IntroductionIn all of the other writing contexts described and discussed in this book, the writer is essentially an invisible operator communicating indirectly with his or her "audience" via the words he or she has put down on paper. When you are making a presentation, however, you are face to face with your audience and have to deliver your text aloud to them, which is perhaps even more daunting. This is a different situation, and you would expect rather different rules to apply. In fact, however, many of the basic rules for good writing remain valid; it is simply a matter of adapting them somewhat to suit the circumstances.Dealing with the AudienceAs has been said before in this book, you should always pay attention to your readers and their needs and expectations when writing. It becomes doubly important to assess needs and expectations when readers become a listening audience. The more you can find out in advance about your audience, the easier it will be for you to communicate with them. If you are not addressing a group that you already know, the easiest course is to ask the person organizing the presentation what sort of audience you can expect and, indeed, what kind of address they will expect from you. Nevertheless, as actors will tell you, no two audiences are ever the same. Actors can deliver the same performance to two different houses and meet with completely different receptions. You may have the same experience if you deliver the same presentation more than once. Actors are rarely able to find out in advance who is going to be sitting in the auditorium at a particular performance, and there you, as a speaker, may have an advantage. However, with a live audience nothing can ever be foreseen absolutely, so one of the key qualities required of a successful presenter is flexibility.We shall return to the question of flexibility later. For the moment, let us concentrate on the factors that can influence the nature of your audience and how those factors affect your preparations.In the first place, size matters. Most speakers will find it reasonably easy to adopt a friendly, informal tone when addressing a small gathering. It is much more difficult to take the same tone convincingly with a larger audience. It takes a special kind of skill, not to mention special confidence, to be able to reach out to a large crowd and speak to them with any kind of intimacy. Sound amplification systems do not help and in fact tend to hinder the generation of a cozy atmosphere. As a rule of thumb, therefore, the larger the audience, the more comparatively formal you should be in your approach. (Formality is, however, very much a relative quality with regard to presentations, as will be suggested below.) Audience size, therefore, may affect the tone of your presentation.Audiences vary in size, but they also vary in what they expect you to provide. Most will usually be hoping for a mixture of information and entertainment, the term entertainment being used in its widest sense. It will be up to you to assess what kind of mix is required. An audience of students in a lecture hall or a group of work colleagues attending a briefing will usually expect solid information, leavened with a little humor or the occasional anecdote; a club that has invited you to address its members on your special subject will probably expect you to keep the members interested and amused and to impart a little useful information along the way. If you are unsure about what the audience expects, it is generally safest to prepare a presentation consisting mainly of information interspersed with occasional moments of lighter fare. Audience expectations will affect both the content and the tone of your presentation.It is comparatively rare to encounter an audience that is so entirely on the same wavelength as the speaker and so entirely concentrated on what he or she has to say that all its members can assimilate everything they hear in the course of an hour or more. The receptivity of audiences varies, along with their size and expectations. Some people will be rapt; some will be distracted. Some will come ready supplied with the background knowledge that they need in order to understand you fully; some will not. You have to try to assess the capacity of the average member of your audience to understand everything you have to say. Do not, on the one hand, pitch the level of your talk too high. Unless you are addressing an audience of your peers, many members of the audience will be far less familiar with the subject than you are. Do not, on the other hand, pitch your talk to what you take to be the lowest common denominator of your audience. Nothing is more boring than to hear simple information delivered at a slow pace and endlessly repeated. Make the same reasonable judgment of the receptive capacity of your listeners as you would if you were writing normally; that is, imagine yourself as a member of the audience and write your text with that in mind.Your assessment of the receptivity of the audience will affect almost every aspect of your presentation: its content, its language, its tone, and its delivery.Preparing Your TextBefore you begin your preparation, you will need to decide whether you are going to read a prepared text, memorize your prepared text, or work from a set of notes. Most experts advocate the third option.If you read a text, your attention will necessarily be concentrated on the papers in front of you. This will make it less easy for you to make eye contact with the audience, which is often a great help in attracting and retaining its attention. It will also tie you to the lectern, when one simple method of varying your presentation is to move around a little on the platform.If you memorize your text, you are free to roam and to make eye contact with the audience, but you are very much at the mercy of your memory. It is not simply that you might forget what you intended to say next. Something may happen in the audience, someone may, for instance, ask a question, you respond, and perhaps you become involved in a digression of some sort—and then you have to remember where you were and how you intended to continue.Both reading and memorizing tend to reduce your flexibility, and flexibility, as has been said, is all important for presentations. Using notes generally gives you flexibility. Now, let us just be clear about what is meant by notes in this instance.In preparing for a presentation, you will obviously, think, read, and research, as you would for any other piece of writing; take careful notes on the information you have gathered; and organize those notes into a coherent plan. You could use these outline notes as the basis for your talk; however, this may seem to leave too much to chance, especially if you are an inexperienced speaker. What happens if you look at these notes on the day and cannot think of a good way of developing them?One way around this problem is to develop these notes on paper as you would normally—that is, to proceed to write out your talk in full—but then go one stage further and reduce your text to another set of notes or, perhaps more accurately, of headings and subheadings. This set of headings is what you take with you to the auditorium, either written on separate, numbered note cards or in the form of an outline:I. Introduce self—make contact with audience
Glad to be with members of the Tallahassee Sports Cycling Club
Personal reminiscence of Tallahassee in 1996 II. Introduce topic—Tour de France
Greatest bicycle race in the world
American involvement and American champions
Joke: May be hard to find a "king of the mountains" in Florida III. History of Tour de France
A. French love affair with the bicycle
First bicycles produced in France in 19th century
B. Reasons for founding of race
C. Personalities responsible for founding of race IV. Conclusion
May be looking at a future wearer of the yellow jersey right now The notes or outline can take any form that you like and find helpful, and can include any aspect of the talk that you may need a prompt for, for example, a joke or anecdote. You should be much freer to react with your audience and to adjust to your time schedule if you work from notes. At the same time, the very fact that you have written the whole speech out before should give you a solid foundation. Although you have not deliberately tried to memorize every word of your text, you will probably find the act of writing them down has fixed certain formulations in your memory, and you will be able to reproduce them with comparative ease.One final tip: If you take any sheets of paper or cards with you, make sure they are numbered so that you can put them back into order if you accidentally drop or shuffle them.Time ConstraintsYou will usually have a set period of time to deliver your presentation, and even if no time limit has been set, you will not wish to go on too long and risk overtaxing your audience. You will need enough material to fill your time. It is embarrassing to run out of things to say after 40 minutes if you are scheduled to speak for an hour, and the audience may not help you with interesting questions. At the other extreme, it is frustrating to run out of time when you still have important points to make. To avoid either scenario, it can be very useful to speak out loud in your own private rehearsal, or in the presence of a trusted friend, to gauge how long your material lasts. Since you can never be sure of the pace at which things will proceed, even if you have rehearsed carefully and stick strictly to your prepared plan, you will again need to build some flexibility into your presentation.The best plan is to provide yourself with too much material rather than too little. It is also useful to grade the material you have: things you have to say, things you want to say, and things you would like to say. Items in the final category should be able to be omitted if you are running short of time. This is one more complication when you are making your plan and writing out your script and notes, but it may be worthwhile.Also, always make sure that you have a watch with you or can see a clock while you are giving the presentation.Style, Tone, and StructureA presentation is spoken and listened to: That fact determines its style, tone, and structure. If you write out your text, you will need to be more than usually aware of your inner voice to ensure that what you put down is easily speakable. Remember the basic hallmarks of good style: Be clear, be simple, and be as varied and vigorous as you can.The tone will, as usual, depend on the occasion and the audience. A formal lecture will require a fairly formal style. Most presentations in an ordinary work or social environment, however, can be reasonably informal. Do not automatically assume, however, that you are going to be on very casual terms with your audience. If you establish a friendly rapport with your audience early on, you can adjust your style accordingly. Generally speaking, a style on the informal side of neutral will fit the bill; for example, write I don't rather than I do not, where appropriate, to signify to yourself that it is a spoken and relatively informal text, but do not include too many colloquial or slang expressions.The style of your text may be informal, but its structure should not be. The structure will need to be more than usually clear because your listeners have to take it in through their ears without, necessarily, any visual aid. Organize your points in a simple, logical order and make the way your argument progresses abundantly clear. If you were writing an essay, you might pride yourself on moving smoothly from one point to the next and linking your paragraphs by various subtle means. Subtleties may be lost on a live audience, however. The basic rule for the overall structure of a presentation has already been mentioned elsewhere in this book: Say what you're going to say, say it, and say that you've said it. To this we may add another rule: Say what you're doing as you do it. Make your changes of subject and links explicit. In the Tour de France presentation outlined above, for example, you might say: "I've dealt with the history of the Tour de France; I'll now go on to say something about my personal experiences as a journalist covering the Tour." Or, in an entirely different example: "Those are the objectives of the planned sales drive, now let's look at the methods we can use to achieve those objectives."You should not be afraid to repeat important points. If you make a point, provide evidence for it, or explain or develop it in some way, then make the basic point again before you proceed to something else. This makes it easier for the audience to follow your argument and also gives note takers an opportunity to jot down the essential information.RehearsingIf you have little or no public-speaking experience, or even acting experience, then you may find that you suffer from stage fright before you make your presentation. There is no cure for stage fright except to nerve yourself to go on and begin. Most actors find that as soon as they are actually on stage, they fall almost straight away into the routine they have rehearsed many times before, and their nervousness vanishes. If you rehearse your presentation, you may find the same relief. Even if you do not suffer from stage fright as such, it is still a good idea to rehearse in order to give yourself confidence. If you are at ease with your material, with your style of delivery, and, perhaps most important, with the sound of your own voice, you can be at ease with the audience as well.You can rehearse by speaking or reading your text and tape-recording or videotaping yourself. It is, however, not uncommon for people to be somewhat disconcerted when they hear or see a recording of themselves speaking at length. Do not be distracted by the fact you may sound rather strange; there is nothing you can do about the basic sound of your voice, and the people around you are usually quite happy to live with it. Concentrate instead on whether you are pronouncing words clearly, whether you are putting the emphasis in the right places, whether you are going too fast, and whether anything that may have looked good on paper does not come over very well when you say it.Also, if you have made a videotape, analyze your movements and gestures. If you do not have access to a video recorder, you can also rehearse in front of a mirror. This will give you a chance to practice any gestures you think may help to convey particular points. You can also check to see whether you have some automatic habitual gesture that may distract the audience. Some people scratch their noses, some people flap one hand or both hands every time they make a point. If you find yourself regularly or compulsively performing some small action over and over again, try to be aware of it and keep it in check.Rehearsing with a tape or video recorder or in front of a mirror requires a fair degree of critical objectivity on your part. If you can find an audience or even a single auditor to rehearse with, this will be a great help. Ask your listener to check you for:- audibility
- clarity and intelligibility
- speed of delivery
- the effectiveness and tastefulness of any humor
- irritating verbal habits or gestures
If you receive a good report on all those headings, you are ready to go.DeliveryDo not rush. Speak at a steady pace, perhaps slightly slower than you would use in an ordinary conversation. Remember that your audience has to follow your argument. On the other hand, do not go too slowly. To ensure that your audience gets your point, repeat it rather than pronouncing it with unnatural slowness or leaving a long pause after it.VisualsPrepare any visual aids you intend to use beforehand. Make sure the apparatus works, make sure that you know how to work the apparatus, and practice using it. Most of all, make sure the visuals can be clearly seen by the audience.Do not rely too heavily on visuals. A good visual can help you make a point, but a series of indifferent visuals can be just as boring as a lifeless speech. Try not to turn your back to your audience while you are using visuals, and especially, avoid making the audience wait while you manipulate the apparatus or write something on a board or overhead transparency.
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