How to effectively present in English in the 21st Century

I don’t like them. I think they are useless and are a product of the 1990s.

Presentations have a bad name. When people are told they “have to” attend a presentation, the image in their minds is of being sat in a room, listening to an unprepared presenter reading slides about a subject that is boring, full of jargon, has no story and no point.

So, as a presenter you are beginning your presentation with an audience full of preconceived, negative ideas about what you are going to talk about. if you begin your presentation in a way that confirms their expectations, you will already have lost your audience.

To overcome this you need to begin your presentation in an unexpected way. That is why the use of a contents slide only confirms to your audience that your presentation is going to be boring. Instead, eliminate the contents slide completely. All you need is an introduction slide with the title of your presentation. That slide should be on when your audience arrive. Then, once you get started you are straight in to your presentation.

This is a simple change to the ‘standard format’, but it can make a huge difference to the way your audience views your presentation.

Managing your audience’s expectations is one part of your presentation that is increasingly becoming more important. Audiences’ attention spans are becoming shorter and shorter and keeping your audience’s attention focussed on your presentation is becoming increasingly difficult. Today, you have to think like a movie director. To have to think about what will grab your audience’s attention and what will keep your audience’s attention. Following tried and tested formats for a presentation is just not going to do that today.

Both native speakers and learners of English as a second or third language all start learning by learning the structure of English. The way verbs and nouns follow each other and the way we use articles and prepositions in our sentences and expressions.

Unfortunately, for most learners of English as a second language that is where it all stops.

The next level of English, the level that takes you away from sounding like a textbook and making you sound more natural is the level of what I term “destructured English“.

Let me give you an example. Most learners of English will learn the following greeting and answer:

A: How are you?

B: I’m fine thank you and you?

There is nothing wrong with this greeting, and is taught all over the world. It is grammatically correct and has the right balance of politeness and friendliness. The unfortunate thing is that it is boring and too rigid. It conveys no character or feeling and shows none of your personality or how you are feeling. In effect it is too structured.

To destructure this we can play around with a few different greetings. For example:

A: Good morning! How are you today?

B: Good morning! I’m very well thank you and your good-self?

This greeting begins to convey more feeling and more emotion and starts to give you character. The words alone are not actually going to do this. You also need to put some enthusiasm in to it as well, and that can only come from confidence. Confidence comes from practice and the realisation that you can actually do it.

Destructuring English is not only limited to speaking. Using a destructured form of English in writing can liven up your writing and make your emails sound much better to the reader. For example:

Dear John,

Please find attached the agenda for the next meeting at head office.

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me.

Regards

Carl

Again, there is nothing wrong with this email, it has the right words, all in the right place. The problem is that it shows no emotion or real friendliness. It ‘sounds’ like a standard email. Again, it is too structured.

To destructure this email we can do the follow:

Dear John,

I have attached a copy of the agenda for our next meeting at head office.

If there is anything you want to ask me, just let me know.

Regards

Carl

This email says exactly the same thing as the first email, the difference is that this email sounds much more human and friendly, yet at the same time it is still polite. All that has changed is the use of the word “I” and “you”

Now look at this from a presentation point of view. Often when we start our presentation we begin with a textbook beginning that goes something like this:

“Good morning. My name is Hwan Soo Kim and my presentation is about the coefficient drag factor of mice running in a wind tunnel. My presentation is broken up into three parts. The first part is ….. “

While this beginning ticks all the boxes from a textbook point of view, it actually does nothing for your audience. It essentially tells them they they are about to be bored stiff for the next sixty minutes! Not a particularly inspiring beginning. It is too structured.

Instead try this:

“Good morning! Thank you all for coming today.

As some of you already know, my name is Hwan Soo Kim and today I am going to talk to you about some amazing insights we have discovered on the coefficient drag factor of mice in a wind tunnel.

So, let’s get started.”

This is a much better beginning because it sounds much more natural, it gives the speaker some character and personality and it sounds different. By destructuring your beginning you create more interest in what you are going to talk about.

So if you want to take your English to the next level, then begin deconstructing the English you use. Look for more natural ways to express yourself. Use movies, TV shows and native speakers in your company to listen out for new ways of saying the same old things. If you want a better way to begin your presentation, head over to ted.com and watch a few presentations there. You will soon find new ways of saying things.

There are so many places where you find deconstructed English, You Tube, for example, has millions of videos you can watch. Here in Korea there are many US and British TV shows shown on terrestrial TV channels and of course you can learn from each other. There really is no excuse.

Your voice is arguably the most essential tool you need when you present. Without your voice, you are not presenting. So developing a good strong voice is something you will need to do if you present regularly.

For most people who are presenting they experience nervousness. This nervousness effects your voice by raising their pitch (low voice or high voice) and speeds up the words you speak. In some cases, when you are especially nervous your voice can break and ‘shake’ in a way that makes it sound like you are crying or highly emotional.

The key is to be able to project your voice to the back of the room. This is fine if you are presenting in a small room with a small group of people. But when you are in a large room with a larger group of people and you do not have the assistance of a microphone, then this can cause major problems for the people at the back of the room.

So, here are a few tips that can help you to project your voice more clearly:

1. speak from your diaphragm, not your throat

Your diaphragm is a thin layer of muscle positioned just below your lungs. This muscle assists your breathing and is actually the cause of hiccups. Most people speak using their throat, and we naturally do this when we are speaking softly or quietly. However, to improve the volume and pitch of your voice you should use your diaphragm to project your words. To do this you need to make sure that your breathing and voice comes from your stomach area. It is a lot easier than you think, and with practice you will soon be able to do this naturally.

2. Stand up!

Presenting while sitting down suppresses your voice by making your voice volume much lower. To avoid this you should always stand up when you are presenting and keep your head held high. Avoid looking at your shoes!

3. Position your notes / computer high up

Most presenters on stage place their computer on the floor and then spend the rest of their presentation looking down at the computer’s monitor. When you look down you automatically lower the volume of your voice. The best place for your computer is on the podium / lectern. This ensures that your head is always high up.

4. Relax!

Okay, I know this is difficult. Most people are very nervous when they are presenting, but it is important to try and relax before you speak. Try rotating your shoulders and neck a little before you begin. Drink a little warm water to relax your throat and focus you mind on keeping relaxed.

I hope that helps a little when you are next presenting. Please feel free to add any other tips you find useful in the comments section.

We often think we have to fill our presentations with data and lists in an effort to give our audiences all the information available. This forgets a very important change in the way we get our information. When we are interested in something, we go away and Google it – or in Korea, we Naver it.

With this in mind as presenters we do not need to cover as much detail as we used to do in a presentation. What we need to do now is to give enough information to spark enough interest to get our audience to want to learn more.

The way I see presentations today is that they are an opportunity to create a ‘buzz’. Whether that is to stimulate interest in your product or service or to explain a new plan for your company. What your goal should be is to induce a spark that gets your audience wanting more. Fill your presentation with a the facts and data and you not only bore your audience, you lose their interest in whatever you are talking about.

Company reports, SOPs and other detailed explanations are, and if they are not -should be, available for your audience members. So you do not necessarily concern yourself with every single little piece of information.

Of course presenters need to give some details, the overview if you like, but the boring nitty gritty can be left for the audience members to look up if they have enough interest following you presentation. And this presents a unique challenge to a modern day presenter – how to spark the interest.

To do this you need to be able to show that audience that by taking an interest in what you are saying, it will improve their lives in one way or another. For example, if you are presenting your company to a group of potential new clients, you need to show them that your company can improve the way they do business. Your potential clients do not want to listen to you spend five minutes talking about the history of your company since its foundation – that is information that can easily be found doing a simple search in a search engine. They want to know what you have achieved and how you can use that achievement to help you become a better company. You potential clients do not want to know how your management is structured. They want to know which manager will be looking after them and how he or she will help their company become a better company.

Think about it. When you are sat in a presentation, are you really interested in how a company structures its management? Even worse, why are you talking about your CEO / Chairman / woman when they haven’t even bothered to turn up to the meeting?

The way it works in the twenty-first century is you give three or four key pieces of information and allow your audience time to ask questions on the parts that they want more information. That way you are presenting to your audience needs and not your need to squeeze in as much boring, irrelevant information as possible – in an effort to keep your antiquated boss happy.

Keeping it simple, relevant and short is the way to present in the twenty-first century.

Recently I have been coaching a group of Global Marketing Executives at a large Korean company here in Seoul. They have been preparing for their annual global conference this year in Barcelona, Spain. There were five presenters, each talking about their own specific area of expertise.

When I began, all we had was a pre-prepared script and some slides. Usually, I do not recommend preparing a script as it often leads to boring presentations. This is because when you read, or memorise, a pre-prepared script it is very difficult to put your real personality into your spoken words. However, in this instance we had plenty of time to ween the presenters off their scripts.

The first step was have the presenters read through their scripts with the slides to make sure that the words they were speaking matched the slides they were talking about. This also gave me the opportunity to change a few sentences and words to make the script more ‘natural sounding’. This involved changing formal sentences into informal sentences, as people tend to speak English more informally than they do when writing English.

Once we had got the script to sound more natural, the next step was to put the stress and intonation into the spoken words. To do this we needed to isolate the adjectives and modifiers such as “very” and “much”. Presenters who have pre-written a script for a presentation normally miss this very important step, and this is what makes their presentations boring. What you have to do is to put stress on the words you want your audience to remember.

Another way of making the Presentation sound much interesting is to speed up on the filler words such as “here you can see the ….” and slow down on the important sentences “…amazing sales growth…” and speed up again for following filler words “…we have achieved in the last…” and slow again “…two years.”

Try it.

[Fast] Here you can see the…

[Slow] the amazing sales growth…

[Fast] we have achieved in the last…

[Slow] two years.

What you will notice is that you sound like you really feel the words you are speaking, when you place the stress in the right places. You also have your audience fully understanding what you feel is important.

Of course to do this correctly takes time. I was lucky as this particular company was serious about getting this right. When all the presenters did their final presentations, they sounded natural,confident and fully engaged with their subject material. The slides matched exactly what they were saying and they sounded great, not just good.

Whilst it is always better to be able to do your presentation without a script, for some people the thought of standing in front of a large audience without a script is frightening. For those, by all means prepare a script, but make sure that you focus on the stress, speed and intonation of your words to present a presentation that sounds natural, confident and exciting.

No audience wants to sit through a thirty minute presentation, that sounds flat and uninteresting.