Part 1. Listen to the introductions from three different presentations and complete the table

PROFESSIONAL PRESENTATIONS

UNIT 1

PLANNING AND GETTING STARTED

“The human brains starts working the moment we are born and never stops until you stand up to speak in public”

George Jessel

Presentation technique and preparation

Exercise 1

This article, from Financial Times, is about presentation technique. Scan the text to identify seven examples of bad technique and five characteristics of good technique. You do not have to read the article in detail or understand every word to do this.

When incompetence is “tantamount to fraud^*”

by John Kirkman

Not long ago, I went to a two-day conference. The fee, travel, and hotel accommodation cost nearly $300.

The conference offered 20 papers. Of those, nine were rendered partly or wholly incomprehensible by poor design or inept^** handling of visual aids. Of the 20 speakers, 12 overran their allotted^*** time, so the programme on both days fell behind schedule. To cope with this, the chairpersons asked some speakers to cut short their planned presentations. They did.

Incompetent presentation is tantamount to fraud. Here are extracts from my notes on that conference.

Speaker 1got slides out of sequence with talk, distractingly putting them up before she reached the relevant point in her script. Read inexorably through the script, stumbling over written word-clusters she could not articulate.

Speaker 2put up transparencies on overhead projector, with comments: “You won’t be able to read these.” Correct! Had an electronic watch that bleeped at 15 minutes, commented that the beep meant time was up; went on speaking. Overran by 10 per cent.

Speaker 3used first five allocated 15 minutes to tell an anecdote relevant to talk. Overran by 27 per cent.

Speaker 4was warned twice by the chair about time to stop; so he spoke twice as fast to try to finish with slides whistling to and fro at a rate that made reading impossible. He confused himself as well as us by putting a slide that “should not have been here”. Overran by almost a third.

Speakers 2, 3 and 4 all began by stressing what they could not do in 15 minutes, thereby reducing substantially what they could do.

Things got worse. One speaker began by belittling himself and insulting us: “I will just put up this slide to keep you occupied while I go through boring facts.” He offered an example, but could not find it: “I have some figures somewhere … (fumbled in notes) … but I can’t find them, never mind.”

Day two brought no relief. We were offered overhead transparencies made by photocopying A4 pages in a small typeface. One illustration, 11 columns – five rows of figures - was put up with no comments other than: “There are the figures.” I was sitting about halfway back, 50-60 feet from the screen. The figures were utterly unreadable.

One speaker’s monotonal mumble defeated even the halter microphone he was asked to wear because we could not hear him.

Another speaker did not know whether or not he had a slide to illustrate his point: “I think we have a slide for this. It is slide 6. Oh, no. sorry. Well, we will go on.” How we supposed to follow, if he himself was lost?

My notes have favourable comments on only three speakers, and those notes make an important point: the value of being simply competent. My comments on speaker eight illustrate that point: “Vigorous, organised, enthusiastic, clear. Content not new or exciting, but mere competence of presentation made it seems easily the best so far.”

I knew before I went to the conference that the presenters were not professional lecturers, so was I expected too much? I was not looking for outstanding oratory, merely for competent presentation, constructed for the period allocated, and delivered with simple clarity.

It is possible to learn to be a competent speaker. Competence (not brilliance) rests more on acquired skills than on inherited flair. But most presenters at this conference had made little effort to learn how to protect their own reputations and those of their employers.

The Financial Times

Vocabulary notes

*tantamount to fraud = almost the same as dishonestly taking someone’s money

** inept = incapable, amateurish

*** allotted = made available, given

Exercise 2

What are the key considerations involved in preparing a presentation?

Exercise 3

Part 1. Listen to the introductions from three different presentations and complete the table

Date: 2016-04-22; view: 1669