How to present in English

There is quite possibly nothing more focussed when it come to story telling than the traditional TV commercial. You have usually 30 to 60 seconds to capture your audience’s attention, tell your story and make them want to buy your product or service.

Studying TV commercials is a great way to learn how to tell a story in a focussed, relevant way.

One of the most interesting type of commercial is the tourist commercials of various countries. I have studied the recent commercials of India and Malaysia and I am struck by the way the creators of these commercials can tell their story in such a warm, emotive way and in such a short period of time.

Above is the advert from India, entitled “Incredible India”. Although this commercial is two minutes long, the story it tells is ‘incredible’. My guess is that most people’s perceptions of India is a large, dusty, polluted country with little or no beauty to see. Certainly not a country with amazing beaches, gorgeous mountains and fantastic beauty. There are no words as such, just images. These images tells the story of a young (ish) man, travelling round India experiencing the sites and sounds, and thinking about what to write in his post card home.
In two minutes, this commercial changed my idea of India, it brought some wonderful emotions to mind, and had me wanting more.

Above is Malaysia’s award winning advert from 2007. Here is another commercial that brings the emotions of spending a relaxing time with your family, with warm, sunny beaches, beautiful mountains and exquisite mountains to mind. Again, the story is simple, yet inspiring and there is no need for words as the images, together with the song convey the message the advertisers want.
And there is the point for us presenters. We often talk about the importance of telling stories in our presentations, yet the vast majority of presentations done around the world have no stories at all. Just facts and figures, and a lot of unnecessary words. What we can learn from these commercials is that our stories do not have to be complex or long, they just have to be simple and relevant to what we are talking about.
When we are presenting our latest product to our best customer, we need to show them how the product can change their lives, we can do that by telling stories, by ‘tapping’ in to their emotional side, and not just giving the numerical data, facts and figures. Numerical data, facts and figures have no emotion, in many ways they are not meaningful to us. By turning our data and numbers into relevant stories we can turn our presentations into powerful communication tools.

Most presentations that I attend or see online begin with nothing spectacular. They usually begin with a “Good morning. Thank you for coming today”. And while this is an OK beginning, that is exactly what it is. It is an “OK” beginning.

There is no inspiration, there is no excitement, and lets be honest the media have not been hyping your presentation for the previous 4 months. Steve Jobs may be able to get the audience excited with a “good morning. Thank you for coming today” beginning, the chances of you being able to do so are pretty slim.

I would not suggest you come running down the centre isle of the room like a TV Presenter or a pop star, but there are a few little things that you can do to help get your presentation off to a great start that wins your audience over and gets the atmosphere moving into a positive direction.

The first method I first saw Garr Reynolds do when he presented at Google Authors, it is simple, but very effective. Below is a sample of how he used animation to say “thank you”

In this slide you see a simple, small “thank you”. When Garr Reynolds shows this slide he says “I just want to say thank you, but not just a small thank you, a really big thank you”

As he says “… a really big thank you” the slide changes from the above slide to the slide below.

This is a nice simple way to get your audience smiling, if not laughing, and really does help to get your audience into a positive frame of mind.

Another way to begin your presentation is to begin with an amazing statistic. For example:

This is a slide that Steve Jobs used in his January 2010 presentation to introduce the iPad. That is an awesome statistic and one that had the audience clapping. Again, the objective of such an opening is to create a positive atmosphere and both the methods I have shown here certainly help to achieve that goal.

One of my favourite opening at the moment is to use video to introduce myself – I talked about the use of HD video as a background to your welcome slide in a previous post, and I have recently been using it to introduce myself when I open a presentation. (you can view that post here)

Another interesting way to make your opening a little more interesting is to use images from your own life (I admit this is another idea from Garr Reynolds) I used this style when I opened my presentation at TED MeongDong, Korea. Below is my slide deck from that presentation.

So when you open your next presentation, think about how you can utilise some creativity to make your opening a little more interesting. It not only makes you look more interesting, it also makes the whole event of your presentation more interesting.

One of most badly delivered parts in a presentation is numbers. Quite often when someone is delivering a presentation andaregivingtheir audience a set of numbers whether it is sales figures, production costs or any kind of statistic they just create a chart or graph in Powerpoint or Keynote with just the numbers on it.

What this is to an audience is a group of numbers arranged on a chart. It has no real meaning.

In their book Made to Stick Chip and Dan Heath talk about giving those numbers meaning. here is a great example from that book.

“Bottled water costs about 8.4 cents per ounce. Municipal water in San Francisco costs about 0.0022 cents per ounce. When you read those two statistics, what you take away is this: Wow, there’s a big difference there. Bottled water costs a lot more than municipal water! But our brains aren’t very good at intuiting much more than that…”

However, they go on to give an example how the same example about municipal water and bottled water compare in price.

“The writer Charles Fishman, in a magazine article about the bottled water industry, figured out a brilliant way to make this statistic come alive. Here’s what he wrote: “In San Francisco, the municipal water comes from inside Yosemite National Park. It’s so good the EPA doesn’t require San Francisco to filter it. If you bought and drank a bottle of Evian, you could refill that bottle once a day for 10 years, 5 months, and 21 days with San Francisco tap water before that water would cost $1.35.” Now your brain can begin to apprehend the full scale of the difference between these numbers—it’s not a big difference, it’s a gargantuan difference! It’s a 10-and-a-half-year’s-worth-of-refilling-a- water-bottle difference.”

What you need to do is give some meaning to your numbers, rather than just stating a list of numbers.

Here is another example of  great way to show statistics by the great Hans Rosling. This guy has an awesome way to present numbers and data.

The above video is available in 7 different languages at the TED.com website

There is a simple trick in English that you can use :

“We have now sold over 500,000 units of piping since we started in 2007. That means if we put all those 500,000 pipes end to end it would stretch from Seoul to Pusan and back! That’s about 500 km.”

All we have to do is present the statistic or number and then relate something that your audience can relate to. For example, if your audience has just come back from a coffee break and you are giving statistics on the amount of gasoline used in an average car per year, you could compare the number with the number of cappuccinos Starbucks sell.

So, change the way you present numbers and see your audiences eyes light up.

Here is a good language lesson that came up in one of my classes today.

We were talking about New Year Resolutions and I pointed out that there is a language within English that tells the listener whether you will achieve what you want to achieve or whether it will remain a dream.

Words like:

I want to…

I plan to…

I hope to…

These sentences tell the listener that you are not likely to achieve what you want to achieve. These sentence beginnings are what I call “Dreamers English” they are the language used by people who dream of achieving things, and not by people who do achieve things.

A sentence beginning with “I will…” tells the listener that you are serious about what you want to achieve and is more likely to believe that you will succeed.

Examples:

We want to open negotiations with Australia about a free trade agreement

I will open negotiations with Australia about a free trade agreement

So next time you are preparing your presentation, remember to use “will” rather “plan to” or “want to”

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