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...
How many words are there….?
in a five minute presentation? Or a three minute…? Or a 30 second elevator pitch?
That’s one of my pet hate questions that seems to crop up quite often in various fora: I even get asked this on our training days by people who I’d have thought would have known better! 
Asking for a time-limited presentations winds me up - and yet it’s something that seems to be the staple of many training environments such as Speakers’ Circles, Toastmasters, schools and so on.
It flies in the face of everything I know about presentations: say what you’ve got to say, then stop.
It’s not a hard concept, is it? No, I didn’t think so either. (The tricky part is actually figuring out what you’ve ‘got’ to say, of course, but that’s another issue.) Why pad out a presentation than needs 2 minutes into five? Why try and crap a 10 minute presentation into 6?
Just because that’s how long your slot is? What a rubbish reason.
The content is the king. You decide how much you need to say and then say it: unless there’s an over-riding reason to keep to a specific time (you’ve got only 20 minutes before the next speaker and running late would be rude, for example) the time should be dictated by the content, not the other way around….
Okay… rant over! And yes, I know there are exceptions to that point, but the principle is sound, I think!
Judges…
…are to receive some training in dealing with the media. I know it’s not directly presentation skills as such, but it’s pretty close. The BBC report it here. It could be interesting to see how they handle themselves and I for one am going to keep an eye/ear open for their first presentations.
The bad news, from our point of view, is that it’s not use who are doing the training!
7 deadly sins
I was about to write (another!) mistakes-to-avoid blog entry. Instead, I found this - the seven deadly sins of presenting. Hard to argue with them frankly!
