Public Speaking

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From Kristine Kathryn Rusch:

I never meant to become a public speaker, although I did train for it. I was in competitive forensics (public speaking) in 8th and 9th grade, although I transferred over the debate in high school. Even though I went to State both years (once with a poem I wrote myself), I didn’t like memorizing and declaiming. I was much more comfortable with debate—learning a topic and arguing it in front of judges.

. . . .

I learned how to speak in front of groups then because speaking in front of groups terrified me. That tends to be my M.O. If something frightens me, I confront it. If it’s a “silly” fear, like public speaking, I learn how to overcome it—enough.

(I also had a career in radio, but it doesn’t translate: what terrified me was being seen, not the speaking part.)

. . . .

One other side effect of being a “famous” author was attending a lot of banquets, many of which had speakers. I had to go to every major event in science fiction when I was the editor of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, which gave me a heck of a speech-survival instinct (still!). Back then, I could flee a room faster than anyone except Jack Williamson and Robert Silverberg at the very whiff of a bad speaker. (Oh, dear, I would say to my seatmates, I need to hit the restroom. And then I would vanish…until the speaker was done. You see, it’s not polite to return to your seat while a speech is in progress…)

I’ve given speaking a lot more thought than I usually admit. Here’s what I do.

  • I make sure I know the topic I’m asked to talk about. (You’d be surprised how many folks don’t.)
  • I make sure I’m as entertaining as I can be. Or as shocking as I can be. (Sometimes I want writers in the audience to think about what I’m discussing.)
  • I leave time for questions, because that’s often the best part of a presentation. People ask questions about things I’ve never thought of. If I don’t know the answer, I say so. If I do, I pontificate a bit. And often, I end up thinking about that topic for a while thereafter. That’s one reason why I started doing Ask Kris Anything, because I can’t travel, and I miss the questions.

Link to the rest at Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Here’s a link to Kris Rusch’s books. If you like the thoughts Kris shares, you can show your appreciation by checking out her books.

PG has also done a lot of public speaking. One of the results is that he has developed a love/hate relationship with Powerpoint.

When Powerpoint is good, it is very, very good, but when it is bad, it is horrid.

PG has a tendency to push Powerpoint toward its theoretical maximum. When he has been dealing only with Powerpoint, it generally manages not to embarrass PG by doing something different during the presentation than it was doing while PG was practicing with it in his hotel room.

PG’s worst Powerpoint disasters have occurred when he has used third-party programs or programettes to do things Powerpoint can’t do on its own. On those occasions, what looked wonderful and entertaining in his hotel room has sometimes crashed and burned when a couple of hundred people were watching it on a large screen. A general rule is that a computer takes ten times as long to reboot when other people are watching than it does when PG is the only viewer.

Yes, there are many more boring and terrible Powerpoint presentations than there are good ones. However, there are many more boring and terrible speeches without Powerpoint than there are good ones as well.

Being an expert on a topic and being able to speak in a fluent and interesting manner about that topic in front of lots of people are two different things.

For some people, the speaking part seems to come naturally, but speaking fluently is often the result of a lot of practice and spending time thinking about how the speaker’s knowledge can be communicated in an interesting fashion to an audience. If attending the presentation is like reading the book, the speaker has not succeeded.

Here are a few of PG’s don’ts for making a presentation:

  1. Don’t read your speech.
  2. Don’t avoid looking at your audience – look at individual members of the audience just as you would if you were standing or sitting in a group with them having a discussion. Human beings respond to eye contact.
  3. Don’t read your Powerpoint. The Powerpoint is for the big picture, to help provide structure and continuity for your presentation. No tiny type in your Powerpoint, either.
  4. Don’t use one of the default presentation themes that come with Powerpoint. If they don’t seem boring to you in and of themselves, they are boring for at least some members of the audience who have seen those same themes before. If you spend a little time searching online, you can find lots of free and paid themes that are better than Microsoft’s and that your audience hasn’t seen before.
  5. You don’t have to use Powerpoint. Google Slides can also provide a good presentation platform if you don’t want to pay for Powerpoint. The last time PG dug deep into Google Slides, it didn’t have as many bells and whistles as Powerpoint does, but there’s no reason you can’t prepare a creative and effective presentation with Google Slides. As with Powerpoint, look for a Google Slides theme that at least some members of the audience haven’t seen lots of times before.
  6. You don’t have to run a presentation from your laptop computer. PG can’t speak for Android, but your iPhone and your iPad can provide a platform for presenting with Powerpoint. The first step is installing a Powerpoint app, which you can find online. You will want to check your presentation thoroughly using your iPhone or iPad before showing it to others. In PG’s experience, iPhone/iPad presentations are sometimes a bit different than the same one on his laptop. Fancy transitions between slides don’t always work right. He hasn’t had any similar problems with Google Slides on a smaller device, however. Make sure your iPhone/iPad has a good battery that’s charged up and bring your plugin charger just in case.
  7. Don’t trust hotel internet connections. If you have anything in your presentation that relies on a good internet connection, have a Plan B if the connection is slow or nonexistent. Most hotels have improved their internet access greatly from the net dark ages many years ago, but a presentation that works well with a wireless signal in one room in the conference center may not work as well in a different room in the conference center. Smart presenters check the internet speed in the room where they are going to present on the day or night before their formal presentations to make certain the internet connection works well. (Even doing that is not a guarantee the internet experience will be the same the next day when 500 audience members are on the same internet connection you’re trying to use, however.) If you don’t have a reliable internet connection where you are going to present, or you’re not sure and want a Plan B, you can take screen shots of your browser and drop those into your Powerpoint to create a faux online experience. You can even click on the appropriate buttons or icons in the screenshots to move forward to the next screen shot for a more believable faux experience.
  8. You don’t need a Powerpoint to make a good presentation. People have come to see and hear you, not your Powerpoint. If all else fails, be prepared to present your thoughts effectively without a big screen. PG always has a printed version of his Powerpoint that he can use to present if the technical/internet gods are displeased with him. And don’t act like the lack of your Powerpoint is a disaster that has ruined everything. Be chipper and upbeat. Generally, the audience wants you to succeed and will appreciate your pluck for forging ahead without your electronic crutch.

9 thoughts on “Public Speaking”

  1. Power corrupts.

    PowerPoint corrupts absolutely. And then bores the audience to death.

    I say this as a highly trained and experienced military briefer, from before there was a PowerPoint (starting in the 1970s) and we had to make our slides by photocopying onto clear plastic and throw them manually on an overhead projector. When we weren’t handwriting them on the plastic sheets.

    PG’s points are good as far as they go, but they don’t reach the real reason that PowerPoint — and traditional military briefing memes — fail so badly:

    Oral communication and visual communication overlap a lot but they’re not congruent. That is, there are some things that are much better on the screen — pie charts of budget allocations, citations to specific sources of data, and so on. There are others that are better orally, such as any heading that doesn’t fit on two lines — better yet, one line — when projected at a reasonable size under varying and often unpredictable lighting conditions. (This is also a good way to avoid “reading the PowerPoint”: Don’t put the whole thing into PowerPoint in the first place!)

    The entire purpose of PowerPoint slides, and for that matter traditional military briefing slides, is to facilitate increased data retention by the audience — usually of material with which they have at least some familiarity. Whether that means “did the assigned class reading the night before,” “is an experienced executive or leader in the field being brought up to speed on the current challenge,” or something else, is for another time. PowerPoint/slide photocopies is not, and cannot, be an adequate substitute for paying attention (or, all too often, even attending!) in the first place, and trying to make them so is one of the biggest and most common errors.

    • I agree with most of your points, C., but I do have one quibble.

      The presenter is conducting oral communication and visual communication simultaneously whenever s/he is speaking to the audience. The audience is constantly albeit sometimes subconsciously, watching for visual cues from the presenter – posture, gestures, eye contact, movement, etc., etc., as part of the audience member’s assessment of the reliability of the information, the confidence of the presenter, whether the presenter is afraid of being contradicted by an audience member, etc., etc., etc.

  2. I agree with all of PG’s points and they certainly would improve a lot of presentations. The advice about connectivity is gold.

    However, there is a style of PowerPoint presentation that defies all the rules, but can work quite well under the right circumstances. This is a technique to use when you have information to deliver that the audience is well-motivated and prepared to receive. Your goal is to inform, not entertain.

    Use no background or theme. Just plain black and white or easily read color combinations. Pack slides with information– dozens of succinct bullet points, but keep the type clear and large enough to read. Include only relevant charts and graphs.

    When delivering the presentation–this is the hard part–follow the PowerPoint closely, but pay no attention to it and don’t direct your audience toward it. The presentation is coming from your mouth, not the screen.

    Tell the story to the audience, be lively. The material on the screen is back up for the audience to use, but keep it unobtrusive so it doesn’t distract from the oral presentation. Interesting, eye-catching slides are detrimental. Concentrate on delivering valuable, well-organized, and clear information orally. If the information is not valuable to your audience, leave it out and put more time into important stuff. If you don’t have important stuff to convey, what are you doing? Give yourself and the audience a break and stand down. Make the slides available as reference after the presentation.

    When done well, presentations like this can work great. The trick is not to let the slides distract from the presentation, don’t rely on them at all to convey your points. Let them serve only as complete and well-written notes.

    For this style presentation, put entertaining with PowerPoint out of your mind. Entertaining with PowerPoint is possible, but too difficult for me. The worst presentations, IMHO, occur when the screen and voice compete for attention.

  3. As a developer, I went to a lot of Microsoft conferences. Of course, one requirement of every presenter was that they come with a PowerPoint presentation (also printed in the huge three ring binder they dumped on every attendee).

    There was one presenter, who when the computer went down, and even three MicroSerfs couldn’t revive it – walked to the middle of the stage and yelled out “Free! Free at last!”

    He then went on to present an absolutely fascinating talk on how they used the software package du jour to control the logistics for the Chunnel construction.

  4. And be prepared to wing it if something goes wrong with the technology. I used to create PowerPoint a lot at my day job.

    One day, our boss asked us to combine two bar charts. We did how she thought she described it. The host site was requesting the slides so they could print them. We sent it off.

    Boss looked at slides. What we did was not what she wanted. So we fixed the slide and sent the presentation back to the host site. We told them which slide had been changed so they could print the correct one.

    Boss goes to meeting. Gets to that slide, and it’s the old version. The printed version was correct. She was a very experienced speaker and just sailed right on through to the next one. Another had the same problem and reportedly spent the entire presentation complaining.

    Meanwhile, another boss who liked to pace knocked out the power cord. A presentation takes five minutes to warm back up. He continued to give the presentation until we got the slides back up.

    Things will always happen. The key is how to handle it.

  5. “Ultimately, it’s the presenter rather than the Powerpoint that is the key.” –PG

    I gave a tech talk recently and the Powerpoint performed its bit flawlessly. I felt great about the presentation, but in the feedback survey afterward several attendees noted that I appeared tired and lackluster, and my talk suffered for it. Yup: I’d spent the entire week leading up to the talk recovering from a severe cold AND traveling on business, only getting home the night before the conference.

    Audiences can feel the energy coming (or not coming) from the speaker, and the stuff on the screen behind them isn’t nearly as important as the speaker-to-audience connection that happens (or doesn’t).

    Sigh… I’m going to retire from public speaking now.

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