What Makes a Good Presentation?
As writers, we’re often also called upon to be public speakers. There’s the rub – since writers, almost by definition, like to sit alone in a room and write. But promoting one’s work involves interacting with the public … and the public can be unforgiving.
Surveys show that people decide in the first seven seconds whether they are interested in what you are saying – seven seconds! The bottom line is that you have a small window to captivate your audience. Are they going to listen – or work on their grocery lists?
Grabbing listeners’ attention in any kind of presentation depends on answering the following questions:
- So what? I want to make a presentation on X; the immediate question has to be: so what? what meaning does this presentation have for its listeners?
- Who cares? Why this particular audience for this particular presentation? I’ve chosen to give it to you for a reason, and I’d better be able to articulate that reason.
- What’s in it for me? If people don’t know what they’re getting – how it will improve their lives or work, what advantage they’ll have from having heard it – then they’ll tune out fast. The farm report? Yawn.
Once you have people’s attention, however, your work is far from done.
Here’s the issue: humans have a short attention span, and are able to retain three – yes: only three – points from any presentation. Try to fit any more in and you’re going to lose your audience; and, worse, they won’t retain anything that you said.
Make this handicap work to your advantage! Craft your presentation around three main points, and keep coming back to them – if they have catchy taglines, so much the better. Twenty minutes after your presentation is over, attendees should be able to easily and quickly articulate your three main points to a colleague, and that will only happen if you make sure that they’re well embedded in your audience’s minds.
This doesn’t mean that you have to be simplistic – far from it. Make your (well-written) notes available to your audience, so that later they can go back and remember other points, ancillary details, lists, illustrations. Be as detailed and sophisticated as you can in these notes and make sure that they’re widely available; include them in your website or newsletter; remind people of them throughout conversations you have in the industry.
If you can catch your audience’s attention immediately by telling them why they should listen; if you keep the presentation itself to three main points that you reinforce throughout the talk; and if you provide follow-up materials, then you’ll be making stellar, memorable, and useful presentations!
And then you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!