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Need presentation advice!
Chris Kresser | Mar 27 2008
I'm giving a two-hour seminar to a mixed audience of faculty, medical professionals, students and the general public at my graduate school in a couple of months. The title of the presentation is "The Truth About Cholesterol: Separating Fact from Fiction". Because of the varied nature of the audience, I will be expected to present a fair amount of data - but to do it in such a way that the layperson with no scientific training could understand. I'm following the format outlined in Presentation Zen (i.e. minimizing text, simplifying charts & graphs and relying heavily on stock imagery) and that is working well for me. I recently bought Beyond Bullet Points and have been trying to integrate some of Cliff's story structure ideas, but I'm having a hard time with that. I have some questions I'm hoping the hive mind can help me with. 1) How can I keep people engaged and interested throughout such a long presentation - and still get through the considerable amount of material I need to present? 2) What is your opinion about the BBP suggestion to use full sentence headlines on every slide? I'm finding that a bit limiting and repetitive visually. 3) Along the same lines, I'm having a hard time organizing my presentation in the rigorous way suggested in BBP, i.e. with everything in groups of three. My mind just doesn't work that way, and there's something about the hierarchical structure that feels stale to me. On the other hand, I understand the necessity of structuring the information in a way that is meaningful for the audience. Do you have any suggestions for alternative methods of structuring content? Thanks for your help. Chris 4 Comments
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 Talk with them...Submitted by Aisyah on March 28, 2008 - 11:08pm.
Two hours is quite a long talk. To keep audience's attention, I suggest that you introduce dialogues intermittently in your talk. At certain points of your presentation, before you introduce your story about something - do take time to find out the relevant ideas from the audience e.g. their assumptions, views, fears or perhaps things they have done so far to reduce their cholesterol levels. That'll help the audience to warm up to you and that helps keep their interests (as they probably want to find out more from you). I also find that students' attention starts to wane after 30 mins or so into my lecture. Thus, I usually end my lecture earlier than the allocated lecture time. So, perhaps you could break your presentation into two parts, request from the organiser some sort of refreshments. You could use the tea break to mingle and find out from the audience their views about your talk and what they'd probably want to know more. Then, you could change a bit of your story accordingly to accommodate these comments/views. In a sense, giving a presentation is similar to jazz - play it by ear. That'll make your presentation effective & memorable:-) For more about keeping your audience engaged, search Garr's PZ gold mine for story or storytelling. Here's one link about 'talking with them': http://www.presentationzen.com/presentationzen/2005/12/talking_at_them.html. All the best:-)!! » POSTED IN:
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