Posts Tagged ‘ English Presentation

But We Are Different!

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about the need to make sure that the images you use in your presentation are relevant to the subject matter you are talking about. Linked to that is an excuse I often hear given for poor quality and boring presentations: “But we are different”

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This excuse is usually given after someone has explained to me that they know using images and less text is important, but their business or their subject matter does not allow using clear, relevant images and few words on a slide. Frankly, it is possibly the worst excuse I have ever heard! The worst because if they know using less text and more visuals makes a better presentation, then why do they insist on boring their audiences time and time again? Do they not understand that it is their duty to find a better way to present their message?

The simple truth is that slides full of text will be immediately forgettable. Not only have you wasted your time, but more worryingly you have wasted the time of your audience as well. And that, as a presenter, is unforgivable!

And yes, all of you in the world of academia and medicine – listen up – You are not exempt either. Just because your subject matter is complex and technical does not mean you have an excuse to fill your slides with boring text that is too small to read. You are NOT different. (see here for an excellent post by Dr Simon Raybould about medical presentations)

A great presentation is not about deciding what to put in, it is about what to take out. Your audience does not have the capacity to remember everything you say, so you have to keep your message simple and memorable and to do that you have to keep your words and points to the minimum, not the maximum. Relevant and clear images are much easier to remember than row after row of bullet-pointed words.

There is no excuse for slides filled with unreadable text, no matter what you are presenting about. So stop doing it. The next presentation you create focus on taking out and not putting in.

Designing Slides For Note Takers

One of the biggest complaints from presentation ‘experts’ and audiences is that most presentation slides contain far too much text. Full sentences and sometimes even full paragraphs.

Now think about your audience for a moment. Most audience members take notes during a presentation. They have their sheets of paper, iPads or laptop computers and they are desperately trying to capture all the important stuff you give during your presentation. If your presentation slides contain long sentences and paragraphs, then there is no chance your audience can capture the important elements of your presentation. Quite often, your audience just gives up and ultimately, they stop listening.

The same goes for the charts and graphs you may put into your presentation. The more complex your chart or graph, the more difficult it is for your audience to quicky sketch out the important parts of the information you are giving. If your audience is unable to get down into their notes the important information from your presentation, your presentation is going to fail. Your audience are unlikely to remember anything you said 20 minutes after you finish. That is not success. That is a huge fail.

Look at the following example:

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While this slide is okay (except for the website address in the bottom right corner and the logo in the top right) there is still too much text. No note-taker is going to be able to get all the information down before you move on to the next slide.

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Now this slide shows the key information, it show the beauty of the car and the text used could be easily copied down before the presenter moves on to the next slide. Additional information can be added after your presentation, the information will be fresh in your audience’s mind.

So perhaps you should apply a simple test to your presentation slides:

Are my slides simple enough for my audience to capture the key information into their notes within twenty seconds?

That should be your goal when designing your slides. Putting the convenience of your audience first.

Stress The Adjectives

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.

Where Are The Senior Executives?

This year I have done our presentation seminar with a large number of people from many different companies. Some were large international companies, others were smaller domestic companies. On each occasion the students attending were a mixture of people from various departments ranging from the sales department to the human resources department.

However, one thing that has surprised me is that none of the students attending were senior managers. Almost all of them were junior members of their departments who, when questioned, did little or no presenting in their companies.

I find myself having to ask the question: why?

Why is it that the very people who have to do important presentations in English are the very people who do not attend presentation training seminars, courses or workshops? Do they think they are too good to attend? or is it that they feel they are too busy?

In my mind this is a crazy situation. Everyone knows that that the state of presentations today is terrible. In some places it is getting better and in some cases there is an understanding that presentation communication needs to improve, but the perception of the humble presentation is still that they are largely boring, useless and pointless.

My guess, and this is only a guess, is that these managers are too proud to admit they need further training. And it is here where the problem arises.

Most presentations I see done by university students are fantastic. The design, the message and the stories are there. It most cases the final presentation is a little rough around the edges, but on the whole their presentations are good, creative and have a clear, simple message. On the other hand most presentations I see done by senior executives have difficult to read slides, are full of boring text and are a complete mess when it comes to a message. The end product looks like something created in the 1990s., with no clear point and at the end a very confused audience.

Business communication did not stop evolving in the 1990s. The evolution of Business communication exploded in the 2000s. Audiences now demand simple, clear messages that are delivered in twenty minutes and the details are handed to them in a clear, convenient handout. Audiences no longer have time to sit in a meeting room listening to an old style executive spew word and boring word in a dull, unimaginative way for hours upon end. Audiences want to the point messages with great illustrations and simple easily digested facts and figures.

Until these senior executives get it and begin to understand that it is they that need to be taught how to present in the twenty-first century, presentations are going to continue with the same boring image. All I ask is that if you are a senior executive, please lose the pride and get some help. It will not only help you develop, but it will help restore the image of the presentation into something it should be. A great way to communicate a message.

Company Introductions – What to put in

I have sat through so many company introductions and been bored almost to death by one hour presentations telling me about stuff I, and the the other audience members are really not interested in. As mentioned in my previous post on company introductions – a company introduction should only last around ten to fifteen minutes. Anything longer means you are putting in far too much information.

Below is a list of things to include and a list of things to take out immediately if they are in your company introduction.

  1. Information about how your company was founded and by who
  2. Any interesting stories about your founder (if you don’t know any – ask and find them!)
  3. what were the first products or services your company sold
  4. How your company got to where it is today
  5. What you are doing today, how big you are (not factory size or the square meterage of your company’s offices – but how many employees you have and how many units you sell etc)
  6. What are your company’s future plans.

That’s it. You do not need anything else.

What you should not put into your introduction:

  1. Your company’s management structure – it means nothing to us!
  2. All the different departments your company has – we do not care!
  3. All the different products or services your company produces and sells – it’s too much information.
  4. Line upon line of text – it really is very boring and you will read it making it even more boring!
  5. Copied and pasted pictures of your Chairman opening a new factory. Seriously, it looks awful!

Compatibility

Recently, I have been working with a large industrial group that has many different departments working on different parts of their overall business strategy.

In an effort to present their company’s future strategies and goals, they have developed a 20 slide, sixty minute presentation that brings together all the different work that department does and how each department works together to achieve their future plans.

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Unfortunately, the presentation does not work. Why?

Firstly, the writer of the presentation went round each department individually and asked them to prepare slides and a script for the part they each have in the overall strategy. This immediately caused a dysfunctional and disjointed set of slides that had no natural flow or logic. While the writer of the presentation did his or her best to bring each part together in a logical fashion, it failed because there was not a team of people working together to get the presentation right or logical, there was just one person who did not understand any of the work that each department did.

If you are preparing a presentation that focuses on the overall strategies or direction your company is going and there are a number of different departments involved, then the presentation needs to be built with a team of people, ideally one person from each department meeting together to put the presentation together. This way, each department representative can ensure that each point made in the presentation fits logically and seamlessly in the ‘big picture’, and where one person in the team does not understand something, it can be explained properly so that what goes in to the presentation is clear and easy to understand.

Another problem that has occurred, is that the script and the slides are not compatible. What is written on the slide, is not what is being spoken by the presenter. This causes great confusion with the audience.

Finally, the person responsible for the translation of the presentation into English was never involved in the original build of the presentation. This means that the English translation is even further away from the original presentation ‘script’. This essentially renders the whole presentation in English useless.

As a result of this lack of ‘togetherness’ the whole presentation fails. It is full of technical mumbo jumbo, that not even a senior professor at a top university understands and there is no point to the presentation.

To avoid this, it is essential that a team of people are given the responsibility to build the presentation. A representative from each department should be on the team, and if the presentation is to be translated into English, then the translator needs to be in the team. This way, any difficult technical language can be tested by different people to ensure understanding and a clear and consistent message.

Remember, a presentation is not something you build to impress your boss. A presentation is something you build to communicate a message. It is therefore important to make sure that your message is the most important goal, and not the number of slides or the how technical your slides are.

프레젠테이션 오프닝

프레젠테이션에 있어서 여러분이 너무 긴장하고 두려워하게되면, 오프닝 부분이 전체 진행 과정 중 가장 어렵게 느껴질 때가 종종 있습니다.

프레젠테이션을 시작하는데는 다양한 방법들이 있습니다; 스티브 잡스처럼 “Good morning. Thank you for coming today”라는 말로 시작할 수도 있고, 다른 이로부터 자신을 소개받아 시작하는 것이라면, “ Thank you Mr/Ms XXX (소개 해준 이). Thank you Ladies and Gentlemen” 과 같이 좀 더 격식을 차려 이야기 할 수 있습니다.

어떤 방법으로 프레젠테이션 시작을 열어가시든, 강렬하고 자신감있게 시작하시는 것이 중요합니다.

무엇보다도 오프닝 부분을 사전에 충분히 연습하시는 것이 가장 중요합니다. 아래의 표들은 여러분들이 오프닝 때 사용하실 수 있는 예문들입니다. 어떤 것을 선택하여 사용하시든, 가장 중요한 것은 긴장 되지 않고 편안해 보이면서 여유롭게 프레젠테이션을 시작하는 것입니다.

이 간단한 오프닝들을 마음껏 사용해 보시고, 여러분께서 편하게 느끼시는 구문을 골라 오늘 바로 연습해 보시기 바랍니다.

Beginning Your Presentation

Beginning your presentation is often the most difficult part of presenting, because you are full of nerves and feelings of fear.

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There are many ways to begin; you could begin with a simple “Good morning. Thank you for coming today” the Steve Jobs’ approach. Or, if you have been introduced, you could begin with something a little more elaborate “Thank you Mr Chairman. Thank you Ladies and Gentlemen”.

But whichever way you begin, starting strong and starting confidently is important.

A well rehearsed beginning is the key, and below is a list of ways you could begin your presentation. Whichever way you decide to use, the important thing to do is to feel comfortable and relaxed with the words:

Use can use these simple openings as often as you like. Choose one that you feel comfortable with and then give it a go.

Rhetorical Questions in Presentations

One of the best ways to get audiences to feel they are taking part in your presentation is to ask rhetorical questions. A rhetorical question is a question you ask, but expect no answer to. In effect you answer your own question.

For example:

“English language education is important in today’s world, but we have a problem don’t we?”

Here we see a statement, followed by a question. The question is not expected to be answered by the audience, instead the presenter answers his or her own question. Your presentation continues like this:

“English language education is important in today’s world, but we have a problem don’t we? We have a problem because ….”

When we use rhetorical questions in our presentation, it makes your audience feel they are participating, and unconsciously it brings you closer to your audience. It is a win win situation.

So, try using a few rhetorical questions in your next presentation and see the difference in your audience’s reactions.

Advanced Present Tense

When you learn English as a second language, you are usually taught the present tense as below:

With “will”, “be going to” and in the continuous form using “ing”

I will go shopping this weekend

I am going to the movies this weekend

They are arriving from Italy at 4pm

Most students of English as a second language do not have the opportunity to take this to another level. So here is a simplified version of advanced future tense:

I am planning to go to the movies this weekend

We expect to visit France on our vacation.

We are anticipating sales to increase 100% this year

In the future we will expand our business in to Australia

While some of the above expressions are a variation of the original future tense words, the keywords “anticipating” and “in the future” are good examples of how we can use other words instead of the usual words such as “will” and “going to” .

In presentations, these words are excellent because they are clear and gives you, the presenter, some variation in the choice of words you use. Variation in vocabulary is good because it prevents repetition, and repetition of words often leads to your presentation sounding boring and uninspiring.