, repeat the question you think they asked, nine times out of ten the questioner will agree that you understand correctly and then you can answer the question.

So, do not fear the Q&A session – Prepare for it.