How to effectively present in English in the 21st Century

Photo courtesy of Flickr House Wallpapers

I am a big fan of House MD, and have managed to see all episodes from season 1 through to season 5.

While watching these episodes I noticed that the show follows a format that we can all learn from when doing a presentation.

The show opens with a scenario that tells you how the illness first became obvious. This could be a scene with the patient doing their everyday thing, then suddenly collapsing and then the opening titles begin. What this does is set the scene. When we do a presentation we need to set the scene early on. Give your audience a sense of what the problem is, why we are talking or what difficulties we experience in our everyday life that your product can solve (but of course at this stage your audience does not know this)

Following the opening titles, we get to see Dr House talking with his junior doctors about the patient’s problem, the initial prognosis is given, and the first treatment is administered. As always, the first treatment does not work and the problem the patient has get gradually worse. When we do a presentation, we need show our audience what the problem is, in detail, set out what we can do to make that problem or difficulty better.

What we need to remember here is that a story is being told, it is unfolding before our eyes, and this is very important when we do our presentation.

During an episode of House we get to see the patient almost die, before the Sherlock Holmes like Dr House comes up with the answer to the illness. In a presentation, we need to build up to the main point. The main message we want our audience to go away with. – Starting with your best point is not going to make your presentation memorable. Revealing the main message towards the end of your presentation will make it much more memorable.

Below, you can see how this transfers into a flow diagram that you can use next time you start planning your presentation.

Finally, you have the happy ending. The happy ending gives your audience that wonderful warm feeling of being part of something special, and that it the most important part of your whole presentation.

Nancy Duarte of Duarte Design, spent a day at the Decker Communications HQ. There she discovered the importance of eye contact when presenting.

Your body language and the amount of eye contact you do during your presentation is so important. Stay standing behind the table and you risk not connecting with your audience, move about too much and you are likely to make your audience motion sick.

One of the most interesting things to come out of this post was that Nancy was recommended to over emphasise her gestures and to spend 5 seconds in eye contact with each member of her audience.

You can view the whole post here

One of the biggest mistakes you could make when designing your presentation is to use your computer software’s default settings. Not only does this show that you have a lack of imagination, but it also puts your audience to sleep even before you start speaking.

Apple Keynote's default

Microsoft's Powerpoint default

When you plan your presentation, you should also consider what your design will be. It does not take long to think of some ideas about what you want your presentation to look like.

A great tip you could use is to delete the default placements and start with a blank template. This way you will be forced to create your own style.

When creating your own style you should think of the colours you want to use, colours that you like, or if you are creating a presentation for your company, perhaps use colours from your company’s logo. Garr Reynolds of the excellent Presentation Zen blog has a great article on colour and places you can go to get sample colours.

You could also use the colour selector of your computer’s software to play around with some ideas. Taking time now to create some colour schemes for your presentation could go a long way to helping you to create a visually pleasing and interesting presentation.

Apple's iWork 09 colour selector

Moving away from the default settings in your presentation software and allowing yourself to be a little creative can not only make your presentation more interesting for your audience, but it can make preparing your presentation a lot more fun.

For more information on presentation design, colour schemes and much more try Nancy Duarte’s Slide:ology book

Or you can visit the slide:ology blog

Preparation is the key to a successful presentation. But too many people fail to prepare properly. The best advice I was ever given was that when you are preparing a presentation in a foreign language,  you should first prepare you thoughts and ideas in your native language.

How to prepare is a very big topic, and I will over the coming weeks go through some ideas on how to prepare a presentation, but the simple procedure of getting your ideas down on paper first is one of the best pieces of advice I could ever give you.