Speaking

We have a special page for doing oral presentations because some students find these challenging. This page is longer than usual.

Content: what the presentation should successfully communicate:
The purpose of a presentation is to communicate your critical understanding of the topic and material. Just what needs to be communicated will depend on the assignment.

Manner: how the presentation will succeed in communicating:
Minimize the perceived effort of listening – create a situation where the listener readily pays attention to you, the speaker, and readily understands you. The task of the speaker is to get the listener to attend to the message and then deliver it to the listener as simply as is consistent with the message.

Listener’s attention
During a presentation, there are many demands for the listener’s attention. Some of these are generated by the speaker but many are not. In addition some of the demands for attention generated by the speaker may not relate to the message. A speaker who walks around a great deal can be quite distracting for an audience – this diverts attention away from the message. However, an animated face and hands are often a great help in holding a listener’s attention.

When you are making a presentation, you can hope to have access to about 30% of a listener’s attention. For this reason, you need to do two types of thing.

1. First you need to take whatever steps you can to obtain as much attention as possible.
   A pleasing, relaxed but thoughtful style of delivery is required to get good attention. Think David Attenborough.
   A style that appears to be attentive to the audience rather than self-conscious also helps. Think Billy Connolly.
   Looking around and engaging with people in the audience is good. Think Ross Noble.
   Looking at notes and not appearing to notice the audience is bad.
   Not hesitating, except for the benefit of the audience, is important. So, getting lost and then searching through a sheaf of notes is disastrous.
2. When appropriate you need to shift the listener’s attention.
   Moving to the screen diverts attention to the screen; turning away from the screen back to face the audience brings attention back to the speaker.
3. Then you need to ensure that the attention is not used wastefully – always keep to the point, pruning your material down to the most important and signalling to the listener when the next thing to be said is particularly important.

Listener’s comprehension
How to deliver an understandable message seems intuitively straight forward. However, there are two types of consideration that should be borne in mind. Firstly, encapsulating the message in a predictable or logically coherent narrative is a massive aid to comprehension. This places a premium on the overall structure of the presentation. Ensure there is a structure of the following basic type, based on the story of Little Red Riding Hood:

1. Beginning – to set the scene by explaining the actors (the vulnerable granny, the wicked wolf and the unknown quantity – herself) and the jeopardy
2. Ending – to settle the jeopardy (she survives, wolf doesn’t) and probably to hint at a remaining difficulty (who were those hunters and what were they doing?).
3. Middle – to take the listener along the transformation in knowledge from the beginning to the end.

This is the sequence used to prepare the talk, not to deliver it (where the end would usually come at the end). Every piece of academic work has or can be made to have this basic structure.

Your AV aids
The other aid to comprehension is the appropriate use of AV materials – normally powerpoint. Use of powerpoint seems to me to be a simple issue but one that is nearly always got wrong. It is however, difficult to get right and dangerous to get wrong. Powerpoint is quite capable of competing for the audience attention and unless strictly controlled it will win that competition. The example that is widely given is when a slide has a paragraph of text for the audience to read. Whilst the audience is reading this (and they inevitably will), the speaker could dance a tango and no-one will notice.

In one sentence, the advice is to use very sparingly. Powerpoint slides need to be constrained to be just a support to you, not a substitute. Unfortunately given half a chance they will supplant you completely.

These are the only two good reasons for using slides:

1. Communication of material in a graphical form when it is easiest to grasp in that form
2. Providing the listener with a cryptic reminder of what has just been and perhaps an indication of what is just to come. The reason for this is to allow a listener to hold in their mind a model of the temporal structure of the talk, without them having to think about it.

Both of these have in common that they reduce the effort required of the listener. Neither requires sentences.

If you are placing text on a powerpoint slide, then be aware that no-one in the audience is going to resist the temptation to read it. While they’re reading it, they’re not listening to you. So, keep it very brief. Words or phrases are better than sentences; they’re good when organized into lists of bullet points. Keep the text in a large size of typeface – that way you physically can’t get much text on a slide. Less is better.

Your notes
Having notes is important when you come to do the talk, but the process of making them beforehand is even more important. The process of making your notes is how you refine the story down to its skeletal structure. Imagine what notes on Little Red Riding Hood would look like.

Your notes need to be brief and to the point – think of them as a set of triggers words that will allow you to recall from memory anything you need. Remember that you can only afford to glance at them during your talk: not read them. Then write down things that you can take in at a glance. Reading aloud from notes in a presentation is almost never a good idea – usually it is a disastrous idea.

If your talk has several steps, then use one card to hold the notes for each step. This means that you are only looking (glancing, remember) at things that are relevant to this step in the story – the other steps aren’t going to get in the way. When you’ve finished a step in the story, discard the card – put it down – so that the little stack of cards in your hand gets comfortingly thinner as time goes by.

Practising your talk
Yes, practice your talk. But only for these two reasons. First, a practice lets you test the timing of your talk and find out whether it is too long (very, very bad) or too short (not so bad but very embarrassing). Second, a practice lets you find out which bits of your story you haven’t quite completely understood. Get a friend to note down where you hesitate during a practice run: these are the points that you haven’t completely understood and that need some more thought.

No, don’t practice your talk for any other reason. This is not like playing a piano concerto where practice makes perfect – this is where too much practice will make you sound like an automaton.

Delivering your presentation
Come the day of your presentation, there are a few things that you should do that can help very much. The most important thing you should be doing is getting your audience on your side.

If the audience are on your side, then they will be supplying you with a steady stream of positive reinforcement during your presentation. They won’t be aware of this and you won’t be directly conscious of it either – but it’s there and it is a real support. Someone in the audience nodding or smiling or even just looking at you is someone signalling that they are listening, understanding and wanting you to continue. You will respond to this without even knowing that it’s there or what it is.

So all your actions are designed to generate and use that positive feedback. Here is a random list of things you can do:

• Look and feel comfortable. Don’t dress to impress (positively or negatively).
• Be friendly. Smile, look at the audience.
• Be attentive. Let your eyes look around the audience; never look down at notes unless you have to. If there are unconscious positive signals out there for you to see and benefit from, then you need to be looking around so that your eyes can pick them up.
• Be sincere. Believe in what you’re saying: if you can’t then don’t say it.
• Be honest. If you hit a point where something doesn’t make sense, or someone asks a question you can’t answer – then just say so. For the audience this is so refreshing and welcome, that you’ll get them on your side.
• Don’t be embarrassing. Unless you really are a comedian (and most people aren’t), then don’t try to amuse.
• Don’t be distracting. Unnecessarily walking around while you’re speaking isn’t recommended; nor is answering your mobile; nor are any other things you might be tempted to do but aren’t necessary.
• Be just a bit anxious. Anxiety is perfectly normal and generally rather helpful, provided it doesn’t get out of control. If you are worried about being too anxious, then think carefully through this question. Which instructions and suggestions in this document are really beyond you? Often the answer is that all the small pieces of this are okay, but you’re worried about what happens when they all get put together. This is understandable and the best answer is to try it, treating the presentation as a sequence of steps that follow each other but focussing at any one moment on just the single present step. If you are actually very anxious (as distinct from worrying that you will be anxious), then please get in touch.