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.