HAMMERING THE MESSAGE WITH DIFFERENCES

Differences Count When You Are Presenting

Hammer the message to the audienceYou’ve got a big presentation coming up and you know that you want to make a difference and have the audience walk away with a good understanding of the complex info that you are going to present. What can you do to really make sure that you key points get hammered home? You want to get your understanding itched into the audience. You want to surprise them with your presentation.

What can you do? Setting the stage on fire can be great but impractical way to accomplish this. How about two simpler ways that us technical folks always seem to forget as we pull together our presentations?

Audience Attention is drawn to perceptible differences

Let’s say that you’ve got a slide that contains one of the key points that you want to make to your audience. There are probably other things on that slide (like a title?). You need to make sure that your key point, be it a number, a comparison, a figure, etc. jumps out at your audience. All other points are subdued, playing a background role. However make sure that all are the background figures / comparisons are in direct relations with the key point that you are conveying, or else they will be a distraction and scare away the audience. Any distracting points / items should be brutally chopped out from the slide.

Keep in mind that PowerPoint’s ability to have items join the slide via animation might be a good way to lead up to and introduce the key point.

human group elements into units automatically

The human mind is an amazing thing. We can quickly suck in large quantities of information and rapidly make decisions about it. This talent works for or against you in a technical presentation depending how you are running the presentation. Things that you place close to each other on a slide will automatically be considered to be related by your audience.

Lets consider that you are presenting about the price increase in society. In order to drive home the understanding you add in a graph that shows that both the price of copper ore and the price of apples have both increased by 25% in the past 6 months. Both items would be shown closely together on the same graph and the audience would associate them. However, they really have nothing to do with each other (unless you are trying to talk about the cost of copper apples…).  They will confuse the audience.

But if there was two graphs one of copper and iron ore showing increase of price and then another graph of apples and bananas of same increasing trend. The human mind will start comprehending that there is a price increase across everything from metals to fruits even before you have started speaking.. You will be starting your presentation with an upper hand.


Just a few things to consider when you are making that last pass though the big presentation that you’ve created — do your main points jump out or are they buried?

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

STORY TELLING – AN ENGAGING WAY FOR PRESENTATION – PART 1

Image
In order to garner audience attention public speaker needs to take them on a journey, leaving them feeling inspired and motivated. They need to structure their speech to get the ideas across; keeping the audience engaged all the way, which is a very tricky proposition.  Story telling is one of the most exciting way to put across your ideas Why Story telling You are doing a presentation, so the natural tendency is to start with facts and figures highlighting the facts you want to get across. We think that s the best way. WRONG!! Humans are hardwired for stories. They love heroes, journeys, surprises, layers and happy sometimes tragic endings. Deliver a presentation that captures the hearts and heads of the audience by taking them alongside the journey. Deliver the facts and figures disguised in the story. The moment they start relating to the story, you will have their unconditional attention. They biggest question public speakers face is – HOW? Here I would be detailing few
Read more

IMPORTANCE OF BODY LANGUAGE IN PUBLIC SPEAKING - TOASTMASTER PROJECT 5

Importance Of Body Language Many people who give speeches don’t realize the importance of body language and nonverbal communication. The truth is that people will see you before they hear you speak, and how they see you influence how they hear you. If we are trying to make a good impression – both socially and in business – we often smile and hold contact the other person’s eyes as we shake their hand. The difficulty is that we give off thousands of other unconscious signals through our body language that other people will ‘read’ instantly and instinctively. By shaking their hand or standing in a particular way, we might trigger off old memories in the person we are trying to impress. Maybe an old friend stood exactly like that, in which case our advances might be treated sympathetically. But if we stand like the back-stabbing colleague who has treated them badly, our advances are likely to be treated as hostile. Body Language is all the non-verbal communication we ma
Read more

ICE BREAKER SPEECH - TIPS AND IDEAS

Image
Objective According to dictionary “Icebreaker” is a special-purpose ship or boat designed to move and  navigate through ice-covered waters” and “for a ship to be considered an icebreaker, it requires three traits most normal ships lack: a strengthened hull, an ice-clearing shape, and the power to push through ice-covered waters”.  In real world Ice Breaker is a term which describes an activity which reduces tension and anxiety in a group. Thus, it is fitting that the first Toastmaster speech project is titled "The Ice Breaker". This speech requires willingness to make mistakes and learn from them, courage to speak in front of a group and eagerness to kill the fear of speaking. The Aim The Ice Breaker speech has three aims: Introduce yourself.    Your ice breaker speech topic is you – anything and everything about you can be the topic for example your life, your job, your hobbies, your interests, your family, or any combination of these. You are t
Read more