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The
other day, I went to a series of lectures given at a major university
in the Bay Area. The speakers had miles of titles, books, and awards
- so you would expect to be blown away by their presentations. In
all fairness, most of them were indeed good, but one stood out,
not because of its excellence, but because of the very bad PowerPoint
slides that accompanied an otherwise good talk. You know how in
a lecture you start counting how many times the lecturer says 'ah"
in one sentence, well after the first one, I couldn't help but focus
on the writing on every slide that flashed in front of our eyes
at rapid speed.
There were no commas, no colons, but 12 - 15 lines of text per
slide, which he read - word for word - with his back to the audience.
In addition some of the text didn't immediately make sense, as in:
"the test is does party as thought of by pundits and other
analysts mean Clinton will get his policies through Congress?"
Grammatical and vocabulary errors also detracted from his good delivery
(overcome was over come, "these two phenomenon" appeared
several times).
In complete contrast, three scientists gave a presentation about
adult embryo versus fetal embryo research - a rather esoteric topic.
They used only ten slides, many with just one graphic and one explanation,
but presented in a way that we, the lay audience, could follow and
understand. The difference was that the presenters didn't use their
slides as a crutch, they spoke freely and succinctly and left us
intellectually satisfied.
OK, what does all of this mean for us? It means that for us to
give an effective, good presentation in this educated Silicon Valley
environment, we need to be clear, to the point and concise - verbally
and in writing. We have to know what we want to say, give our audience
something intellectually interesting and let them walk away with
something of value.
We have to speak in a language that all audiences not only understand,
but also want to hear. Or, as Peggy Noonan (a major speech writer
for major presidents) said in On Speaking Well, "…good
hard simple words with good hard clear meaning are good things to
use when you speak."
Presentations don't need:
 complicated
language
lots of
fancy diagrams, bar graphs or badly copied tables
every fancy
theory listed that might fit the thesis
high speed
delivery.
Presentations do need time spent going over them, checking for
English errors and too much verbiage. It pays to put yourself into
the place of the attendees and look at the presentation from their
perspective, so that when they leave, they are thinking of what
you said, rather than remembering your bad slides. For further ideas
on writing good presentations, please contact
me.
Angelika Blendstrup, PhD, is a business communications consultant
(www.professional-business-communications.com)
who helps foreign-born executives with problems understanding the
complexities of American business culture and the English language
to communicate effectively. Learn more about
Angelika...
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