How to effectively present in English in the 21st Century

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

Quite possibly the most important part of a presentation is the use of positive adjectives. Even if your were delivering a eulogy at a funeral, you would still need to use positive adjectives.

Above, is a list of some of the best adjectives to use when presenting a product. However, as I mentioned in a previous post just simply using the adjectives on their own is not enough to give them impact. You need to marry these words to a benefit.

Here are some examples you could use:

“As you can see, it has an attractive case and it is robust enough to be moved around – this means that it is highly portable”

“it has several unique user-friendly features that will be highly beneficial to our ageing customer base”

“It is fashionable which means that it will appeal to a younger customer”

Using positive adjectives gives your presentation a more passionate feel and will give you a way of showing your enthusiasm for the product that you are presenting.

PLANNING

When you are planning your presentation, it is a good idea to write down a list of positive adjectives to describe your product – as in the example below.

Finally, here’s a great clip of an Apple Keynote presentation that isolates the positive adjectives that were used.

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.