Two five hour train journeys within a couple of days gave me plenty of time for reflection. Despite my 20 years training as a scientist, I gave in and did a quick ’straw poll’ about what most people were doing while I walked to and fro the Buffet.
Most were sleeping – or at least approximating it. Some were reading and perhaps taking things in. Some were working on their laptops. Of the laptopers, the most common activity I saw was people going through PowerPoint presentations which was presumably the focus of their journey. I watched several of them scroll through them, mouthing the odd thing without realising it as they zipped through their slides at high speed, changing the slides as they went sometimes.
I restrained my urge to say “Stop it!”, but only just…. 
Why this instinct? Because I knew from looking at these people that they didn’t have the experience necessary to account for the difference in speed between how they ran through the presentation now – almost at the speed of thought – and the speed they’d run through their presentation ‘for real’ – at the speed they could talk.
Forget that at your peril. I’ve seen far, far too many presentations which were ‘crammed’ at the end as the author realised he or she was running out of time and rushed through what was – presumably, I never understood what they were getting at because they rushed too much – the most important part of their presentation.
On both our public voice and presentation skills courses and our commercial presentation skills training we strongly urge people to practice out loud, not in their heads. Here’s why.
- Scanning things in your head means you can go through the presentation at anything from two to ten times faster than you will in real life; there’s no sensible way to be sure of how long the presentation will really take when you deliver it;
- Not saying things out loud doesn’t give you the actual practice of what you’re going to be doing on the day – after all, you’d not train for a marathon by talking about how fast you were going to run but not actually doing any running, nor would you learn to play the trumpet purely from imagining yourself on the concert platform;
- Not actually pronouncing the words doesn’t allow you to find (by falling over!) the difficult combinations of words and sounds which you’ll get wrong on the day unless you re-design or at least practice – it’s surprisingly easy to write tongue-twisters accidentally!;
- Doing things in your head doesn’t allow you to use all the proper breathing exercises and so on which are essentially to controlling your nerves – you can’t just do these things on the spur of the moment, you need to have rehearsed them (lots).
And of course, the final reason for practising out loud….? Well, if you do it on the train, no one’s going to sit next to you!
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