This blog is about presentations & public speaking - how to make 'em, how not to make 'em and how other people are making 'em. Feel free to read, use and comment on what you find here. And good luck with your presentations...
Cheese, cheese, cheese…. and the screamingly obvious!
I’ve just spend a couple of minutes listening to one of those ‘fun’ articles on Radio Four’s Today programme about a webcam which is showing a cheese. The cheese isn’t doing anything except sitting there, maturing.
Now, I know the intervewee wasn’t a professional (bless him!) but the questions weren’t exactly probing and nor did they take an unexpected turn. You know the sort of thing: “When do you expect the cheese to be mature?”. Unfortunately for the level of interest in the programme it appears that this was a killer question without the option to Phone a Friend, 50-50, or Ask the Audience.
I felt like screaming at the radio: “For heaven’s sake, man! Did it not occur to you that you were going to be asked that question before you came on air - in fact wasn’t it on your mind when you set up the webcam…. or even when you started being a cheesemaker!”.
For him and for people like him, here’s a tip. Improvised does not equal extemporised. In other words, just because you’re making it up as you go along, doesn’t mean you have to make it up from scratch as you go along. If you can think of the obvious questions, prepare the obvious answers. If you can’t think of any obvious questions two things spring to mind
You probably haven’t got an easy story and you might want to think of a different angle!; and
There’s no reason you can’t pre-prepare ‘part answers’ and simply put them together on the fly.
Anything…. anything to avoid the “Well, errr…. I suppose sometime about…. err….. it depends.” It make you sound like an idiot.
Of course, that’s easier said than done but easier once you’ve had some practice on a presentation skills course! 
Accents and dialects - the good or bad
Well, for me at least, the good is that they make you sound interesting (all other things being equal of course, which they never are!). I remember reading some research (which I can’t find to reference, sorry!) suggesting that call centres tended to employ people from certain places because they and “generally trusted” accents - mild Scottish, Geordie and northern accents in particular.
BBC’s Today programme on radio four ran a fascinating section this morning (26th of March 2007) on accents and dialects (the listen again facility will be over-written by tomorrow’s programme I expect) prompted by work at the British Library.
As a presenter, of course, accents have a major downside too - and I hinted at it above when I referred to “mild” accents. Strong accents and dialects will tend to make your presentation, no matter how wonderful the content, harder for your audience to access.
Dialect - regional or class variations in grammar, syntax or vocabulary - is (relatively!) easy to spot in your presentation when you practice. Of course, it’s easier to do that if you’ve got someone listening to you who will pick you up on what you’re saying. Accent is altogether harder to deal with, because it’s sooo instinctive: you literally start learning it at your mother’s breast, so to speak.
There are dozens of elecution tutors out there who will help you deal with an accent if you want to change it - but I’m inclined to think that’s a bit of a shame. Your accent is a fundamental part of who you are and shouldn’t be abandoned without some serious consideration! Instead, what I suggest to the budding presenter-with-a-noticable-regional-accent is this….
- don’t sweat it - it might not be as strong as you think - don’t judge yourself from recordings;
- slow down slightly when you speak - but you should be doing this when you present in any case
- work hard on your clarity of diction - pay particular attention to pronouncing your consonants and (even more particularly) consonants at the end of words.
Between them, these three simple tips won’t solve the problem overnight, but they will mitigate it pretty efficiently!
Clichés in your slides
In my last post I rambled on about clichés in your presentation. Someone asked me about spotting them on their slides and I’m afraid my response wasn’t all together sympathetic. Why? Because a good slide shouldn’t have enough words on it to form a cliché in the first place!
The only two exceptions are
- when you’re quoting the whole phrase, knowingly, and a good deal of your presentation is about the cliché as your subject matter, or
- when you’re using a visual cliché as an icon of some kind.
Slides should have as few word as possible - none is my ideal!
Shakespeare is too full of clichés
There’s a joke my kids are fond of telling about not wanting to read Shakespeare (or the Bible). When challenged, they grin and say that Shakespeare is too unoriginal - almost everything he says is a cliché…. and I have to confess that the first time they did it, I didn’t stop to think before I jumped in, all guns blazing, only to realise a second later how much of a fool I’d just made of myself.
That said, of course, it is true that your presentations should contain not a single (accidental) cliché if you can avoid it - they’re all too often sterile noises which don’t actually mean anything. Of course, if you use one for effect, so be it, but please, please, please don’t use them without thinking.
My experience is that a cliché-ridden presentation is likely to be boring in terms of the presentation style and sloppy in terms of content. I’m not suggesting that writing in clichés means you’re automatically not on top of your subject matter, just that you’ve probably not put the necessary level of thought and effort in……
On the other hand, unfortunately, it’s sometimes quite tricky to spot them as they sneak in. My advice would be to use something like this cliché-spotter or - far better - use the services of a professional, such as my friend Suze. If all else fails, just practice in front of a friend who you know will pull you up short when you do the dirty and slip into cliché-speak. (And if you’ve never read any of Suze’s work, the best I can say is that she’s a professional writing who’s so good she doesn’t read like a professional writer… if you see what I mean!)
Stage Fright is not the same as performance anxiety
well, I don’t think so anyway. In the same way as a headache is not a migraine and a cold is not flu.
What’s more, performance anxiety is perfectly normal, natural and a good thing when you’re making presentations or doing some public speaking! In fact, a friend of mine recently defined the difference between the two ideas as the point at which it stops being a plus, enhancing your performance, and starts being a negative, reducing the quality of your performance.
Where-ever the exact break-point between the two, I’m pretty sure that this guy is wrong. He refers to them all the way through his article as the same thing: I think that’s doing his clients a huge dis-service because it’s putting them under a mis-apprehension. It also belittles those people who suffer from real Stage Fright.
I know it sounds like I’m just riding a hobby-horse here but I feel strongly about this. The reason is pretty simple: on our public presentation skills training courses I spend a lot of my time working with people who are nervous and think that they’re some kind of ‘failure’ or have some kind of ‘problem with public speaking’ because of that. It’s important that people understand that this isn’t the case.
Being nervous - that is, having presentation nerves - is normal, natural and useful. Calling it Stage Fright, with all the stigma and so on attached to that just isn’t helpful!
You and I
I’ve just found this blog post about public speaking: I’d comment there, but I can’t find a way of being allowed to add a comment (which I thought was one of the key reasons for having a blog, myself…..)
It’s a nice point - though a bit overstated for my tastes. Presentations which use the word “I” turn me off, even when they’re a person of note or repute: it smacks of arrogance in the presenter.
Mind you - a presentation full of “you” is likely to bug me too, as that sounds like the presenter is preaching….. “you must; you should; you are….”.
My personal advice on our training courses is to talk about what you’re talking about - the climb, the research, the music, whatever. If you’re concentrating on your subject, not yourself, then the question of how many times you “I” and how many times you say “you” (or even “we”) shouldn’t be an issue….
… Simon
Tell ‘em what you’re going to tell ‘em
I’ve just been doing some web-research for videos of good (or even excellent) presentations. Sadly they’re few and far between. In the process I came across this page which has a collection of vids you can watch. They’re not bad - well, the one on swearing is so bad I couldn’t get past the first couple of minutes - but the others are okay.
One thing stood out for me though - a new version of how to structure your presentation.
Instead of
- Tell ‘em what you’re going to tell ‘em
- Tell ‘em
- Tell ‘em what you’ve told ‘em.
He suggested most speakers have
- Tell ‘em how you’re going to bore ‘em
- Bore ‘em
- Tell ‘em how you bored ‘em.
The man has a point! 
