Preliminary Notes on Designing, Preparing, and Delivering Presentations

Department of Chemical Engineering Indian Institute of Science Bangalore 560 012 Effective: August 1, 2011

Contents
1 Presentations 1.1 Early Presentations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.2 2 Presentations based on your work . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 7 8 11 12 13 14 14 15 15 16 18 19 23 24 27 27 27 28

Preparation 2.1 Planning Analog . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.1.1 The presentation did not target the audience . . . . . 2.1.2 2.1.3 2.1.4 2.1.5 2.1.6 2.2 Recognizing the Purpose . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Depth of Presentations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Three structural differences from documents . . . . Preparing Audience for Material Ahead . . . . . . . Leaving the audience behind at the beginning . . . .

2.1.7 Losing the audience in the middle . . . . . . . . . . The Process of Building a Story . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Slides 3.1 Projecting slides that are not remembered . . . . . . . . . . 3.1.1 3.1.2 3.1.3 3.1.4 Typography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The size of type . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Avoid presenting text in all capital letters . . . . . . Guidelines for Colour . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

3.1.5 3.1.6 4 Delivery 4.1

Mathematics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

28 28 31 32 32 32 32 33 33 34 34 35 35 35 35 36 37 37

On the stage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.1.1 Enthusiasm . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.1.2 4.1.3 4.1.4 4.1.5 4.1.6 4.1.7 Voice Modulation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Movement on Stage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Pointer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Eye Contact . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Making a Personal Connection . . . . . . . . . . . . Incorporating Humour . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

4.2

How much to memorize . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.2.1 Memorizing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.2.2 Reading . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.2.3 Off the cuff . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Emphasis in Presentations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Improve your presentation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.4.1 Live practice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.4.2 4.4.3 4.4.4 4.4.5

4.3 4.4

How do you eliminate ller phrases from your speech? 38 Incorporating Analogies, Examples, and Stories . . . 38 Question Answer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Antagonistic audience . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39 39 41 43 43 43 44 44

5 6

Unwritten Code How to critique a talk? 6.1 What should your critique cover . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.1.1 Speech . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.1.2 6.1.3 Body Language . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Talk Development . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

6.1.4 6.1.5 6.1.6 6.2

Effectiveness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Presentation Slides . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Other . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

45 46 46 47 51

How to Study and Critique a Speech . . . . . . . . . . . . .

A The Art of Technical PresentationOutline Handout

Declaration:
Most of the material appearing in the following pages is taken from Michael Alleys The craft of scientic presentations: Critical steps to succeed and critical errors to avoid, Garr Reynolds Presentationzen: Simple ideas on presentation design and delivery, and Jay H. Lehrs Let there be stoning!. The material is reproduced verbatim at a number of places. The material appearing verbatim in an authored report must appear within quotes or the paragraphs must be indented on both sides to make them stand out from the rest of text. These notes therefore appear here as material complied from the above three sources, with no claim to authorship.

Chapter 1

Presentations
Failure to spend the [presentation] time wisely and well, failure to educate, entertain, elucidate, enlighten, and most important of all, failure to maintain attention and interest should be punishable by stoning. There is no excuse for tedium. Jay H. Lehr If we desire to communicate with more clarity, integrity, beauty, and intelligence, then we must move beyond what is considered to be normal to something different and far more effective. The principles I am most mindful of through every step of the presentation process are restraint, simplicity, and naturalness: Restraint in preparation. Simplicity in design. Naturalness in delivery. All of which, in the end, lead to greater clarity for us and for our audience. Garr Reynolds

1.1 Early Presentations

Most of us will make presentations of the following three kinds at some points in our lives: (i) to inform others of progress made in an academic or 7

an industrial project, designed to persuade the audience for action/decision, and to inspire the audience for a greater/noble cause. The early presentations made in our academic careers are mostly about presenting a journal article to the rest of the students in a seminar class. We typically begin with the title of the article as the title of the presentation. This is followed by an outline of the talk, which is essentially the outline of the paper. The talk continues on with the Introduction, which is nothing but the the nice introduction available in the paper converted in the bulleted text. The talk then moves on to either bulleted slides dealing with experimental partmaterials, experimental method, characterization techniques, and so on. A paper dealing with theory or modelling brings up slides containing equations after equations. The next section deals with results, such as effect of variable X on Y and so on. The conclusion slide shows up pretty soon with the conclusions of the paper presented in bulleted form. The last slide says Thank You, and the ordeal of making a presentation is over. Both the presenter and the audience are relieved. This exercise is at the best an exercise in converting written text into bulleted text, and then delivering it to the audience while reading from the slides, or using slides to prompt us into saying what we want to say about each slide. This is far from what is known as creating a presentation from scratch and delivering it.

1.2 Presentations based on your work

People often ask if technical or science-related presentations can be as compelling as presentations covering other less technical topics. Not every presentation has earth-shattering, Nobel-Prize winning signicance. However, if one is talking about ones research or current issues of interest, it is understood that one has something that can benet others. If is not important, why waste your time and the time of others? And if it is important, then being effective matters. Clarity and a connection with the audience are necessary conditions for an effective talk; the audience leaving the talk with the perception that the time spent on the talk was worth is equally important for a technical talk. The rst real presentation that you will make in the department will most likely be the rst evaluation of your ME project or your comprehensive ex-

amination (PhD/MSc students). You would have by then read a number of papers, discussed a large number of times with your supervisor what you are doing and what you plant to do. Your lab mates would have also asked you many a times about the purpose of your work and what it would take to reach there. Given this vast amount of information (every interaction with either a book, a journal article, a friend, or your supervisor is an input material for your presentation) available to you, you now need to create a presentation, and deliver it (act it out) to tell your audience about your work. At the end of it all, you would like your audience to clearly know what you are doing, why you are doing it, how you are doing it, or how you are planning to do it. Remember, you can tell your audience all these things by preparing a document and sending it across! So what is different when you tell the same things through a presentation? You want to be able to convey to your audience what you are doing or what you have embarked upon is interesting, challenging, exciting, and after it is completed successfully, it will impact science/society in some way. The success of your presentation is measured through these, how well you pass on the intensity of your engagement with your work, and most importantly, how much of your involvement and your material can be recalled by your audience a week and a month after the presentation is made! After you have got some results, the success of your presentation will also be measured by how you take your audience along with you and make them realize the import of your ndings. The answer to question So what? for every ndings that you wish to share with them will determine whether the time spent by the audience in sitting through your presentation was worth, or it was wasted! Assuming that the content of a talk is worthy of presentation, there are three aspects of a talk: structure (depth, emphasis, transition between major points), visual aids, and delivery (interaction with the audience). You need to develop enough insights into the process of developing and delivering presentations that you can effectively critique, reect on, and learn from your own presentations as well as those of others, until your own presentation become outstanding.

Chapter 2

Preparation
A presentation is an opportunity to differentiate yourself, or your organization, or your cause. Its your chance to tell the story of why your content is important and why it matters. It can be an opportunity to make a difference. So why look or talk like everyone else? Why strive to meet expectations? Why not surpass expectations and surprise people? Part of the Presentation Zen approach to presenting well is learning to give up what weve learned about making presentations in the era of the PowerPoint deck and the cookie-cutter method of design and delivery. The rst step is to stop letting our history and conditioning about what we know (or thought we knew) inhibit our being open to other ways of presentation. Seven sentences per slide? Some clip art thrown in for good measure? No one ever got red for that, right? But if we remain attached to our past, we cannot learn anything new. We must open our minds so that we can see the world for what it is with a fresh new perspective. Like a Japanese bento, great slide presentations contain appropriate content arranged in the most efcient, graceful manner without superuous decoration. The presentation of the content is simple, balanced, and beautiful.

11

... preparation of a presentation is an act requiring creativity, not merely the assembling of facts and data in a linear fashion, youll see that preparing a presentation is a whole-minded activity that requires as much right-brain thinking as it does left-brain thinking. In fact, while your research and background work may have required much logical analysis, calculation, and careful evidence gathering or so-called left-brain thinking, the transformation of your content into presentation form will require that you exercise much more of your so-called right brain. Garr Reynolds These questions should be ringing in your head: How much time do I have? Whats the venue like? What time of the day? Who is the audience? Whats their background? What do they expect of me (us)? Why was I asked to speak? What do I want them to do? What visual medium is most appropriate for this particular situation and audience? What is the fundamental purpose of my talk? Whats the story here? And this is the most fundamental question of all. Stripped down to its essential core: What is my absolutely central point? Or put it this way: If the audience could remember only one thing (and youll be lucky if they do), what do you want it to be? Two most important questions: Whats Your Point? Why Does It Matter (to your audience rst and then to you)?

2.1 Planning Analog

Presentations are not merely assembling facts and data in a linear fashion. A presentation is a story, your story, that you develop for your audience for

certain end goals, and want to tell it in your words, with the help of visuals that amplify and support your message. Clearly, PowerPoint templates do not create presentations! Presentations enact our stories, and these stories need to be rst created in our head for the given audience, to either inform, persuade or inspire, with one dominant theme. Before you go on to build a story in your mind (more on this process later), there a number of issues that you need to be aware of.

2.1.1 The presentation did not target the audience

On January 27, 1986, because of the low temperatures expected for the next mornings launch of the space shuttle Challenger, engineers at Morton Thiokol requested a delay in the launch. From their examinations of previous launches, the engineers knew that the lower the launch temperature, the more likely that explosive gases from the solid booster rockets would escape. In an afternoon meeting, these engineers succeeded in persuading management at Morton Thiokol to request a delay. However, when Morton Thiokols engineers and management discussed the delay with NASA during a teleconference that evening, they met strong resistance. After spending almost two hours in a conference call and reviewing thirteen presentation slides faxed from Morton Thiokol, NASA remained unconvinced of the danger. Moreover, NASAs opposition to the delay was so adamant that Morton Thiokols management rescinded the request. The next day, sixty-three seconds into the launch, a solid rocket booster of the space shuttle Challenger exploded, killing all seven crew members on board. One reason that Morton Thiokols presentation failed to persuade NASA was that the presentation did not target the audience. For instance, in their presentation, the engineers and management at Morton Thiokol did not anticipate the strong bias that NASA had against delaying the launch. NASA had already delayed the launch more than once and felt pressure to place Challenger into orbit. Not targeting the audience is one common reason for the failure of many scientic presentations. Another common reason is a

failure to understand the purpose of the presentation. Few presentations have the sole purpose of informing. Most scientic presentations, such as the Morton Thiokol presentation, must persuade audiences. Other presentations, such as a lecture in a university class, call for inspiring the audience. Michael Alley

2.1.2 Recognizing the Purpose

Scientic presentations have a variety of purposes (inform, persuade, inspire). In a presentation to instruct employees of a zoo how to handle a drugged hippopotamus, the primary purpose is to inform. In a presentation to propose a purchase of a laser velocimetry system, the primary purpose is to persuade. In the opening address to a conference, the primary purpose is to inspire. Although these mentioned presentations have clear primary purposes, most presentations carry a mixture of purposes. For instance, in a technical presentation at a conference, you not only want to inform the attendees of your work, but you also want to persuade them about your results and stimulate conversation about your subject area. Understanding the purpose of a presentation is important, because the purpose affects how you craft the speech. Michael Alley

2.1.3 Depth of Presentations

The average conference paper is 20 minutes in length. Invited talks vary from 25 minutes to 45 minutes. It is not a college lecture where students are to absorb the minutest detail of a subject planned and presented as part of a 10 to 16 week curriculum. Rather, a technical presentation offers an up-todate capsule summary of a particular piece of ongoing or completed research for the purpose of bringing fellow scientists up to date on activities in their eld.

The audience will not be interested in every bolt that you turned, you have to pick and choose details. This picking and choosing is difcult. Depth is interwoven with the background of the audience and scope, which consists of the boundaries of the presentations. In other words, how broad a topic does the speaker address? In many presentations, such as a progress report on a project, the presentations scope is already determined. In other presentations, such as a research seminar, the speaker determines the scope. In general, the wider the scope, the more difcult it is to satisfy the audience. Michael Alley

2.1.4 Three structural differences from documents

One difference is the necessity of the speaker to begin at a depth that orients the entire audience. Mapping (telling the entire structure of what follows) is important in a document, but in a presentation, mapping is crucial. A third structural difference between presentations and documents is the importance of the speaker signaling transitions between major parts of a presentation. In a document, the audience can anticipate transition. In a scientic presentation, the speaker begins with the big picture, focuses on the work in the middle, and comes back out to the big picture in the ending. In essence, the ending discusses the repercussions of the work on the big picture, which was introduced in the presentations beginning.

2.1.5 Preparing Audience for Material Ahead

One failing that many weak presenters share is that they present their results without preparing the audience enough for those results. (Preparing the audience for the results has nothing to do with the background required to understand the work presented.) The context and the importance of the work need to be brought out in the beginning. If this is not accomplished, the audience does not fully appreciate what has been presented, and is likely to wander off to more mundane things occupying his/her mind.

2.1.6 Leaving the audience behind at the beginning

One reason that beginnings to scientic presentations often fail is that the speaker has not anticipated the initial questions of the audience. What is the presentation about? Why is the presentation important? What knowledge is needed to understand the presentation? How will the presentation be arranged? The point is that by the time the presentations introduction is over, none of these questions should be hovering over the audience. What Exactly is the Subject? Many speakers, unfortunately, do not give satisfactory answers to this question in their presentations. They assume that the audience already knows these through the posted title and abstract. Such an assumption is dangerous. Unfortunately, many scientic presenters begin as if the audience has had nothing better to do for the previous week than to read every paper that the presenter has written. Why would a presenter make such an assumption? A common mistake of speakers is to go over the answer to this rst question too quickly. How many times have you been to a presentation in which the speaker places the title slide up on the screen and discusses it for only fteen or twenty seconds? That is too short. When you rst begin to speak, the audience has to adjust to your delivery style: your voice, your movements, facial expressions. Such adjustments take a while, and during that time the speaker has to be careful not to overwhelm the audience with too much information. Michael Alley Why is the subject important? Listening to a presentation is difcult work, so difcult that audiences will give up concentrating if they do not have sufcient reason to do so. Given that, you should not move into the middle of your presentation unless you are sure that your audience understands the importance of your presentation. Establishing connections will take but thirty or forty seconds to make, but would mean much to an audience when energy is required of them to stay with you in the middle. Often, stating the importance of a subject involves grounding the problem in a specic example. Such a grounding helps many in the audience to stay with you through the abstract or mathematical parts of your presentation. Using an example in this way was a favorite technique of Richard Feynman.

In other situations, the issue is not so much the importance of the subject, but curiosity about the subject. To give the audience the motivation to stay with the presentation for its duration, the speaker should instill in the audience the same curiosity that he or she has for the work. How much time should you spend on the introduction? Much here depends upon how much time you have for the entire talk. In a sixty-minute talk, an audience will accept ten minutes on the introduction. In a fteenminute conference presentation, though, you should limit yourself to no more than ve minutes. Spending too much time on the introduction makes the audience impatient. According to my colleague Dan Inman, when a speaker tells a long story in the introduction of a conference presentation, many people assume that the speaker does not have much to report. More important than time, though, is the understanding of the audience. Einstein was adept at introductions. Einstein had a calmness that contrasted sharply with the restlessness that many presenters showed, who mistakenly assumed that the audience was equally familiar with the subject matter and proceeded quickly into the details of the talk. Einstein, on the other hand, patiently prepared the audience for the problems about which he would speak. Michael Alley What Background Is Needed to Understand the Subject? The minimum required to understand the central theme/contribution or the main objective of the work being presented. It may be stated up front after the introduction, or provided as and when required. In case, all the required background cannot be covered, it is reasonable to state what background is expected. It helps the sections of the audience to understand the talk in broad terms, and not waste their energy in understanding micro details. Mapping: Outlining the sections that follow is needed for a long talk for sure. For a short talk, if the interest of the audience can be sustained at a high level in the (story like) presentation, they need not be told bout the subsequent sections. The presenter needs to take this call based on the material being presented and his/her past experience.

2.1.7 Losing the audience in the middle

Audience lose interest in a talk in the middle for three reasons: material not worthy of a talk (gaps in logic), major changes in the course of the presentation without taking the audience along, and drowning the audience in detail that is unnecessary to the objectives and not connected to the running arguments or details that are incomprehensible. A transitions occurs between each segment of the middle. Ideally, middles are broken into two, three, or four divisions. For the audience to pace themselves in the middle, the audience has to know where the speaker is: in the rst division, in the second division, and so on. For that reason, the speaker should make clear those transitions between each division of the middle. So how do you make the transitions for those shifts? Several ways exist. The most straightforward occurs in speech. For instance, in moving from the rst section of a middle to a second section, the speaker could state that transition explicitly: That concludes what I wanted to say about the building stages of Hawaiian volcanoes. Now I will consider the declining stages. For the transition between the middle and the ending, the speaker can use phrases such as in summary or to conclude this presentation. Delivery also provides excellent ways to signal a transition between sections of a presentation. One signal is a pause. In a presentation, a pause is not initially taken as a sign that the speaker is lost. Rather, the audience assumes that the speaker is collecting his or her thoughts. Drowning the audience in detail is perhaps the most common way that speakers lose audiences in presentations is that they drown their audiences with details. When you effectively present your work, you do not present everything about your work. Rather, you select those details that allow the audience to understand the work, and you leave out details that the audience does not desire or need. Finally, effectively presenting your work means that you provide a hierarchy of details so that the audience knows which details to hang onto and which details to let go in case they are overwhelmed. One of Niels Bohrs weaknesses as a presenter was that he did not leave out details. Bohrs passion for completeness overshad-

owed his audiences need for clarity. Michael Alley Another way that speakers drown audiences with details is to present lists that are too long. Audiences remember lists of twos, threes, and fours. Having lists with six, seven, eight, even nine items is overwhelming for most listeners. The effect is that many in the audience will give up, their eyes will glaze over, and they will daydream about their own work. One way to avoid losing a part of the audience in details is to assign a hierarchy to details so that the audiences can decide which details to hang onto and which details to leave behind. Not all listeners in a presentation will comprehend and retain the same number of details. For that reason, speakers have to be careful to make sure that the audience knows which details are more valuable. This is said more easily than done in fact.

2.2 The Process of Building a Story

There is much discussion today among professionals on the issue of how to make presentations and presenters better. For businesses and presenters, the situation is both painful and urgent in a sense. Its important. Yet, much of the discussion focuses on software applications and techniques. What application should I get? Should I get a Mac or a PC? What animations and transitions are best? What is the best remote control? This talk is not completely inconsequential, but it often dominates discussions on presentation effectiveness. The focus on technique and software features often distracts us from what we should be examining. Many of us spend too much time dgeting with and worrying about bullets and images on slides during the preparation stage instead of thinking about how to craft a story which is the most effective, memorable, and appropriate for our particular audience. Before there was the written word, humans used stories to transfer culture from one generation to the next. Stories are who we are, and we are our stories. Stories may contain analogies or metaphors, powerful tools for bringing people in and helping

them to understand our thoughts clearly and concretely. Good stories have interesting, clear beginnings; provocative, engaging content in the middle; and a clear conclusion. I am not talking about ction here. I am talking about reality, regardless of the topic. Remember that documentary lms, for example, tell the story of whatever it is they are reporting on. Documentaries do not simply tell facts, rather they engage us and tell us the story of war, of scientic discovery, of a dramatic sea rescue, of climate change, and so on. Remember that we are living in a time where fundamental human talents are in great demand. Anyone indeed any machine can read a list of features or give a stream of facts to an audience. Thats not what we need or want. What we yearn for is to listen to an intelligent and evocativeperhaps at times even provocativehuman being who teaches us, or inspires us, or who stimulates us with knowledge plus meaning, context, and emotion in a way that is memorable. And this is where story comes in. Information plus emotion and visualization wrapped in unforgettable anecdotes are the stuff that stories are made of. If presentations were only about following a linear step-by-step formula for distributing information and facts, then no one would be complaining about death by PowerPoint today, since the majority of presentations still follow just such a formula. And if designing your slides for your presentation were simply a matter of following a list of rules, dos and donts, then why on earth should we keep wasting our time creating slides? Why not simply outsource our facts, outlines, and bullet points to someone who could do it cheaper? But presentations are not just about following a formula for transferring facts in your head to the heads of those sitting before you by reciting a list of points on a slide. (If it were, why not send an email and cancel the presentation?) What people want is something fundamentally more human. They want to hear the story of your facts. Michael Alley

Once you become aware of of the tangible and intangible elements that must be there in your story, the process of building your presentation as a story can begin. The process is completed in two stages. First go through the material you have researched, or go through the notes that you made while researching on the topic. If your presentation is covering your own research, you will be aware of the previous work and the results you want to share with your audience; the results can include both the failed and the successful attempts, so long as they help you make your point and can t in your story well. Use paper and pencil to sketch out your ideas. Show the connections if possible. Soon you will be able to put these ideas into various groups. At this stage, write each idea on a piece of paper (of the size of post-it notes). Spread out these notes on a large table to identify (i) a hook that will draw audience to your talk in the beginning, and (ii) try to sequence notes to create a meaningful story. If a story does not emerge, go back and generate more ideas, more post-it notes, and repeat. A number of post-it notes will be left unused. Please discarded ruthlessly. At the end of this process, you should have your (somewhat bloated) presentation in terms of sequence of ideas on post-it size notes. The process of making slides begins next, but rst on A6 size sheets. Write and sketch on these sheets what you would like your slides to contain. If you need an image, write what kind of an image you need. More on this process in the next section. The process of creating the story is the most creative one, and it requires a mind that is calm, and detached from all the one that created all the post-it notes you have lying in front of you. You need to have all the ideas at the ideas at the back of your mind, and yet the mind must subconsciously ask what is the overall picture, what is important, what do you want the audience to take home! May the following quoted verbatim can be of some help. When you think about it, the really great creativesdesigners, musicians, even entrepreneurs, programmers, etc.are the ones who see things differently and who have unique insights, perspectives, and questions. (Answers are important, but rst come questions.) This special insight and knowledge, as well as plain of gut feel and intuition, can only come about for many of us when slowing down, stopping, and seeing all sides of our particular issue. It does not matter if you are a scientist, engineer, medical doctor, or businessperson, when you prepare a presenta-

tion you are a creative, and you need time away from the computer and dealing with digital outlines and slides. And whenever possible, you also need time alone. One reason why many presentations are so ineffective is that people today just do not take or do not haveenough time to step back and really assess what is important and what is not. They often fail to bring anything unique, creative, or new to the presentation, not because they are not smart or creative beings, but because they did not have the time alone to slow down and contemplate the problem. Seeing the big picture and nding your core message may take some time alone off the grid. There are many ways to nd solitude, and you dont even have to be alone. Garr Reynolds Lifes creative solutions require alone-time. Solitude is required for the unconscious to process and unravel problems. Others inspire us, information feeds us, practice improves our performance, but we need quite time to gure things out, to emerge with new discoveries, to unearth original answers. Ester Buchholz In order to be open to creativity, one must have the capacity for constructive use of solitude. One must overcome the fear of being alone. Rollo May

Chapter 3

Slides
The number of slides is not the point. If your presentation is successful, the audience will have no idea how many slides you used, nor will they care. Before we begin to make slides, rst on the paper and then on the computer, it is important to consider a few, not-so-obvious, nuggets of wisdom. A verbal presentation has 10% retention value. One with visuals alone has 20% retention value. If verbal and visual are combined effectively, the retention can go to 50%. On the other hand, if the two are not combined well, the recall can drop to zero. I have sat in presentations where I have experienced 50% retention as well as 0% retention. The last one sounds incredible in that the speech is in English and yet nothing is understood! Let it be clear that the visuals that increase retention are not the sides with bulleted text. Visuals are images which corroborate your verbal massage. The audience listens to you as well looks at the visual, simultaneously, without losing focus on the either. The two support each other. As an example, if you talk about diseases caused by drinking dirty water, having a visual of someone drinking from such a source, with names of diseases put on the image aesthetically reinforces your message enormously. Visuals are not necessarily schematics or photographs. These can also be sketches that you draw to convey a complex idea visually. The audience breaks its eye contact with you and looks at the screen as soon as a visual is put up there. The audience tries to discern what is projected 23

and how this projection ts into the scheme of the presentation. When slides work well, the slides orient the audience quickly. The slides also provide a perspective on the information that could not be achieved with simple speech. Unfortunately, too many slides rely on phrase headlines, which often do not orient well, and bulleted lists, which quickly place audiences in trances. One reason that so many slides have this format is because that format is the default of programs such as Microsofts PowerPoint. Many presenters show a host of slides containing mind-numbing lists and distracting backgrounds, but do not contain well-worded headlines or key images that would orient the audience to what is being said by the speaker. When the slide has words that cannot be read, the listener is distracted with the question of what those words are. Likewise, when the slide does not quickly orient the listener, the listener is disoriented, wondering what the point of this slide is. Both the verbal and the visual parts of the communication are lost by then.

3.1 Projecting slides that are not remembered

So what information should you include? The answer lies in the reasons for projecting slides in the rst place. One important reason to include slides is to show images that are too complicated to explain with words. A second important reason to project a slide is to emphasize key results. Examples include experimental data, or disagreement/agreement between model predictions and experimental data. Clearly, there is not much of a choice here. Visuals need to be shown. One can only make them elegant with the underlying key message emerging effortlessly. The trend of variable Y with variable X does not require you to show all the data for all the temperatures in one graph. If the data follow a clear trend, the minimum number of data points that cover the range and bring out the trend are enough. Instead of ve temperatures, two extreme temperatures are enough. Even here, one temperature should be shown with one colour, and the other with a light color to keep focus on just one element. Serious problems are encountered and loss of connectivity with the audience are encountered when right in the beginning, long bulleted sentences are used to list applications, sequence of experimental procedure, techniques used to characterize, etc. With some effort, all these can be replaced by balanced visuals.

The reason to include images is that the audience will remember them much longer than they will remember words. Think about your earliest childhood memories. Rather than words that people spoke to you, you are much more likely to remember images: white shirts hanging on a line, a tire swing tied to a tree. Likewise, when the audience tries to remember a presentation, the images that you have projected are much more likely to be recalled. It takes effort and your creativity to replace text slides with visuals. Specically, what intimidates audiences are slides with large blocks of text (more than two lines per block), slides with long lists with bullets (more than four items per list), and slides that do not contain enough white space. It is important that the audience members quickly grasp the purpose of a slide and that they know how to read it: what to read rst, what to read second, and so on. In poorly designed slides, the audience does not know on what to focus rst. The defaults of PowerPointoveruse of bullets (which are black dots to indicate a new item in a list)has led to what is called death by PowerPoint. The main problem with bullets is that they often pull emphasis away from the words in the list and place that emphasis onto the dots. Feynman and many other good presenters did not think much of the practice of using bullets. A much less distracting way to indicate the separation of items in a list is with extra white space placed vertically between the items of the list. Unfortunately, the defaults of PowerPoint not only call for bullets on all main text blocks, but also call for sub-bullets on any subordinate text blocks. Note that indenting subordinate points achieves the same goal without the distraction. Michael Alley It is recommended that each slide should have a sentence headline (left adjusted on the top). I am not sure of this recommendation though. A sentence headline does clutter a slide. On the other hand, if we cannot clearly bring out the reason for putting a slide while discussing the previous slide (what is called as transition), then a sentence headline is a good idea at the expense of clarity. Another argument given in support of putting headings is that the audience go on and off as they listen to a presentation, sometimes going on tangents related to their own work. In these situations, having a sentence heading really helps to bring them back to the talk. Introducing a headline or sentence headline just to understand the contents of a slide a later

stage when one reads a slide as a slidument is a bad idea. A slide designed as a visual should be least distracting. A common mistake in designing the bodies of slides is not achieving a balance between the words that are said and the words that are shown. In a strong presentation, although one often uses words and phrases from the slides in speech, the speech should include more than just the words on the slidesmuch more. In many weak presentations, all the words that the speaker says are given on the slides. These presentations are complete disasters. A listener reads a slide faster than the speaker and this causes enormous confusion in the listener. When the audience is not sure whether to listen or to read, they do neither. It is possible in many cases to reduce a bulleted sentence or point (idea) to a single word, and use this word to focus on the idea and also as tele-prompt. With additional effort, it is possible to drop the entire list of single words and replace it with a visual. Both the list of single words and an appropriate visual can be used provided the slide has enough white space left on it. You need to sketch visuals or write what kind of a visual you need to convey your idea at the story creation stage and look for appropriate visual. If you must have lists, avoid lists with more than four items. No matter what the purpose of a list is, the items in the list should be parallel in structure. In other words, if the rst item of a list is a noun phrase, all items should be noun phrases. In addition, if you include one subitem, logic dictates that you include a second. If possible, avoid sublists because audiences usually do not read them. That sublevel of information is better left in your speech. Avoid unnecessary detail on a slide. Placing too many details on your presentation slides, you run the risk of the audience not remembering the most important details. Worse yet, you risk having the audience give up without even trying to understand the slide. One way to prevent a slide from seeming overcrowded is to limit the number of items on the slide. Many graphic designers recommend a maximum of seven items. If you need more than seven elements, consider a second slide, or bring in the new elements as overlay after the rst set of elements are discussed. Avoid using all fancy features of bringing elements on screen (from top or sides). PowerPoint makes a number of backgrounds available as templates. Fireballs, meadow scenes, ribbons, party balloonsthese backgrounds might be appropriate for fund raising presentations at a fraternity house, but are distractions in scientic presentations. A much better choice of background is a

dark blue or green with white. Another good choice for the background is a very light color with a dark color for the type. The overall message here is not that you should avoid programs such as Microsofts PowerPoint. The message is that you should use the software to make your presentation as you imagined it to be before switching on the computer. Let PowerPoint not make the presentation that it would have you deliver!

3.1.1 Typography
Use a sans serif font such as bold Arial or Comic Sans MS for presentations. Do not use italic, underline, and outline options. The default font provided by PowerPoint Times Roman is not suited for presentations.

3.1.2 The size of type

The size of the type is measured in points (a point is about 1/72 of an inch). When a bold sans serif font is used, appropriate type sizes for all slides except the title slide are between 18 and 28 points. Use 28 points for heading for slides, 24 for primary type for the body of slide, 18 point as secondary type body for slide, and 18 point for reference listing. For the title on a title slide, using 32 or 36 points is appropriate. Not surprisingly, if the default of Microsofts PowerPoint is used (an unbolded serif font), the presenter has to use a larger type size for legibility. That is why the default type size for headlines in PowerPoint is 44 points. In a small room, one can drop down one level: 24 pt for heading, 18 pt for primary matter, and so on.

3.1.3 Avoid presenting text in all capital letters

Many presenters mistakenly use all capital letters on their slides. These presenters fail to recognize that readers recognize words not only by the letters in the word, but also by the shape of the letters: for instance, the shapes of ascenders such as b, d, and f and the shapes of descenders such as g, j, and p. Using all capital letters dramatically slows the reading because using all capitals prevents readers from recognizing the shapes of words. All capitals also take up much more space (about 35 percent more space). Use minimum

space with clarity uncompromised. A slide with more blank space is more inviting to read.

3.1.4 Guidelines for Colour

Not all colour combinations can be read effectively. Most effective is black letters against (used for road signs) but since yellow background puts audience on aggressive mode, black letters on white background are the best. Black lettering on red background is the most difcult to read. About 8 percent of males and 0.5 percent of females have deciencies in distinguishing certain color combinations. The combinations that cause the most problems for these people involve red, green, and brown. For that reason, avoid such combinations.

3.1.5 Mathematics
Many slides in scientic presentations suffer because they contain too much complex mathematics. It is unreasonable to expect your audience to follow complex mathematics when you do not have the time to methodically work through that mathematics. You need not remove all complex equations from the slides of a short presentation, but it is expected that when you show mathematics, you account for what the audience can comprehend during the presentation. You should clarify for them what you expect them to gather from the display of the mathematics. For instance, in showing a complex equation, you could state up front that you do not expect the audience to follow all the mathematics. Rather, you have shown this equation to point out what the terms physically represent. For instance, the rst term might represent the rate of mass ow into the control volume. By clarifying what you expect the audience to gather, you allow them to relax. Without that clarication, though, some in your audience will simply quit listening to the presentation because they realize that they have no hope of working through the mathematics.

3.1.6 Conclusions
You can let the single word Questions appear at the bottom of the conclusion slide. This strategy allows one to keep projecting the conclusion slide

for the duration of the question period rather than to project a throwaway question slide as so many presenters unfortunately do.

Chapter 4

Delivery
Dr. Bassler is really good at speaking in a very down-to-earth, conversational manner. There is great clarity to her narrative. For example, she often says The question is then .... or So the question is this: .... . Along the way she also answers the two questions we often have as listeners but that too often go unanswered: So what? and Why does it matter (to me/us)? I love her style. She never relies on the condence monitors (that we can tell) or bullet points (there are none) but instead she moves her eyes naturally around the room, clearly engrossed in what she is explaining but also very much in the moment. She references the screen often but only to illustrate her point. From Blog of Garr Reynold I nd that I remember presentations where I was engaged and it wasnt mechanical at all or focused solely on PowerPoint or other media.

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4.1 On the stage

4.1.1 Enthusiasm
The most captivating speakers in science and engineering have been the ones who loved their subjects and knew them well. If you do not convey your interest for the subject, how can you expect your audience to become interested? Conveying does not mean that you sing and shout. Moreover, scientic audiences are suspicious of deliveries that contain too much dazzle, particularly at the beginning; these audiences often assume that the presentation is more style than substance. In truth, a presenter can show a genuine enthusiasm for the subject in many ways: a sincere voice, sustained eye contact, animated facial expressions, and natural gestures that contribute to the audiences understanding of the subject. A speaker cannot hope to teach the audience the specics of his work, but he can elicit a valuable appreciation of the research effort and imply the value of the contribution to the growing body of knowledge on the subject. To achieve this he must convey enlightened enthusiasm for his subject and the advances he has attained. Jay Lehr

4.1.2 Voice Modulation

Changing the speed and loudness not only prevents the speaker from hypnotizing the audience, but it helps the speaker emphasize key details. The best speakers, Feynman and Pauling, changed their loudness and speed dramatically during a presentation. Such changes, though, should occur naturally; otherwise, the audience senses that the speaker is acting. In other words, the speaker should have the same voice inections in loudness and speed that the speaker naturally has in conversation.

4.1.3 Movement on Stage

In addition to the way you stand, an important consideration is the way you move. The best presenters move during their presentations, but they move

with purpose, and those movements contribute to the presentations. For instance, walking toward the audience can be a powerful movement that helps emphasize a point.

4.1.4 Pointer
A common mistake made in pointing to a projection from an overhead projector is for the speaker to point directly at the transparency rather than at the screen. If the speakers pen or nger quivers, that quivering becomes amplied by the projector. This has translated into computer presentations as well where presenters are often seen to move mouse as pointer. This should never be done. The laser pointers must be turned on only when one likes to point something on the screen. Often, speakers turn on the pointer and make it go round and round on the screen for no apparent reason. These habits distract audience a lot. Wooden pointer are often played with by the speaker unconsciously to overcome nervousness. Some speakers are found to hold the wooden or laser pointer all through the presentation. It is best to keeps hands free, and use them to gesticulate and be natural.

4.1.5 Eye Contact

Your eyes affect the audience. If you look at the oor, the audience will look at the oor. If you stare out the window, your audience will stare out the window. If you engage the audience with your eyes, the audience will return the look and will concentrate more on what you have to say. Granted, part of that increased concentration arises from guilt. When you are looking at an audience member, the person thinks, I better pay attention because this speaker is looking at me. Another part of the increased concentration, though, arises because the audience member feels a part of the presentation. One myth about eye contact is that you should look above the heads of people to the wall in the back. Such a strategy makes no sense at all. With eye contact, you are both trying to engage the people in the room and to discern how they are responding to what you have to say. What could anyone possibly learn from looking at the wall? Many in the audience also speak to you with their facial expressions. Although some audience members keep a straight face through the entire presentation, others reveal if they are delighted, confused, angered, or bored.

A good speaker pays careful attention to the audience and adjusts the presentation to engage the audience again if they begin to drift off. Other times, you might have an audience member who is going to fall asleep on you no matter how well you present. In such cases, let the person sleep and focus on the rest of the audience. Perhaps that person has a new baby, and for that person your presentation is going to be the only quiet hour of the day.

4.1.6 Making a Personal Connection

Another avor that many people successfully incorporate into speech is a personal connection. Michael Faraday and Ludwig Boltzmann were noted for giving presentations that had a warm and personal atmosphere. At a time when so many others spoke for the sole purpose of impressing audiences with their knowledge, Faraday worked hard to make sure that everyone in the audience understood what he had to say. His eye contact, his humbleness, his passion for having the audience understand himthese served to make connections with his audience.

4.1.7 Incorporating Humour

In one of his presentations as president of Sandia National Laboratories, C. Paul Robinson began in the following way: As a small boy I had two dreams, and I was torn between them. At times I wanted to become a scientist, and at other times I just wanted to run away and join the circus. But thanks to the grace of God and a career in the Department of Energys laboratories, Ive been able to fulll both dreams. Humor is risky in a professional situation. Dening the line of what will make everyone laugh and what will make some people feel uncomfortable is impossible. People react differently to different subjects. Professor Dan Inman, a vibrations engineer, is well known for the humor that he works into his talks. For that reason, he is often asked to give afterdinner talks at conferences. Inman believes that self-effacing humor is best. Im considered funny because Im such an easy target, In addition, Inman believes that humor should be natural, not planned.

4.2 How much to memorize

Speaking from points allows you to earn credibility. You can also adjust the speech if required. The pace can be natural and it provides for good eye contact with the audience. The main drawback is that the wording may not be exact, which can required a long preparation time till the presentation completely sinks in mind.

4.2.1 Memorizing
Precision, smooth delivery, credibility earned, eye contact. It however has potential for disaster, the pace is unnatural. The speech cannot be adjusted, and requires a really long time to prepare for the most of the people.

4.2.2 Reading
Precision, smooth delivery; credibility undercut, lack of eye contact, unnatural pace, inability to adjust speech. Relatively short preparation time, but this style is really not an option anymore.

4.2.3 Off the cuff

Speaking off the cuff requires no preparation time, provides very good eye contact, natural pace. It has potential for disaster, difcult to organize, and verbal component heavy to the extent that there may be no visual aids. Given these disadvantages, you might think that memorization has no place in scientic presentations. That is not true. When you have only a few words to say before an audience, such as the introduction of a colleague, memorization might be the best approach. Also, you might memorize the rst couple of lines of a difcult or important presentation just so that you create a good rst impression with the audience and so that the words begin to ow as you speak from your slides or notes. For many people who speak from points, the rst couple of sentences are the most difcult. Much of that difculty arises from the nervousness that speakers often feel before a presentation. Having the rst couple of lines memorized allows you to get started and to get to what Feynman refers

to as that miraculous moment when you concentrate on the science and are completely immune to being nervous.

4.3 Emphasis in Presentations

The emphasis of details in a scientic presentation is as important as the organization of details. On average, people remember only about ten percent of what they hear. For that reason, although a presentation might be well organized, the presentation could fail without proper emphasis. In such a case, the audience could walk out of the room remembering only the ten percent of details in the presentation that were least important. One key place for emphasis in a presentation is the beginning (slightly after the audience are adjusted your style of standing, speaking, moving, and looking at the audience in between), when the audience is the least tired and the listening abilities are the sharpest. For that reason, you want to use the beginning of a presentation to say something important: to dene the scope of your presentation, to show the audience the importance of the work, and to map (outline) the talk in a memorable way (it is normally done in the most casual manner) the path of the presentation. Whatever path you choose, the number of divisions in the path should not be larger than ve. Larger divisions tax audience; they often take deep sighs and glance at their watches. For the audience, the chances for retention dramatically drop. The ending is also a wonderful opportunity for emphasis, especially if the audience knows that the ending is upon them. Why is that? As mentioned in the section on transitions, if the audience knows that the ending is near, they will sit up and concentrate, even if they have not understood everything up to that point. Another missed opportunity for emphasis is not keeping the conclusion slide projected during the question answer session. Many presenters show this slide for only a minute, or less in some cases, and project a question mark or other worthless projection during the three to ve minutes of the question period?

4.4 Improve your presentation

To prepare themselves to speak, many presenters require some time alone before the presentation. For example, when Heinrich Hertz began teaching, he claimed that he could think of nothing else but each lecture for at least one hour before he gave it. According to one of her daughters, Marie Curie required the entire afternoon to prepare herself for her ve oclock lecture to her graduate students. Although Feynman spoke only twice a week for his immortal physics lectures (available as a book in three volumes), he worked from eight to sixteen hours per day on these lectures, thinking through his own outline and planning how each lecture t with the other parts. Students often continue tinkering with the slides up to the hour of the presentation, and nally when they on the podium, they do not nd their rhythm. A speaker needs time to practice, even if he or she has the best set of presentation slides. Practice helps the speaker with transitions from one point to the next. Practice also helps the speaker work through the explanations of difcult concepts so that all the words are, in fact, inside the speaker and ready to come out. Most important, perhaps, practice reassures the speaker that he or she can, in fact, make the presentation. Perhaps the greatest source of nervousness for a speaker is the fear that he can stand before an audience and not know what to say. By having walked through the presentation, even if in a mumble, the speaker knows that the words are there.

4.4.1 Live practice

One of the best ways is to have colleagues critique your presentation. These critiques should not only mention those aspects that are weak, but also discuss what aspects of delivery were strong (see critique sheet). Also effective is to videotape yourself making a presentation and then to review the videotape with a critical eye. Although this exercise can be frightening, it is enlightening to see your movements and expressions and to hear your voice. The strategy for improving delivery of presentations can follow the well known method used in sports. Simply watch a videotape of a great player. With speaking, imagine one or more of your model speakers and try to emulate that persons style. Having these individuals as models does not diminish individuality as a speaker. Rather, it helps bring out those traits in your de-

livery that you value so highly in theirs. In describing how he felt giving a paper to a geological society, Charles Darwin said, I could somehow see nothing all around me but the paper, and I felt as if my body was gone, and only my head [was] left. The sense of being disconnected that Charles Darwin experienced reects the way that many presenters carry themselves during a presentation, as if they have no idea about the elements around them: the room, themselves, the audience, or the time.

4.4.2 How do you eliminate ller phrases from your speech?

The process generally takes several days, with the rst step being to learn what ller phrases you say. That step you can accomplish by having a colleague critique a presentation of yours. Once you have discovered what your ller phrases are, your subconscious will work to eliminate them from your speech. Your subconscious is powerful. Do not underestimate its abilities. When you notice yourself saying one of your ller phrases, you are well on your way to eliminating that phrase from your speech. Not surprisingly, you are much more likely to say ller phrases when you are tired, which is reason enough to get a good nights sleep before an important presentation.

4.4.3 Incorporating Analogies, Examples, and Stories

When you want to make a segment of your presentation memorable, then consider using analogies, examples, or stories. For instance, when the purpose of a portion of a pre-sentation is simply to convey the size of something or the likelihood of an event, analogies are powerful. For instance, Otto Frisch liked to use the following example to describe the size of a nucleus: If an atom were en-larged to the size of a bus, the nucleus would be like the dot on this i. Einstein used the analogy of shooting sparrows in the dark to describe the likelihood of producing nuclear energy with alpha particles striking nitrogen nuclei. Often, presentations fail because the speaker restricts the speech to an abstract or mathematical perspective. While some people can learn from this purely mathematical perspective, most cannot. Most people require some

image or physical process to follow. Consider the difference between listening to the solution of a second-order differential equation and listening to the solution of a second-order differential equation that represents the ight of a paratrooper dropped from a plane. In the second presentation, you have something physical to which you can anchor the mathematics.

4.4.4 Question Answer

When asked a question, it is important to pause and think before answering. Such a pause not only allows you to consider what you will say, but also provides emphasis to the rst sentence of your answer. The audience is patient with a speaker who silently thinks about the question for a moment, much more patient than if the speaker lls the silence with empty chatter or a ller phrase such as uh, um, or you know.

4.4.5 Antagonistic audience

With an antagonistic audience, two strategies should be considered. One strategy is to dene the question up front, but not to give away your results. If those in the audience who are opposed to your results do not know your position, they are much more likely to listen to your arguments. Granted, if their initial bias is strong, you probably will not change their minds by the presentations end, but you are in a much better position to reduce their vehemence against your position. You might also win their respect. A second strategy, named the Rogerian strategy for the psychologist Carl Rogers, is to show that you truly understand the oppositions main arguments. In other words, you extend an olive branch to the opposite side by recognizing the strengths of their argument before you begin with a defense of your own. What this olive branch does is to reduce the initial antagonism that the audience has to you and makes them more inclined to listen to your arguments. Such a strategy works well when the goal is not to win the other side over, but to reach a compromise with the other side.

Chapter 5

Unwritten Code
The following are taken from writeup by Jay H. Lehr, titled Let there be stoning! 1. There needs to an outline near the beginning of a long talk (with various aspects covered), which is repeated along the way so the audience can become reoriented with the larger-scale structure of the presentation. 2. In the beginning, tell the audience what youre going to tell them. Then tell them, and be sure to leave time at the end to tell them what you told them. It sounds simple, but it works and they will appreciate it. 3. Make sure you talk into the microphone; tell the audience to let you know if youre too loud or not loud enough. You will lose 20 seconds regaining your composure and properly modulating your voice, but that beats 20 minutes of deafening silence or a rumbling sound system. 4. The slides use a full sentence at the top to summarize the key point, or none at all. Shorter titles are rarely effective. I learned about this from The Craft of Scientic Presentations and its been good advice so far. 5. Dont stay on one slide too long; put blanks between slides if you have a lot to say before the next slide. The old slide is distracting. Instead put a dark blank slide. 41

6. Dare to be different. 7. Use your hands, move around, not to the point of distraction, but look alive! Rehearse. Rehearse before a friend and to yourself in the quiet of your mind, on a drive, a run, a swim, a cycle, a daydream, anywhere! 8. Think of the time the audience is collectively giving you. One hundred people times 20 minutes is 33 hours. Dont you owe them a few hours of effort in return? 9. Get your timing down. No one minds your going a minute or two overtime, but ve or eight is inexcusable. Face it, there is extraneous material in your talk. You may love it, but the audience can do without it. Get to the point earlier, and spend more time on the meat and less on the soup and nuts. 10. When all is said and done, more is said than done. Dont waste words, but if you must, remember that attitude is 75 percent of nearly everything in life; enthusiasm is at least that in public speaking. Brim with enthusiasm; if you dont have it for your work, how can an audience have it for you? Come alive! 11. When on the speakers platform, unless you have a natural wit and air of showmanship, you cannot afford to be yourself. You must be an actor who is privileged to educate and entertain. The latter must come rst or the former has no hope of attainment. But there is one simple rule that can make us surprisingly as comfortable before a group as with a single friend. Be intimate with your audience. Make them feel that you are there because you care about informing each and every one of them; no matter if there are 40 or 400, be intimate. 12. The slides are as simple as possible. 13. Know when to move and when to not move (red light!). One of the most powerful tips is that When you move, the audience look at you. When you stop, they look at the screen. Use this to your advantage. Dont pace randomly, idly or unconsciously. Dont rock back and forth on your heels. Also, empty your pockets if you tend to ddle with lose change or your keys.

Chapter 6

How to critique a talk?

Studying other speakers is a critical skill. The ability to analyze a speech will accelerate the growth of evaluator, speaker, and others in the group. We rst outline the questions you should ask yourself when assessing a presentation. These questions also apply when you conduct a self evaluation of your own speeches. The second half deals with how to develop a critique. The rst part is adapted http://ebookbrowse.com/the-art-oftechnical-presentation-john-peterson-pdf-d88979656, and the second part is adapted from http://sixminutes.dlugan.com/speech-evaluation-1-how-tostudy-critique-speech/, Speech Analysis Series by Andrew Dlugan (accessed on Aug 25, 2011).

6.1 What should your critique cover

6.1.1 Speech
1. Volume (good projection, vibrant) 2. Pitch (varied) 3. Quality (enthusiastic, passionate) 4. Articulation/pronunciation (clear, crisp, controlled)

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5. Rate (smooth, deliberate) 6. Vocal variety (conveys emotion, natural, animation) & voice control 7. Volume 8. Sincerity 9. Use of pauses (for effect, to allow listeners to digest information) 10. Manner (directness, assurance and enthusiasm) 11. Grammar 12. Word selection and explaining technical terms/jargon

6.1.2 Body Language

1. Posture/stance (condent, relaxed) 2. Gestures (natural, meaningful, lively, precise, enhanced message) 3. Body movements (animated, graceful, purposeful, any distracting or repetitious movements) 4. Facial expressions (friendly, natural, appropriate to speech content) 5. Eye contact (no set pattern, established bonds with listeners, encompassed everyone) 6. Dress (appropriate, condent) 7. Use of props/visual aids (effective, added to content)

6.1.3 Talk Development

1. Opening (clear, interesting), body, close easy to follow and understand (well constructed) 2. Conclusion reinforced body; climactic

3. Organization (clear, simple) + support material (examples etc) directly contributed to the message. Key ideas were few in number and introduced systematically. Logically written and presented 4. Smoothness 5. Spontaneity 6. Flexibility 7. Used descriptive language 8. Original ideas used and portrayed 9. Used word-pictures (effectively, memorable) selecting the right words for communicating the message

6.1.4 Effectiveness
1. Held audiences attention audience was interested and well-informed of new ideas 2. Audience response (attentiveness, laughter, interest) 3. Achievement of purpose/objectives 4. Creation of excitement, suspense, twist 5. Originality of thoughts and material 6. Showed research of topic 7. Used personal experience 8. Use of notes and lectern (appropriate, unobtrusive) 9. Spoke to the topic/objectives 10. Well-prepared and well-rehearsed 11. Spoken within allotted time 12. Um/Ahs/Hesitations

13. Condent/control of nervousness 14. Overall message was clear and called the audience to an action 15. Easy to relate to audiences everyday lives and showed how it can help 16. Persuasiveness 17. The speech evoked a reaction (inspire, uplift, humour, satisfaction...)

6.1.5 Presentation Slides

1. Visuals orient the audience 2. Visuals add energy and depth to the presentation 3. Slides are clear to read and easy to understand 4. Slides have proper level of detail 5. Slides show key details 6. Could text be replaced by visuals/images 7. Did the slides use white space as an design element for slides? 8. Were the mathematical parts used judiciously and explained clearly?

6.1.6 Other
1. Topic selection (suited speaker, audience, time available) 2. Addressed the chairman at start and close appropriately 3. A speech to remember?

6.2 How to Study and Critique a Speech

You should use your answers to the above listed questions and the following additional consideration for delivering helpful, encouraging, and effective speech evaluations, whether you write them up or deliver verbally at the end of the speech. Providing speech evaluation regularly helps you improve your own speaking skills dramatically. 1. Learn the objectives of the speaker Before the speech takes place, ask the speaker what their objectives are. Sometimes the objective is obvious, but not always. Perhaps the speaker has just read the Presentation Zen book and is experimenting with a modern style of visuals which goes against common practice. If you know this, you can tailor your evaluation accordingly. If you dont, you may unfairly criticize them for not considering the expectations of the audience. 2. Consider the skill level of the speaker sometimes Treat novice speakers with extra care. Be a little more encouraging and a little less critical, particularly if they exhibit a high level of speaking fear. Compliment them on tackling their fear. Reassure them that they arent as bad as they imagine. Be supportive. Ask them how they feel it went. Evaluating the (very) experienced speaker: A common misconception is that you cannot evaluate a speaker if they are more experienced than you. This is false. Though you may have limited speaking experience, you have a lifetime of experience listening to presentations. Your opinion matters. As a member of the audience, you are who the speaker is trying to reach. You are fully qualied to evaluate how well that message was communicated. Every speaker, no matter how experienced, can improve. Perhaps more importantly, every speaker wants to improve. You can help. 3. A speech evaluation is a pretty simple thing. Just listen to the speech, take some notes, and then share your opinion. Right? 4. Be truthful.

If you did not like the speech, do not say that you did. If you did not like a component of the speech, do not say you did. There is a tendency to want to be nice and embellish the positives. Dishonest praise will only damage your credibility and character. 5. Express your opinion. Avoid speaking on behalf of the audience with phrases like Everyone thought or The audience felt You can only accurately talk about are your own thoughts and feelings. Magical phrases in a speech evaluation start with personal language: I thought I liked I felt I wish 6. Avoid absolute statements. There are very few public speaking rules. For every best practice, theres a scenario where a speaker would be wise to go against convention. Phrases such as You should never or One should always should rarely be part of an evaluators vocabulary. 7. Be specic. Use examples. Explain why. How can you make sure that the constructive criticism doesnt completely outweigh the praise and end up discouraging the speaker? The answer: be specic. Studies have shown that specic praise is much more encouraging than generic praise. This applies to criticism as well. Specic feedback (positive or negative) is more meaningful than generic feedback. e.g. I liked the dynamic opening of your speech. is better than I liked your speech. In addition to being specic and tying comments to examples from the speech, it also helps to explain why you liked or didnt like a particular aspect of the speech. Consider the effectiveness of the following four statements: Gestures were poor. Gestures were limited in the rst half of the speech. Gestures were limited in the rst half of the speech because the speaker gripped the lectern. Gestures could have been improved in the rst half of the speech. By removing her hands from the lectern, she could more easily make natural gestures.

Statement #4 is phrased in a positive manner, it is specic, it references an example from the speech, and states why it is good not to grip the lectern. 8. Dont evaluate the person or their objective. Evaluate how well the message is delivered, not the messenger. Keep your comments focused on the presentation. Similarly, avoid evaluating the speakers objective. For example, suppose the speakers objective is to convince the audience that recycling is a waste of time. If you always reduce, reuse, and recycle, dont let that inuence your evaluation. (By all means, start a debate about it later, write an article, give your own speech, etc.) As an evaluator, your primary role is to help the speaker achieve their objective in the most convincing way possible. 9. Evaluate whether the objective was achieved. Everything other than the speaker themselves and their primary objective is fair game for your evaluation: content, speech structure, humor, visuals, eye contact, gestures, intangibles, etc. and everything else covered in the rst article from this series. 10. The best evaluations are a combination of praise, areas for improvement, and specic suggestions. All three elements are essential, but can be mixed in numerous ways. This is the focus for the next article in this series: The Modied Sandwich Technique for Evaluations. Begin the evaluation by highlighting strengths demonstrated by the speaker. Then, discuss areas for improvement for the speaker, and make concrete suggestions if possible. Conclude by highlighting additional strengths of the presentation. The critical feedback is sandwiched between positive comments. The theory is that the speaker will be more receptive to listening to (and acting on) the criticism if positive statements surround it.

Appendix A

The Art of Technical PresentationOutline Handout

This material was prepared by John Peterson (jtp@technologist.com) for Neon Guild Presentation in October 2010, and is reproduce here varbatim. It is available freely on the web through http://www.neonguild.org/The%20Art%20of%20Technical%20Presentation%20%20John%20Peterson.pdf ( August, 2011). This material is a way summarizes what is contained in the previous chapters.

Introduction
1. Technology is cool needs to be shared! 2. There are so many opportunities to present to parents, your class, your prospective employer, 3. your spouse, your prospective client, your community 4. There are way too many awful presentations going on especially from techies! 51

5. Everyone has the potential to share & present well, make a positive impression, persuade. and to improve! A presentation is: Benecial, interactive sharing of ideas, experiences, information. (and note how information is last.) A presentation is NOT a speech (which is a non-interactive broadcast) Common principles apply to apply to all presentations - large group, or oneon-one: communicate, empathize, interact, educate, persuade all with PEOPLE in mind >>> Its the interaction with people that makes a presentation shine

5 Ps of Presentation
Passion, Preparation, Performance, People, Potholes (to avoid)

Passion
A prerequisite for great presentations! Means being excited about your topic, personally invested, knowledgeable Can be in any area: video games, sports, personal workout regimens, how to bake bread, Travel tips, Windows 7 Libraries, Champagne tasting, y shing, keeping a green lawn, linux media servers!! (notice many/most of these are NOT technical. But technical presentations and audiences have special considerations both challenging and helpful. 1. Upside: Technical audiences are almost always patient, and willing to overlook polish for content. Sadly, theyve seen so many bad presentations that they probably expect yours to be bad and they came anyway!! 2. Downside: Technical audiences are technically knowledgeable, so its hard to BS. Also, technical audiences want some fairly deep or practical content. Easy on the glam & gloss...

Preparation (1st P) The key to good presentations - and conquering fear! Means being ready or even over-ready. (Note really no such thing as over ready...) FIRST: Key questions to ask early. Contact presentation host to establish (via email or written form): 1. Why whats driving them why you, why this topic, why this time, this audience 2. Who (who will be the audience, and how many) 3. What (what the subject is desired, in as detailed a way as possible, and also how long can it/should it run) 4. When (the exact date and time, expected show time, and whether your show is dependant on others (or others on yours), and how you will both deal with delays, re-schedules, or cancellations. Cancellation Note its not if, but when. Cancellations happen dont take it personally.) 5. Where (the address, but just as important, the presentation space size, seating, microphone/projector needed?) 6. Wherewithal (what specically will they provide, for video, audio, presentation gear, food, perhaps, and exactly who is your point of contact (1: beforehand; 2: at the event for setup and issues) Second: Brainstorming topic, ow, key points Use this time to loosely consider what to present, and how to present it, in what order Do NOT use presentation software for this use a hammock, paper, text doc, etc. Do this far enough ahead to allow for relaxed review, and multiple revisions Outtake is a presentation outline key ideas and points.

Third: Tweaking knowledge Do research needed in order to be solid on all the material youd like to share Perhaps update your knowledge, or buttress with some stats Consider likely questions, especially given your audience. You want to have answers! Fourth: Assembling Material to support key points Pictures, examples, samples, stories, stats. At least one item to support/enhance each point you want to make. Wherever possible, nd graphical material to share. That way, while you talk, they can absorb your image. >> Use Images/photos, not clipart Great images are worth 1000 words! To nd images, use your own, or leverage the Internet. Google graphics search, iStockPhoto, etc. Sometimes its fun to take your own pictures to illustrate a particular point. Often these are the most interesting, because they match your story so well. Image Tips Choose one image to illustrate each point. Let them absorb visually while you talk. Avoid text bullets/block like the plague!!!! If you use text on your slides, they will read it, and tune you out. Why even have a presenter (you), if they have text to read. UGH. Choose images based on relevance, impact. Avoid generic, slick images that dont closely support your point.

 Rule of thirds Power points = intersections of 1/3 lines (yup!). Feel free to crop photos mercilessly. Most photos need cropping badly. http://www.digital-photography-school.com/rule-of-thirds Highlight key item on the imagewith every trick in the book: Contrast, alignment, relative size, color, cropping. Every photo management utility has this and much more.

Two of my favorites: o Free: XnView: http://www.xnview.com/en/index.html o Trialware- but awesome: ACDSee PhotoManager: http://store.acdsee.com/store/acd/en US/DisplayProductDetailsPage/productID.1 1500 Cut the cute spins, animations, wacky effects, odd fonts. Focus on your material, not the effects. They act to distract, and quickly tire the audience. Fifth: Assembling the Presentation o This is the rst time you use actually use presentation software like KeyNote or PowerPoint. o When you rst assemble, dont worry about the precise order, spelling, sizing, etc, just get started. o Focus on not missing any key points from your brainstorming outline. Design tips: o Short , Sweet, Simple KISS (Keep it simple stupid) o One point per slide, unless its an agenda, or credits, etc. o Six words per slide MAX. Otherwise theyll read it, and tune you out. o Multiple fonts are a distraction. Keep fonts effective, not as a carnival show. Also, your fancy fonts may not work/be available on the system you present with o Guy Kawasaki 10/20/30 rule (Be careful! Everything stated here may not work for you!Sanjeev): o 10 slides, 20 minutes, 30 point font minimum o Yes, this is extreme, but its an interesting concept.

o For technical/ content sharing presentions, triple the slide count and time. Only go over an hour with great caution most adults tune out after 45 min or so...

Presentation/Performance The SHOW

>>> Key Idea - Its ALL about PEOPLE. Really! So, think about your audience every step of the way. How will they react? Will they understand the acronyms you are using? What questions might they ask?

Practicing Presentation/Dry run

- Plan/visualize in advance: How it looks, sounds, ows, connects. And length! 45 min is an excellent target for dgeting. And, if its hot, or the end of a long day, maybe even less. If they have beer, all bets are off ;-) - Practice live in front of small, friendly audience (spouse, friend, coworker) for reality check. If you do not have anyone, or are uncomfortable, practice OUT LOUD in front of an empty chair (really especially important to do it out loud) - Finally, visualize your presentation in front of large audience. This helps you to not be so intimidated when you go live! In the Room/At the Show - Right before the show talk/connect to people in the audience introduce, get their background and expectations. This helps make what can be an intimidating experience more personal. - Small tips for the last minute: Breath mints, hair /bathroom break/y check!! - Address each point or sentance to specic a specic person or table. Then move to another person, for the next point. Revisit individuals for effect, personal touch. Be especially focused on the back and sides of the room, where they will be more disconnected...

- Never turn your back!!! (Makes it hard to hear, impossible to connect) - Dont turn off the lights ever. Somebody will go to sleep, many will zone out guaranteed! - >>> Avoid handouts until after Just like text on-screen, the audience will read ahead, and tune you out. - Check constantly for audience reaction, understanding, tuning out. Then adjust! - Pacing to fast, slow check with your boss the audience!

General Tips:
The Intro:
- Tell a story. - State a surprising statistic or unknown fact, as long as you can back it up with a reliable source. - Ask a challenging question, not a self-serving or obvious one. - Make a bold and contrarian assertion. - Refer to a current event, as long as you keep in mind that current, these days, means really, really recent. - Use a quote, if your audience hasnt already heard it a gazillion times. (Source: LifeAfterPowerPoint.com Sept 2009) http://www.lifeafterpowerpoint.com/?m=200909 - Mix it up vary your delivery, intensity, technicality, and interaction. This will keep your audience engaged, interested - Lighten it up humor, especially self-deprecation always lightens the mood! - Being comfortable is key: o Familiar with presentation environment & tools o Condent with your dress, food, drink, bathroom state. etc

Being seen: - Physical positioning, vertical presence, interaction (material & audience) - They must see you in order for them to connect with you. - Avoid being in a dark spot of the room. This will kill almost any presentation! Being heard: - Microphone tips: wireless is best, either lapel or boom. This allows you to move naturally - Maintain natural, even voice. Too soft will put people to sleep, too loud will turn them off. - Get a sound check beforehand even if with the audience. Ask someone at the back... - Feedback usually caused by speaking too softly, or moving in front of speakers. Cover mic & correct - No microphone, or mic failure: ask audience to gather closer. Leave podium/front of room. Project! After the show: relax you did it! 1. Enjoy the victory! 2. Have business cards ready 3. Re-connect with the audience on a personal level, get feedback, better the next time!: 4. How was it? 5. Anything youd suggest for the next time?

Potholes - Gotchas Dont try to transfer all human knowledge in one show ;-) Be willing to adapt, re-focus, condense your presentation on the y. Nervous habits of repetition: UM, Uh, Like, rocking. These are almost Reading from prepared text: This is death, almost always sounds horrible. Avoid at all costs.... Too much text live example: http://prezi.com/4 muqjahha-g/powerpoint-doesnt-suck-you-do/ Jargon never assume your audience will understand assume someone in the group has never heard of that term you know so well! Live Software /Hardware demos be ready for failure have a backup plan in case you cant use it (its not if but when) Supporting materials hold interest, support & validate key points, challenge audience Interaction gotta have it! Find a way. Expect the unexpected remember the why, and your preparation will get you through

Cool Presentation Tools:

- - Screen sharing: zooming, annotation (Zoomit): Practice it ahead! - Snagit - screencapper supreme (windows, mac beta) - Green Laser, Like the Kensington K72353US - Projector @ native resolution (which is??), connections/cables (VGA vs DVI, etc) - Remote control freedom to roam. My two favorites: o Kensington Green Laser Control: - http://www.amazon.com/Kensington-K72353US-Wireless-PresenterPointer/dp/B003I4FC80 o SMK Link Remote Navigator 2.4: - http://www.smklink.com/index.php?id=Mzk1 - Note for laser pointers, green laser rocks has much better visual contrast than Red!

Useful Resources:
Excellent Book: Even A Geek Can Speak, Joey Asher Excellent Book: resonate: Present Visual Stories that Transform Audiences, Nancy Duarte Excellent Book: Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery, Garr Reynolds Guy Kawasaki: 10/20/30 rule: http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2005/12/the 102030 rule.html#axzz11Lw5wOiS Excellent Presentations on Presenting: Death by PowerPoint, Alexei Kapterev (Slideshare.net) http://www.slideshare.net/thecroaker/death-bypowerpoint The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs, Carmine Gallo (Slideshare.net) http://www.slideshare.net/cvgallo/the-presentation-secrets-of-steve-jobs2609477 Guide to Better Pecha Kucha Presentations http://www.aqworks.com/2007/07/03/guide-to-better-pecha-kuchapresentations/?language=en PowerPoint the Big Ugly: Try searching on: horrible Powerpoint http://www.wisdeo.com/articles/view post/8732 Sendup on Gettysburg http://www.norvig.com/Gettysburg/ address by powerpoint:

Or search YouTube for PowerPoint comedy Great Rule of Thirds Lesson: http://www.mac-on-campus.com/LearningCenter/Library/31363.aspx Good luck! John Peterson