How to effectively present in English in the 21st Century

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.

It is very tempting when making your presentation to put as much information as you can on a slide in the belief that this will make your presentation look better.

Actually, what it does do is confuse your audience and they soon begin to suffer from ‘information overload’.

By putting too much information on your slide you are causing too much distraction in the slide and the audience stops listening to you, and they start to focus more on your side. When your audience stops listening to you, that is a time when you may as well not be there.

Here is an example of a slide that has been created without any thought about the audience. This was actually slide number 45 in a 68 slide presentation. I have serious doubts there was anyone left in the room by the time the presenter got to this slide as they were all very similar in design.

Genuine slide from a genuine presentation!!

Let me introduce you to the concept of “White Space”. White space is the blank space on your presentational slide. All it is is a background. Nothing else.

One of the reasons we use ‘white space’ is to help focus the audience on the point we are making. This technique is not only used in presenting. Even posters make use of  ’white space’. Take a look at this poster I created for a language institute that wanted to advertise that they were opening an “entry class” business English class at 6:30am.

Apologies for the poor quality image

All the attention is drawn to the big red square in the middle of the poster. The source of my inspiration for this poster was the current Apple iPhone adverts, which use a very simple design in which a picture of the phone basically says all there needs to be said.

So next time you begin to put together your slides, think very carefully about what you put there, because when designing a presentation – “less really is more”

One of the biggest mistakes a presenter can make is in the planning stage.

After sitting down and writing a great outline, a great story, and gathering all the right images and data, the presenter then opens up his or her Powerpoint programme. Then without thinking, just starts writing their slides. No thought about colour schemes, fonts or layout.

One thing you need to know when you present to an English speaking audience, is that the very first few slides will determine whether you are able to keep your audience listening, or whether they will just go to sleep.

Designing your slides is a very important part of planning your presentation. Standard colours like a medium blue background is a definite no no, so is white. Standard fonts such as Times New Roman and Arial are also a definite no no. Your computer comes with a selection of fonts, and if you do not like the alternatives, you can download some free fonts from 1001 Free Fonts so use them.

The above slide is an example of a slide that has no thought given to the design, or for the audience. It has a very boring blue background, with a standard font (arial) It also has the company’s logo placed at the bottom, which just does not go very well with the background.

Together with the use of bullet points, this slide is not only bad, it is also guaranteed to have your audience sleeping within the first 3 minutes.

Here is an example of a much better slide. There are no bullet points, the background is interesting, and the font used is Helvetica. It also makes use of “blank space” (sometimes called “white space”) It gives the same information as the previous slide, but it does so in a much more interesting way. You could also add a little animation to the slide by moving the timeline forward as you speak.

This slide is a very common slide in most presentations. What is does is tells the audience what you are going to talk about. Whilst telling your audience what you are going to talk about, I personally choose to say this rather than make a slide for it. However, if you choose to put a slide up with what you are going to talk about, the above slide is not the way to do it.

Like the first slide, it is boring. No audience is going to be inspired to stay awake and listen to you with a slide like this.

Here is a much more interesting way to present the topic of your presentation. Again, like the previous example, you could animate it and have the coloured boxes moving forward as you tell you audience what you will be talking about.

Once again, this slide uses colour to make the slide more interesting. It is not busy and it links very well with the previous slide.

Taking a little time to think about design can be the difference between an outstanding presentation and just another boring presentation.

There are many resources on the internet that can help you with inspiration. One of the best resources for presentation inspiration is slideshare.net It is free and you can spend hours there just hunting around for some great ideas. – Go on have look, and release your creative talents. And remember, when designing your presentation, have fun!!