by Edmond Lau

A great presentation consists of two important parts: well-structured content that empowers the idea that you’re trying to convey and an eloquent style of delivery that keeps your audience’s attention on your content.  Both parts aim to facilitate the communication of your idea to an audience.  Poor structure makes it more difficult for your audience to follow along and extract the salient points, and poor delivery detracts from the content.

An effective and general paradigm for structuring content that’s applicable to any presentation, essay, research paper, funding pitch, job application presentation, resume, or tech talk comes from what MIT Professor Patrick Winston — an AI veteran with a lecture series on How to Speak — calls VSNC. [1]  Based on this structure, any compelling presentation or paper builds upon the following four cornerstones:

• a clearly defined vision statement,
• an enumeration of concrete steps toward achieving the vision,
• an articulation of salient news and results with clarifying details, and
• a summary of contributions.

Most presentations, surprisingly enough, can fit into this paradigm and become much more powerful when designed with it in mind; weak presentations usually omit one or more of these parts.

Offering a succinct and clear vision (preferably on its own slide if slides are used) early in the presentation establishes the thematic goal of the talk.  It defines the boundaries of what’s relevant in the ideas presented and provides the glue that ties various points together.  Succinctness and clarity in the vision ensure focus in the talk.  Overly detail-focused individuals, in particular, sometimes create presentations whose themes are only implicitly defined and whose points flail around haphazardly.

Once the high-level vision is established, enumerating the concrete steps for attaining that vision gives the audience a mental path to follow and understand what’s necessary to reach the goal.  The steps review progress already made and highlight what still needs to be done.  Most presenters tend to get this part right since it’s a straightforward summary of completed and future work.

With the path enumerated, sharing news and details about recent accomplishments provides an excellent opportunity to enrapture the audience.  Numbers, statistics, graphs, analogies, demos, and stories that showcase results often work well.  Engineers tend to overvalue abstraction and to inadvertently neglect to include the details, but the details and stories are often what make the talk compelling.

Wrapping up the talk should be a summary of contributions.  A common mistake is to end a well-organized presentation merely with a rehash of major points rather than crystallizing the unique contributions that the presenter or the presenter’s team actually accomplished.  The contributions may be completed work that moves a field, product, or company forward or they may simply the be the refinements of ideas that offer a completely new perspective.

To make the VSNC concepts of vision, steps, news, and contributions more concrete, let’s take a look at how they apply to a real-life presentation and how they help convey ideas more clearly.  Mac and technology fans look forward to Steve Jobs’s Apple keynote presentations, partly because they’re dying to know the next visionary Apple product and partly because Jobs’s presentations are extremely well-executed.  His commanding stage presence definitely helps, but a decomposition of his recent March 2nd keynote [2, 3] on the iPad 2 reveals that the VSNC paradigm provides a powerful framework for understanding how his presentations are typically organized.

Jobs starts his presentation by summarizing the vision for the iPad 2 in a single, crisp slide: “Our most advanced technology in a magical and revolutionary device at an unbelievable price.”

What were the concrete steps involved in building this magical and revolutionary device?  Jobs outlines the steps in these two slides, reviewing upgrades to faster dual-core processors and graphics while maintaining low power usage and the efforts to make the device even more lightweight and 33% thinner:

Having established the vision and the steps to getting there, Jobs pitches the new iPad 2 by going over salient news and results to get the audience excited.  He chooses to do this by showcasing demos on the iPad 2 of FaceTime, PhotoBooth, iMovie, and GarageBand:

At other keynote presentations where Jobs also reviews the momentum of existing products, Jobs will often augment the news portion by sharing and marveling at numbers and details on how many iPhones or iPads were sold in the past year.

Jobs concludes with a summary of new engineering, product, and pricing contributions to convince the audience that 2011 will be the year of the iPad 2.  Some of the points were previously covered in other slides; others like the statistic on 65,000 iPad apps reminds the audience that contributions made to the original iPad still apply to the iPad 2.

The application of the VSNC paradigm to Jobs’s keynotes illustrates that VSNC  is a surprisingly versatile and powerful framework for both crafting and critiquing the organizational structure of presentations.

Once the content is solid, the other foundation of a great presentation is delivery and style, for which here are a few useful pointers:

• Enunciate and speak slowly.  Unbridled enthusiasm for your work or your idea and nervousness to finish the presentation as fast as possible can easily lead to an overly quick delivery and slurred words.  If you feel that you’re speaking at a slow and comfortable pace, slow down further to about 50% of that pace.  Speaking slowly provides a variety of benefits beyond the obvious of ensuring that your audience can understand what you’re saying; it gives you more time to choose your next words, helps slow down the pace to keep you relaxed and in control, and provides more of an opportunity for you to watch the audience’s expressions and re-adjust your presentation strategy (for example, by rewording an explanation upon detection of blank faces) as necessary.
• Train yourself to avoid sprinkling your speech with “ums” and “likes,” and replace them instead with pauses.  Either have a friend count your “ums” or “likes” or record your own presentation and count them yourself later.  While initially uncomfortable, pauses actually sound more professional and help accentuate key points that you’re trying to communicate.  Colin Firth’s Oscar-winning performance and delivery in theThe King’s Speech exemplifies how a carefully enunciated and pause-filled speech can motivate and move an audience.
• Maintain eye contact with the audience.  In particular, pick a few friendly faces from the audience that appear to be reacting to your presentation.  Their nods of approval and understanding give positive feedback and bolster your confidence during the presentation, and any confused expressions act as an indicator that you might need to slow down and re-explain a possibly tricky point.
• Don’t read directly from your slides.  Time spent on reading slides is time not spent maintaining eye contact with the audience.  Moreover, reading long sentence-like bullet points on slides conveys a lack of preparation and  reduces the incentive for the audience to actually listen to you since they can just read the text faster themselves.  A better approach is to list key, succinct points on the slides and to connect them together with your own words.  This incentivizes you to better rehearse to have fluid transitions between points and forces the audience to pay attention in order to understand the presentation.
• Move deliberately in time with your points, so that transitions in your physical stage presence correspond to transitions in your presentation.  This helps to both reduce the amount of haphazard pacing while accentuating important transitions in your presentations.  If your presentation has three points, one simple way of doing this to walk in the shape of squished baseball diamond so that you walk to a new base as you transition to each point and then walk back to home plate as you conclude.
• If your presentation involves writing on a whiteboard, make sure to write with an open body that’s perpendicular to the board rather than facing the board.  Facing the board while you write occludes the text or diagrams and increases the lag between when you’re writing (and likely speaking) and when the audience can actually read what you wrote.
• If there is Q&A at the end of the presentation, always repeat the question, possibly rephrasing in your own words.  Repeating the question ensures both a) that the audience is able to hear the question, and b) that you’ve actually heard the question correctly and don’t waste time or look silly while answering an incorrect interpretation of the quesiton.

Skills in structuring effective presentations and delivering them clearly come with practice.  Keeping vision, steps, news, and contributions in mind for any talk or presentation will make it stronger, and dissecting strong presentations and critiquing weak ones to understand how the speaker handled or mishandled each cornerstone will make your own talks better.

———-

[1] http://courses.csail.mit.edu/6.8…
[2] http://events.apple.com.edgesuit…
[3] http://www.geeksugar.com/Apple-i…

By  Megan Ingenbrandt

There’s two types of people in this world. People who are comfortable speaking in front of a crowd, and people who aren’t. Some people enjoy getting up in front of a large group of people, and other people dread it. My twin sister, Nicole, is the latter.

I’ll never forget it. We were in our high school Honors English class, and the assignment was to recite a monologue from a Shakespearean play. Alphabetically, Megan comes before Nicole, so I went before my beloved twin. I recited my speech no problem, because I enjoy speaking in front of a large group. We’ll just say I’m a big ham.

For my sister, it was a different story. She walked over to the podium, and froze. You could almost see the beads of sweat forming on her forehead. She then got visibly upset, almost to the point of tears, rushed through her speech, and quickly sat down. It was pretty obvious that Nicole hated this.

This type of reaction is normal amongst people who do not like to be the center of attention. But when you’re a leader, it comes as part of the territory.

So for those of you who hate public speaking as much as my sister, here’s a few tips to make the experience less painful.

Preparation.

Instead of stressing out about giving a presentation in front of a large group, turn that negative energy into a positive. How do you do this?

With preparation.

1. Get a good night’s sleep the night before. I know this can be hard with that nervous energy you’ve got brewing inside of you, but trust me. This works. Start your bedtime routine an hour or so earlier, unplug from your devices, and relax.
2. Eat a healthy meal beforehand. Any personal trainer will tell you, food fuels your performance. Eat a healthy and hearty meal before your speech. You’ll stay full and focused throughout the presentation. And you’ll feel a lot better than if you ate a greasy cheeseburger.
3. Don’t read your presentation, know it. A mistake a lot of speakers make it relying too much on their powerpoint. Know what points you are going to make, and where each one is in your presentation. Use a notecard if you have to, but don’t turn around too much to see what’s in the powerpoint. Know what points you’re trying to make. Then, recite them to the audience. Talk to them, not the back wall.
4. Have a back-up plan. Nothing is more upsetting than when things don’t go as planned. If you can’t prevent it, have that back-up plan ready. If possible, send your presentation to someone at the venue ahead of time, or make sure you have a backup copy on a flash drive. (Bonus points if you do both!)

Don’t forget to sure all electrical equipment you’re going to use is working. You want the audience to hear as well as see you, so make sure your mic is working properly. That should help you avoid having technical difficulties come showtime. If the equipment isn’t working, the show must go on. Speak loud enough for everyone to hear you, and don’t stress out about it.

Remember, bad things are going to happen sometimes, but that’s why you should always have a plan B.

Less is more

Speaking of having a presentation prepared, remember that less is more. “If you are doing Powerpoint, don’t just have slides crammed with text. Limit slides to a couple of bullet points, graphs, or photos that reinforce what you are saying,” says John Z. Wetzmore of Pedestrians.Org.

Practice, Practice, Practice

It’s true; practice does make perfect. Try to go through your presentation at least once a night for the week before you give your speech. The more you run through it in your mirror, or in front of a family member or friend, the more confident you will feel in front of the crowd.

Dress The Part

If you look good, you’ll feel good. That’s why you feel like a million bucks when you get a great new hair cut or cool outfit. So say it with me now: look good, feel good.

Pick out your best outfit, and work it like Beyonce. When you look the part, it will be an instant boost to your self-esteem. Then you’ll be able to get down with your bad self!

And this is where you’ll thank me for telling you to sleep well before your presentation. So if you didn’t hear me before, get your forty winks! You don’t want to look or feel tired in front of your audience. Be awake, alert, and ready to knock their socks off.

Engage Your Audience

Don’t talk at the crowd, have a conversation with them. One of the biggest tips I’ve found to make public speaking a lot easier is to get the audience to do most of the work for you. So get the conversation going! You can get them talking by asking them questions, and keeping them engaged with your enthusiasm and energy. This will loosen you up, and get them interested in what you have to say.

Act Natural

You don’t have to try to be something you aren’t. You’re up there for a reason, and that reason is you know what you’re talking about. So just be yourself. I’ll share a few tricks that have always helped me keep it real.

1. RELAX. Take a deep breath, and relax. Just re-assure yourself that you’ve got this, and you’ll do great.
2. Give yourself a pep-talk. Try Adam Grant’s method of convincing yourself that you’re excited to get in front of the crowd. This will help you give a more convincing performance. Try saying, “I’m excited,” or “I can do this.” Remember, you can do it!
3. Don’t try to be funny. The people who hired you wanted a professional, not a stand-up comic. People feel pressured to use a joke as an icebreaker, but this isn’t something you have to do. Humor is a fickle beast, and not everyone shares the same sense of it as you. Besides, if your joke bombs, it’s going to throw you off for the rest of your presentation and make you even more nervous. Play it safe and don’t do it.
4. Act the same as you would off-stage. Talk to the audience the same way you’d have a conversation with an old friend. Use the same gestures and natural, fluid body language that you would in everyday life. Don’t act nervous, even if you are. If you have to, fake it ‘til you make it.

Professional Speaker, Kim Hardy, advises, “Be completely relatable. Speak from the heart in a conversational tone. Share stories of overcoming mistakes. Allow your uniqueness to shine. Prepare, but forget being perfect.”

Don’t play hide and seek

Founder of Careeranista, Chaz Pitts-Kyser, warns speakers to get away from the podium. “Hiding yourself behind a podium makes you less engaging. Seeing that an audience is not engaged can cause even more anxiety. Let your audience see you. Walk around, if possible, to make eye contact with different people in the room. You can always walk back to the podium to look at notes.” (If you need to!)

Strike A Pose!

When all else fails, strike a “power pose.” According to Amy Cuddy, a social psychologist, your body language doesn’t just affect others’ perception of us. It may also affect the way we see ourselves.

Stand tall and proud. This confident pose can “affect testosterone and cortisol levels in the brain. It might even have an impact on our chances for success.”

Getting in front of a crowd doesn’t have to be the worst experience of your life. Just use these tips, and you’ll be a professional speaker in no time!

What are some tricks you use to make speaking in front of an audience less nerve-wracking? Leave them in the comments below!

By  Sandra Schrift

Most of us would agree that having humor in our lives increases rapport, strengthens our relationships and overcomes communication barriers. People who work in a positive, often playful environment are more likely to stay. Productivity and creativity increase while stress is reduced. We just feel better after a good laugh. Think funny!

1. Open with a humorous story. . I remember the time the lights when out and I fell off the stage. I wasn’t hurt and quickly said, Now I will take questions from the floor. I’m at my best when taking questions in the dark. Before you can be funny, you must learn to see funny. Find the humor around you, in your life every day. The lady who takes an aisle seat rather tan sit next to the window . . . doesn’t want to mess up her hair. Practice telling the story out loud, and cut out any parts that aren’t crucial. As Shakespeare so wisely said, “Brevity is the soul of wit.”

2. Use props (candy bars, hats, funny faces, etc.) Props can be used as a metaphor or an analogy for a point you are introducing. They get your creative juices working while providing an anchor for your audience to focus on.

3. Cartoons use your own or others a picture saves a 1000 words. Put cartoons on an overhead or use as part of a PowerPoint presentation.

4. Humor – should be relevant to your topic. Tom Peters said, I deeply believe in humor; not in jokes. Humor is spectacular. Humor relieves anxiety and tension, serves as outlet for hostility and anger, and provides a healthy escape from reality. It lightens heaviness related to critical illness, trauma, disfigurement, and death. It comes as no surprise that many people are utilizing humor to deal with the trying times. But is the humor timely? Is it appropriate?

Do not use ethnic, racist, political or religious jokes. Include a joke that helps bring back the attention of the audience or as a way to lighten up your remarks. We all can use a good laugh from a well timed, funny joke.

5. Self effacing humor- it is better to admit you made a mistake than to admit that you are one. One of my lines as a mother of five is: For someone who isn’t Catholic, I sure did my share for the pope! Phyllis Diller is in the Guinness Book of World Records as having the most laughs per minute. A laugh is measured by:

5 points if everyone is laughing and applauding
4 points if everyone is laughing and there’s a smattering of applause
3 points if everyone laughs but there’s no applause
2 points if some people are laughing
1 point for a titter or giggle

6.Mime- Marcel Marceau makes us laugh and moves us. Charlie Chaplin was an all time great without using the spoken word.

7.Move Your Body Try lifting your nose, look off to the side, jut out the bottom of your jaw, and notice how you become arrogant or aloof, Take a wide stance, shift your hips forward, and now you’ve just gained 50 pounds. The use of body movements will help to visually enhance your remarks.

8.Repetitive oral recitation- (repeat after me, Remember, if you can see funny, you can be funny. Repeat a particular sentence throughout your presentation to encourage audience retention.

9. Use taped music for a stretch break. Get the audience to sing a funny song. Pass out words to a song. Lighten up your attendees have some fun and your audience retention will increase. Don’t be afraid to be theatrical or silly. It’s why we pay actors the big bucks; and your audiences won’t forget you. Be outrageous. It’s the only place that isn’t crowded.

10. Group exercise a fun way to conclude your presentation is to use a group exercise. Use the football huddle to get the group to repeat a cheer or an affirmation to take some action.

By Dennis Nishi

Paul Smith had 20 minutes to sell the CEO of Procter & Gamble, and his team of managers, on new market-research techniques for which Mr. Smith’s department wanted funding. As associate director of P&G’s PG +0.05% market research, Mr. Smith had spent three weeks assembling a concise pitch with more than 30 PowerPoint slides.

On the day of the meeting, CEO A.G. Lafley entered the room, greeted everybody and turned his back to the screen. He then stared intently at Mr. Smith throughout the entire presentation, not once turning to look at a slide.

“I felt like maybe I hadn’t done a very good job because he wasn’t looking at my slides like everyone else,” says Mr. Smith, who also noticed that the other managers didn’t seem very engaged. “It didn’t occur to me until later that he did that because he was more interested in what I had to say than in what my slides looked like.”

The experience prompted Mr. Smith to alter his approach. These days, he uses far fewer slides and a lot more anecdotes, turning his presentations into stories his audience can relate to instead of lecturing them on what needs changing. As a result, Mr. Smith says, he’s subsequently had much greater success getting his ideas across. In four subsequent presentations to Mr. Lafley and his team, they’ve followed along more closely, asked more questions and given better feedback, says Mr. Smith.

Even with digital and social-media tools, employees often struggle to convey ideas to each other, to managers and to customers. That’s why companies such as FedEx, Kimberly-Clark and Microsoft are teaching executives to tell relatable stories as a way to improve workplace communication.

It’s a tool that’s more useful than PowerPoint presentations, say career experts, who note that storytelling can also be used on a day-to-day basis to sell ideas to one person or a hundred. But being an effective storyteller requires preparation.

Move beyond facts and figures, which aren’t as memorable as narratives, says Cliff Atkinson, a communications consultant from Kensington, Calif., and author of “Beyond Bullet Points.”

Many people in business think raw data is persuasive. But when you’re dealing with people from other departments and in different fields who don’t understand how you got that data, you can lose them pretty quickly.

“You have to step back and put yourself into their shoes and take them through the process of understanding,” says Mr. Atkinson. “That requires you to distill the most important facts and wrap them in an engaging story.”

Find ways to connect with your audience on an emotional level, says Mr. Atkinson. Neuroscientists have discovered that most decisions—whether people realize it or not—are informed by emotional responses. Do some legwork to find significant events in your audience’s lives or your own that you can base your story on or use to reinforce your points, he says.

This can include dropping in anecdotes about taking care of a sick family member or a memorable customer story, says Mr. Smith, now a corporate trainer and author of “Lead With a Story: A Guide to Crafting Business Narratives That Captivate, Convince, and Inspire.”

Mr. Smith’s book mentions a story told by a single mother to P&G about the trade-offs that she made to support her children. Her experiences, more than anything else that year, convinced P&G executives to lower their price on shortening.

Mr. Atkinson suggests organizing your story into three acts and starting by establishing context. You want to let your audience know who the main characters are, what the background of the story is, and what you’d like to accomplish by telling it, he says. You might open, for example, by describing a department that’s consistently failed to meet sales goals.

Move on to how your main character—you or the company—fights to resolve the conflicts that create tension in the story, Mr. Atkinson says. Success may require the main character to make additional capital investments or take on new training. Provide real-world examples and detail that can anchor the narrative, he advises.

The ending should inspire a call to action, since you are allowing the audience to draw their own conclusions about your story versus just telling them what to do. Don’t be afraid to use your own failures in support of your main points, says Mr. Smith.

Whatever you do, don’t preface your story with an apology or ask permission to tell it. Be confident that your story has enough relevance to be told and just launch into it, says Mr. Smith. Confidence and authority, he says, help to sell the idea to your audience.

A good oral presentation is well structured; this makes it easier for the listener to follow.
Basically there are three parts to a typical presentation: the beginning, middle and end or (introduction, body and conclusion). We are going to look at the content of each part individually and the language needed to express its structure and content.

The beginning of a presentation is the most important part. It is when you establish a rapport with the audience and when you have its attention. More detailed techniques are to be found later.
Get the audience’s attention and signal the beginning.

• Right. Well. OK. Erm. Let’s begin.
• Good. Fine. Great. Can we start?
• Shall we start?
• Let’s get the ball rolling.
• Let’s get down to business.

Try to get your audience involved in your talk either by asking direct or rhetorical questions. Ask for a show of hands for example in response to a question. Some of these approaches may not be appropriate in all countries. Ask yourself how things are done in your country together with regard to your own experience and adapt accordingly.

Introduce yourself
(name, position, responsibility in the company) Not only to give that important information so people can identify you but also to establish your authority on the subject and to allow the audience to see your point of view on the subject (you are a student, researcher, responsible for, director of, neophyte, layman).

• Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen, let me introduce myself.
• Good morning everyone, I’d like to start by introducing myself. My name is… I am a student at the INT where I am a doctoral candidate,
• I am X. Y. from 3 Com. I’m the manager of…
• I am a researcher from …
• I’ve been working on the subject now for X years..and I’ve had wide experience in the field of …
• Good morning, my name is Lawrence Couderc. I am a student at the INT and I would like to talk to you today about some of my findings in I study I did on

Sometimes, especially when invited to speak, the host introduces the guest, gives the same information as above and then gives the floor to the guest speaker.

• I am very pleased and proud to introduce …who is….
• He/she is known for…
• Now I’ll turn the floor over to today’s speaker. (take the floor, to have the floor, to give the floor to someone.)

In English-speaking countries it is not uncommon that the speaker begin with a joke, an anecdote, a surprising statement to get the audience’s attention, to make people want to listen, to feel relaxed and even to introduce the subject.
An illustration from real life can be useful here as this may be a way to present information in such a way that the audience can identify with.

Give title and introduce subject

What exactly are you going to speak about?
Situate the subject in time and place, in relation to the audience, the importance. Give a rough idea or a working definition of the subject.

• I plan to speak about…
• Today I’m going to talk about…
• The subject of my presentation is…
• The theme of my talk is… I’ve been asked to talk to you about…

A cultural aspect may be important here; scientists want to demonstrate their work and findings while managers and humanities people want to share ideas and reflections with their audience. It may be the result of a desire to persuade and convince. It may be comparison of two or more products, plans or proposals. Why are you going to speak about it?

• I have chosen to speak about this because…
• I was asked to speak about X because…

Have you set any limits on the scope of your talk? What won’t you speak about? It may be very useful to eliminate certain areas before you start so as to avoid confusion or deviation from your main task. It also protects you from criticism later if do not mention it in advance.

Have you limited the time? It is useful to give the listeners some idea of the time so as to maintain their attention better.

• I will not speak about…
• I have limited my speech to
• I will speak for 15 minutes
• My talk will last about 15 minutes

You may want to give acknowledgements here too. If you have been sponsored, supported or encouraged by a particular firm, organization, professor, etc. you may want to acknowledge their contribution. Your research and paper may have been the work of a collaborative effort and you should acknowledge this too and give the names of all the participants. At some point you should ask a question or somehow try to determine where the audience is. How do they feel about the subject? You will then have to modify the contents, as you never know exactly what to expect.

• Have you ever heard of …?
• Every day you encounter.

To get the audience’s attention and perhaps to find out where they are you could introduce the subject by saying:

• Have you ever heard of/seen X?
• You’ve probably seen countless times…
  You may have wondered…

Give your objectives (purpose, aim, goals)

The main purpose of an informative speech is to have the audience understand and remember a certain amount of information. You should thus have two purposes: a general purpose and a specific one. The former is to inform: to give an overview, to present, to summarize, to outline; to discuss the current situation or to explain how to do something or how something is done. The latter is what you want the audience to take away with them after listening to you, what you want them to do, what they should remember.

• My purpose in doing this paper is to give you a solid background on the subject of oral presentation so that in the future, at the INT or elsewhere you can deliver a successful speech in front of a group.
• What I would like to do today is to explain…
• to illustrate…
• to give a general overview of…
• to outline…
• to have a look at…
• What I want my listeners to get out of my speech is…

Once you have established your specific objectives you may go on to formulate your content.

Announce your outline.
You want to keep the outline simple so 2 or 3 main points are usually enough. Concerning grammar the headings of the outline should be of the same grammatical form.

• I have broken my speech down/up into X parts.
• I have divided my presentation (up) into Y parts.
• In the first part I give a few basic definitions. In the next section I will explain In part three, I am going to show…
• In the last place I would like/want to give a practical example…

Questions and comments from the audience.
You should also let the audience know at some point in the introduction when they may or may not ask questions.

• I’d ask you to save your questions for the end.
• There will be plenty of time at the end of my speech for questions and discussion.
• You may interrupt me at any moment to ask questions or make comments

No one wants to be that guy, the one whose captive audience spends the majority of the meeting sighing and staring their smartphones. We all know that guy, and chances are we’ve been him, too. How can anyone be expected to pay attention while Mr. Monotone drones on? Fortunately, you can avoid the mistakes that are costing you the attention of your audience—once you know what to look for.

At the root of a dull and dreary presentation is a lack of contrast. The contrast I’m talking about is a multi-dimensional technique that can easily apply to every aspect of your presentation.

Why does contrast work? Because, as humans, we are naturally drawn to it. Everything about life is filled with contrast—black and white, male and female, love and hate.

Here are some common mistakes people make around contrast.

Mistake: No contrast
A skilled communicator captures an audience’s interest by creating tension between contrasting elements—and then provides relief by resolving that tension. This is the foundation of an interesting and compelling message. You need to deliberately set different ideas or thoughts in opposition to one another in order to create interest. For example, some common presentation structures that have contrast intrinsically built into them include: problem-solution, cause-effect, compare-contrast, and advantage-disadvantage. Using one or more of those structures to present your message will instantly make it more engaging.

Mistake: Lack of opposing energies within your message

Moving back and forth between contradictory ideas encourages full engagement from the audience. Don’t let them get too comfortable in one place before you jolt them to the other side. It really boils down to the fact that every great speaker describes “what is” and then contrasts it with “what could be.” Communicating an idea juxtaposed with its polar opposite creates energy. To the audience, this movement feels natural and actually propels your presentation forward.

You might think that this only applies to explaining what the world looks like today (or historically) versus what it could be tomorrow. That’s the most obvious type of contrast. But it could also be “what the customer is like without your product” versus “what the customer could be with your product.” Or “what the world looks like from an alternate point of view” versus “what the world looks like from your point of view.” Basically, the gap is any type of contrast between where the audience currently is and where they could be once they know your perspective.

Mistake: Not emphasizing the contrast that already exists

If you already have contrasting elements in your message, think about ways to amplify and expand on the existing differences between them. Make the most of these inherent contrasts by describing them in vivid detail. Don’t gloss over differences. Then be sure to intentionally structure your presentation around that contrast, alternating between one side and the other.

Here’s a list of common contrast elements that you could incorporate into your next presentation.

But we’re just getting started on how to effectively use contrast to be a compelling communicator and avoid the boredom trap. Stay tuned for more posts on how to avoid the presentation mistakes you might be making. Your audience will thank you.

Do you get the feeling that people aren’t connecting with your message on a personal level? Maybe you put a lot of time and hard work into your presentations, only to receive blank stares from a tuned-out audience.

Here’s my secret: The easiest way to get your audience to care is to add elements of emotional contrast. Emotions have a tendency to pique our interest, and incorporating both positive and negative emotions into a presentation can transform a stagnant message into something stimulating. Here are some common mistakes people make when it comes to emotional content in presentations.

Mistake: Leaving out the human connection

Are you making an effort to add genuine feeling to your talks? An audience that doesn’t have any emotional attachment to a message will become disconnected, distracted, and, worst of all, bored. Evoking laughter, gasps of awe or fear, concerned looks, and even applause throughout your talk are all signals that you’ve triggered an emotional reaction in your audience. Audiences love these moments, but they require some additional effort from the presenter to both dream up and execute.

Mistake: Information is not enhanced with emotional appeal

The majority of presentations are purely analytical. They offer information but no human connection. The goal is to mix analytical content with emotional content, which creates contrast and therefore creates interest. Look at any of the analytical topics from the below list. By themselves, they don’t have any emotional charge to them—neither pain nor pleasure. Yet, they could all be presented in an emotional way.

For example, you could say that an acquisition took place. But that fact is neutral until you tell the story of the struggle it took to acquire the company or the heroics displayed by both parties to expedite it. Data is purely analytical until you explain why it matters.

Which type of content below do you tend to incorporate more into your presentations? How could you add an emotional element to it?

Mistake: Not building anticipation and emotional peaks

The best moviemakers in the industry understand that emotion is the secret to making sure audiences don’t get bored. In film, emotion is measured beats. Beats are the smallest structural element in a movie; there can be several in one scene. In fact, scenes are analyzed to make sure there is a shift of emotion in every single one. Screenwriters carefully ensure that the emotions are moving between pain and pleasure so that the audience remains engaged. Moving back and forth between analytical and emotional content works for presentation audiences as well. You should deliberately build emotional peaks in your talk, taking your listeners on a journey of tension and release.

Remember, contrast is critical for keeping the audience interested. You don’t need to get rid of your data-rich graphs or statistics, just find ways to sprinkle in some humor, suspense, or story. Inventory your slides, identify any content that can be transformed from analytical to emotional, and change it wherever appropriate.

Involving your listeners emotionally helps them form a relationship with you and your message. Your audience will thank you with their laughter, tears, applause, and attention.

By Michelle Mazur

“You can speaking on anything you like. I’m sure whatever you come up with will be great.” These words give you absolute freedom to say whatever you want. With absolute freedom comes absolute terror because now you have unlimited speaking topics!

Ahhhh! What’s a speaker to do?

Before I launch in, this post is meant for aspiring speakers, Toastmasters and students, those who have no clue what topic to choose for their next speech. It’s also for anyone looking for their next big speech idea.  I’ve been asked this question a lot lately via email – “How do I choose a good speech topic?”  I’ve even been asked, “What’s the best speech topic?”

There is no best speech topic

Just like Sasquatch, zombies, Dracula and unfortunately unicorns, there is no mythical, guaranteed to be amazing, speech topic.
The perfect speech topic doesn’t exist and neither do unicorns

There is no one subject that is going to interest every audience at every event. Selecting a topic is a personal journey. It’s where you, your audience and your knowledge matter. Let’s break down the process of finding the best speech topic when you are given the gift of choosing any topic you’d like.

Step 1: Who’s in your audience?

The person who booked you for the gig says you can speak about whatever you like. The next question out of your mouth needs to be, “Tell me who is showing up for this event?” You need to get as much information as you can about your audience – demographics, beliefs, attitudes, challenges, hobbies. Find out what other speakers have discussed. The more you know, the more likely you will find a topic that resonates with your audience.

The topic you select is to benefit them and provide value. Remember, content is key to creating presentations that audiences love.

Step 2: What do you know about?

You should not pick a blogging niche that you know nothing about and you shouldn’t pick a speech topic that you have no experience with. Develop a list of your expertise. Write down everything you know about with no judgment about its value to your audience. Here’s my list:

• Duran Duran
• London
• Zombies
• Cats
• Market Research
• Persuasion
• Twitter
• Blogging
• Surviving graduate school
• Loss and grief
• Loneliness

I wrote that in less than 30 seconds – just list it. I’m not saying every audience I speak in front of wants to hear about Duran Duran – but heck, I’m super knowledgeable about it (don’t judge my love of ’80s super-groups).

Step 3: What do you love?

You’ve written down everything you know about.  Now look through that list and circle the topics you feel passionate about – the ones where your knowledge and enthusiasm collide like an atom circling a super conductor. Don’t circle a topic because you think your audience might like it – this right now is about you coming up with options. What do you feel most passionate about?

Step 4: Choose the best topic for the audience and event

You understand your audience, you know what you know and appreciate what you love. Look at the topics you circled. Find the topic that best serves your audience. This is the sweet spot. This is the topic you should speak about.

Need more help picking just the right speech topic for yourself and your audience? Here’s a great resource from 6 Minutes on the secret to choosing a great topic.

Now, your job is – not to write the speech yet. You need to develop your BIG IDEA statement first! I’ll discuss exactly how I to do that in next’s week blog.

What topics do you like to speak about? Leave your topic ideas in the comment section.  Can’t wait to read them!

By David Zielinski

Just because you are a good speaker doesn’t mean you are a good speechwriter. The advent of PowerPoint software has made the fully scripted paragraph an endangered species, replacing it with bulleted lists, catchy headlines and whiz-bang special effects. But good writing remains at the heart of good speechmaking, particularly when the intent is to inspire or motivate audiences. If you’re among the fortunate few, you may have staff speechwriters or communications experts to help you craft that spellbinding speech. But most of us aren’t that lucky, which means having to face down the terror of the blank computer screen on our own.

So what’s the key to writing a memorable speech that doesn’t lean heavily on PowerPoint for speaker support? We talked to some of the best speechwriters in the business – who between them have written speeches for U.S. presidents, cabinet members and CEOs of some of the world’s largest companies – about what it takes to write a speech that is music to the audience’s ears.

The Research Process
One thing these pros agree on is this: A speech is only as good as the quality of research and reflection put into it. To that end, Ken Askew, a freelance speechwriter who has written speeches for luminaries like President George H. W. Bush and Lee Iacocca, is constantly on the prowl for ideas to use in speeches, whether his writing assignment is next week or next year.

Askew’s low-tech idea file consists of a large box into which he throws notes jotted on napkins, offbeat news stories emblematic of broader trends, intriguing studies or statistics and clever advertisements. This work usually pays off handsomely down the road. For example, he stumbled across a statistic mentioning the highway with the lowest average speed in the world: the Autobahn in Germany, which most would associate with having the fastest speed. Although people sometimes drive at speeds exceeding 150 mph, when there is an accident on the Autobahn – of which there are many – traffic is backed up and idling for hours, making for the lowest average speed.

“I tore that out and threw it in a box, thinking I might be able to use it down the road for a speech on the necessity of regulation,” Askew says. “Good speechwriters need to be idea sponges. You can’t be too critical when you spot something interesting. If it hooks your imagination, there’s a reason for it, and who knows how you might be able to apply it in the future.”

Hal Gordon, a former speechwriter for Colin Powell and the Reagan White House, is of the same mind regarding research. “Always collect more information than you can possibly use,” Gordon says. “It’s far better to have a mass of information and try to boil it down to 30 minutes than to not have enough and figure out how to pad the speech. If you have more information than you can use, then it follows that you are selecting the very best of that material.”

Culling only the best data, anecdotes or humor – using only one sparkling example to support a point when you’re tempted to use two, for example – is a key to brevity, the hallmark of good speeches. “Have you ever heard a speech that was too short?” asks Jane Tully, president of New York-based Tully Communications, an executive speechwriting company, in an article written for her web site. “I doubt it. But we’ve all squirmed through presentations that droned on well beyond the allotted time – and our most vivid memories of those occasions have little to do with the speaker’s message.”

If you want audiences to stay on the edge of their seats, says Tully, take a hint from mystery writer Elmore Leonard, known for his spare but gripping prose. How does he do it? According to Leonard, “I leave out the parts people skip.”

One Word After Another
While elite speechwriters have varied writing habits, there is a recurring theme: Most suggest getting your core thoughts and ideas down in some form before putting your critic’s hat on. The key is not to edit yourself too early in the process, lest you get stuck at the starting gate.

Askew writes his first drafts in the form of a relational database. Basic ideas and concepts are written on large Post-It notes, placed on a whiteboard and then connected with circles or lines. “I move the Post-its around as I think through the speech,” Askew says. “I always include far more than I can fit in a speech by design, which makes editing a challenge. I usually end up pulling about 80 percent of the notes off the board.”

Like many professional speechwriters, Askew often squirms when asked by clients to provide an outline before writing a speech. He prefers to write a one-page speech summary, what’s known in the field as a “destination” document. “It communicates the gestalt of the main point, the feel, tone and what it is you are trying to achieve with the speech, or the central metaphor you want to use,” Askew says.

David Green, president of Uncommon Knowledge, an executive speechwriting firm in Haworth, New Jersey, compares a client asking a speechwriter for an outline to a book publisher requesting a detailed roadmap from a novelist. “Novelists I talk to often say they start out intending for their story to go in one direction, but their characters wouldn’t let them go there, so they had to go a different way,” says Green. “In the course of writing a speech, I often take it in directions I didn’t expect.”

Although many professionals opt for a more free-flowing, stream-of-consciousness approach in writing a first draft, some won’t move forward until they’ve honed their first page or two to near perfection. Capture the audience early, this thinking goes, or prepare to lose them quickly.

“I am tortuous about the first page, super tortuous about the first paragraph and insanely tortuous about the first sentence or two of every speech I write,” says Askew.

Green prefers to write out an entire speech, then reduce it to a series of talking points. He takes a cue from speech coaches, who believe speakers should start by creating six or so summary-type sentences – essentially one-liners – each with a compelling central point and story. Those statements can then be threaded together into a 30-minute speech. “Good speakers are good storytellers, and that doesn’t just mean having good stories or anecdotes,” Green says. “It also means having a rhythm and sense of pace in the presentation, all of which comes from good writing.”

When crafting speeches for executive clients, Marilynn Mobley, a senior vice president for Edelman, a public relations firm in Atlanta, also writes out her entire script word for word before creating summary statements. “The benefit is it allows the speaker to see the whole rhythm of the speech and the flow of it,” Mobley says. “That overview helps the speaker use the bullet points to better capture the intended pacing and timing.”

Mobley uses a color-coding method to help ensure she has the right mix of content in her speeches. Once she finishes an early draft, she marks each line with a different colored marker – red might be for facts and figures, green for anecdotes, and yellow for humor. She then spreads out the whole speech on the floor or tapes it to a wall to allow her to scan for wide swatches of red, green or yellow. “I’m not necessarily looking to achieve equal balance between the different types of information, but rather to determine whether I am going a long time just providing data or humor, for example,” Mobley says. “I might rearrange some things, add in some more humor, look for other ways to explain data.”

Don’t think the terror of confronting a blank computer screen is limited to amateur or part-time speechwriters, says Green. Even veterans like himself experience writers’ block. One key to overcoming it, he believes, is to simply get started, letting the first draft “pour out like cheap champagne” without being overly critical of what’s appearing on screen. “When I first began writing, I had to make every sentence perfect before moving on to the next,” he says. “It took me years to be able to write in a more organic, freestyle method.” If a thought or idea occurs to you, Green suggests getting it up on the screen somewhere, even partially formed, with the knowledge that it will eventually get incorporated and revised in a way that makes sense.

Green also believes a change of scenery can do wonders for freeing up mental log-jams. “When I worked for an advertising agency in New York City, New York, I used to tell my boss, ‘you should pay me to walk back and forth from the subway to the office, because that’s where some of my best ideas come from.’”

Writing for the Ear
Mobley believes one of the biggest mistakes that novice speechwriters make is writing for the eye rather than the ear. She suggests reading out loud everything you write, since it not only helps refine rhythm but can unearth hidden problems. Mobley, for example, once wrote a speech that used the phrase “in an ironic twist.” Upon speaking the line, however, she found it something of a tongue twister. “On paper it looked fine, but once I tried saying it, it was a different story, so I dropped it rather than risk stumbling over it.”

In a blog written for the web site of Ragan Communications, Gordon stressed the importance of drawing pictures with your words. “The ear processes words more slowly than the eye,” he says. “Accordingly, drawing a picture with words will often help the audience grasp the message that the speaker is trying to convey.” For example, Gordon cites a famous remark associated with President Franklin Roosevelt: “I hate war.” While the quotation is accurate, it has diminished impact as a sound bite removed from its context. Roosevelt’s full statement read this way:

“I have seen war. I have seen war on land and sea. I have seen blood running from the wounded. I have seen men coughing out their gassed lungs. I have seen the dead in the mud. I have seen cities destroyed. I have seen children starving. I have seen the agony of mothers and wives. I hate war.”

Says Gordon: “Simply saying ‘I hate war’ would have only been a catch phrase. After the word picture Roosevelt drew from his own experience, no one could doubt that his assertion, ‘I hate war,’ came from the depths of his heart.”

Writing for the ear means capturing the way audiences speak, not how they write, Mobley stresses. In everyday conversation, people typically use contractions; when they write they usually don’t. “Using contractions may not be proper writing, but it is plain speaking,” Mobley says. “We should write like we speak.”

The key, says Laura Lee, president of OverViews, an executive speechwriting company near Detroit, Michigan, is not to “create grandiloquent rhetoric, but to express your own personality, passions and perspectives in ways that those who know you best will say, ‘Yes, that’s him.’”

Avoiding the PowerPoint Trap
It’s easy to fall into the trap of using PowerPoint, the omnipresent and user-friendly presentation design software, in a way many speakers do today: with bulleted lists and text-heavy slides serving as the centerpiece of a presentation. Yet because that’s what many audiences have come to expect – speakers leaning heavily on PowerPoint as a crutch by “reading from the screen” – it also represents a missed opportunity. Green, for one, promotes more creative uses of speaker support as a way to help his clients’ messages stand out from the pack.

In one 40-slide speech Green developed for a client on the value of innovation, some 60 percent of the slides featured one-liners making a provocative statement or question, and the rest contained optical illusions that enforced the idea of looking at things from different perspectives. “It allowed the speaker to create a break in the flow of his comments and create a sense of ‘chapters’ by having these interesting visuals,” says Green.

In another speech, Green’s mission was to highlight the difference between simplicity and complexity in product features. Rather than spelling out the distinction in a series of snooze-inducing bullet points, Green used the paintings of Jackson Pollack to represent complexity and those of Mark Rothko to represent simplicity. “You want your audience to have some kind of takeaway, and they’re not going to be able to take away an entire 30-minute speech,” Green says. “What they’re most likely to take away is one or two compelling ideas or good lines.”

In the Summer 2007 issue of the Claremont Review of Books, Diana Schaub, chairman of the political science department at Loyola College in Maryland, argued that use of bullet points has undermined the quality of speechmaking in the U.S. “Hierarchy may be antithetical to democracy, but it is essential to logic,” she wrote. “The replacement of paragraphs with bullet points indicates the democratization of logic. But the equality of all sentences destroys the connectedness of thought. The scattershot technique of contemporary speechmaking can bowl you over if the speaker has sufficient force of personality, but it can’t pierce your mind or heart, and it certainly can’t do it as written rather than spoken.”

Adds Mobley to the debate over the much-used software: “There’s a reason you never see PowerPoint used during a eulogy.”

The Golden Rule
Whatever process you choose to research, write or revise a speech, it pays to remember a golden rule of speechwriting: Audiences don’t want to know how much you know, they want to know what they can do with the knowledge you’ve accumulated.

“The really great writers and speakers give us insight, not just ideas,” says Mobley. “A good idea makes the audience say, ‘I never thought of that.’ But insight makes them say, I never thought of it that way.’”

Dave Zielinski is a freelance writer who divides his time between Wisconsin and South Carolina.

3 Rules for Capturing Audience Interest

David Green, president of Uncommon Knowledge, an executive speechwriting company in New Jersey, offers three rules for virtually any speaking challenge – rules he says will help any audience sit up and take notice, for the right reasons.

Rule 1: Counter-program
The audience has expectations. If they’ve heard you before, they think they know what to expect. If they haven’t heard you, they group you with other keynoters or speakers they’ve heard from your industry. Green says you have to break through their preconceptions. If everyone else is using text-heavy PowerPoint support, consider using dramatic photos. If everyone else is forecasting the future of your industry, focus on eye-opening lessons from the past. If your public persona is fire-breathing, use a more “fireside” style.

Rule 2: Speaker support should only support
You’ve seen them all. Text-flooded PowerPoint slides that look like pages of a book. Charts dense with information, with typeface reduced to barely readable size so it all fits on a slide.

Every time a new slide comes up, the audience stops listening to the speaker while reading the slide. Then there are those presenters who speak straight from their slides, adding few ad-libs or spontaneous thoughts.

People can either read the slides or listen to the speaker, but they cannot do both simultaneously. If you are simply parroting your slides, you’ve essentially made yourself superfluous, maybe even a nuisance. Hal Gordon, a former speechwriter for U.S. General Colin Powell, recounts the story of Jack Welch, former CEO of General Electric, attending a PowerPoint presentation given by a GE staff member. The speaker was reading directly from each slide, and finally Welch, fed up, called out, “Look, I can read as well as you can. If this is your presentation, why don’t you just hand me your slides and we can be done with it.”

If you must use PowerPoint, use it as an outline only to prompt your memory and give your audience a roadmap. After all, it’s not your software giving the speech – it’s you!

Rule 3: Play the Audience
A speech is live theater. You don’t have to entertain, but you do have to tell a compelling story. The audience is not out to get you…usually. But they won’t hang on your every word either, unless you lure them in.

So know your audience – and your speaking environment. The audience will expect something different from you as a conference keynote speaker than if you are leading a panel or having a face-to-face discussion with them. Then use your best sense of what they want from you – and give them something more, or something different, or something that bends their perspective.