Last week, we all delivered our short presentations. Some were really good, others needed some work. But the topic and the content had very little to do with it; what mattered was the presentation itself, the way in which the content was delivered. This is a hard truth for a scientist, to whom what matters are numbers and facts, the truth. To have to wrap it up in color paper and perfume seems to diminish it to marketing. But we saw how decisive it is, testifying to the importance of this course. Here are the two noticeable mistakes I think we (myself included) often made:
No Obvious Structure:
Having a clear, organized structure is essential for good understanding. If information is thrown at us without an obvious structure, we won’t connect the dots (interesting article about that), which is what understanding is. Understanding, in turn, is necessary for the internalization of information, for memorization.
The reason, I think, why so many presentations don’t have a clear structure is that when the speaker is the author of the speech, they know exactly what they’re talking about (or at least let’s hope they do) and therefore don’t feel the need to make extra clear where in their speech they are or why they are even talking about something.
To make sure that the audience is onboard and that they don’t have to guess where the presentation is going, it is perhaps useful to break it up into parts and give a quick outline in the beginning. When the speech actually comes to the break, pause for a second and introduce the next part. A good way to do this is with a question, which immediately communicates the relevance of the following section (to answer the question). Exampel of this is in the video below (go to 2:52):
Memorizing the speech word by word:
We talked about this in class. On one side of the spectrum is rigid memorization, on the other not being prepared at all. The aim, I suppose, is to be somewhere in the middle, where you have some bullet points in your mind and then talk more or less freely, making progress from one to the other. This is how we talk in real life conversations, and that’s exactly the point: to make the talk seem like… well, a talk. In our class though, many presentations were very rigid, with no room for error and improvisation. That offers some sort of comfort I suppose, but it doesn’t feel authentic. Moreover, memorizing a sequence of words makes it very hard to recover after being distracted and losing the thread.
I’m no authority here, I know my presentation was average at best. But still, the success of a presentation is measured by the impression it leaves on the audience and so every member of the audience is a competent judge.
Jan Jenko