I just wanted to let you know that I really enjoyed teaching this class for the first time and that your enthusiasm for the material and in your participation was a big part of that. I know that most of you will be wrapping up your coursework this summer and fall, so I hope to see you walking through your graduation ceremonies later this year.
Best of luck to all of you in your future endeavors, whether within or outside of Indiana Wesleyan University. Please feel free to continue to visit this site for some of the links to academic resources if you wish, and do not hesitate to contact me if you need anything in the future. This has been a wonderful class, and thank you for being such good students.
I noticed that some people have been clicking on the web site of the Australian Toastmasters Champion, Darren Fleming, who recently commented here on my blog. Well, he has his own blog called the Executive Speaking Weblog. If you guys are interested in further refining your public speaking skills, I think this is a good place to look for continual updates.
For example, here’s a particularly interesting article on persuasive speaking. While I doubt that our class will be as unwilling to listen to your viewpoints as a 2-year-old is unwilling to take her medicine, I think it does merit the point that there is generally a “doubting Thomas” in the crowd who needs some extra convincing (or sometimes just someone who wants to impress the rest of the audience by taking the spotlight from the speaker and trying to get one over on the speaker to show how smart he or she is). Sometimes that is just an unavoidable part of public speaking, but adept speakers can turn them around and use them for their benefit.
One of the topics that we’ll be talking about next week in class is what your next step will be to utilize the skills you’ve (hopefully) learned in class in other situations. I think that good communication and the ability to speak in front of others can help us in many situations, from job interviews to business presentations to training events. One of the places I would consider looking into would be one of the many Toastmasters organizations in the area. You might want to check with your employers, because some of the larger companies have their own speaking clubs that have been organized by employees (Lilly, Raytheon, BMG, Rolls Royce, Roche are some of those).
I don’t belong to Toastmasters, so I’m not getting a referral fee from them or anything, but they are internationally recognized as a great organization, and I think if you’re interested in furthering your education in public speaking, Toastmasters would be a great place to do so.
Just a reminder, because our course is an elective, we may have to move around the building (as we found last week). The room we met in for the first two workshops is now occupied by a core group. Last week we met upstairs in room 200. Make sure before you go to class to check with the front desk to make sure you have the correct room assignment.
Tonight should be an interesting class with a lot of speaking and make-up speeches. There will be a lot of opportunities to try different techniques “on-the-fly” as we did last week. I’m looking forward to seeing the progression throughout the night.
Additionally, here is a question to think about before class: do you think it would be effective to be videotaped so that you can see your performance as demonstrated in the Speaking Effectively video? I know that it might seem incredibly embarassing and potentially vulnerable, but I think that there could also be a great opportunity to see yourself as your audience sees you. We won’t incorporate it into this class, but it’s a technique I would like to use in the future for course development.
The cost of a poor PowerPoint presentation is staggering. Ian Parker in The New Yorker magazine states that according to Microsoft estimates, there are more than 30 million PowerPoint presentations made each day. If we assume some relatively conservative meeting parameters of four people per presentation, a half-hour presentation on average and the wasted time due to a poor presentation is one-quarter of the presentation time, we arrive at a waste of 15 million person hours per day. At an average salary of $35,000 per year for those attending the meeting, the cost of that wasted time is a staggering $252 million and change each day.
As you can see, not only do poor visual aids and PowerPoint presentations serve to confuse and bore your audience, but in a business setting they can be nonproductive and wasteful.
Despite the potentially blasphemous title of this article, I’d like to continue the theme of bad visual aids and bad PowerPoint presentations from last week with this list of 10 things to do when you present a slide show.
Speak to your audience before launching your visuals.
Keep eye contact primarily with your audience, not with your visual aids.
Avoid reading your slides or overheads to your audience, please.
Keep text to a minimum; let images and graphics illustrate and dramatize your points.
Use a font style that is simple and large enough (generally sans serif styles at least 20-24 points) to be read at a distance.
Keep the number of points to 3 - 5 per slide.
Ensure consistency of syntax on each slide (e.g., if the first bullet point starts with a verb, all subsequent bullet points should start with a verb-it’s easier to comprehend and more powerful).
Take time to introduce - and pause to allow the audience time to absorb - any - complex information (e.g., from a graph or chart).
Put your slide titles to work: they should help deliver the message not merely give a name to the slide.
Turn off the projector or overhead to focus attention and re-claim the spotlight.
I think this is one of those moments where I can safely say that we are ALL learning in this class, myself included.
One of the topics we discussed on Wednesday was what the different types of learners get out of visual aids. Here is a quote from this article on bad PowerPoint presentation:
Remember, people process information in many ways. Some learn visually, others learn by listening, and the kinesthetic types prefer to learn through movement. It’s best to provide something for everyone. Let’s be very clear. Visual learners do not learn from bullet points alone; they learn from pictures, graphs, and images. Auditory learners do not learn from listening to sound effects like bells ringing and typewriters clacking. Instead, they learn from listening to an engaging speaker whose voice is powerful and who captivates their curiosity. And, kinesthetic learners do not learn from the movement of words on a slide. They learn from doing, touching, and moving around. They like to be involved and participate.
It is unfortunate that PowerPoint is designed with all these “bells and whistles” that obstruct communication, because the tendency and desire for many communicators is to put as many of these animations and effects into a presentation as possible. They tend to distract from the message, and at times can put off an audience completely. What we tend to forget as speakers is that it is not a fancy PowerPoint presentation or a flashy visual aid that will engage our audience, but our own ability to communicate our message to them in a way that interests and involves our audience.
I think we had a really good workshop last night, and while half the class was missing, I think it gave the opportunity for some good one-on-one discussions on improving public speaking skills. Hopefully, you will be able to utilize some of the practice techniques on your own this week to help you build your confidence and start gaining the habits that you’re looking to acquire.
We talked so much last night about bad visual aids and bad PowerPoint presentations that I thought I would do a little research today about the subject. As I mentioned last night, I’m interested too, now that I know that I officially have been declared a “bad” PowerPoint user as well. Just doing a web search netted me about 9,000,000 links, so there is obviously some sort of trend out there that others have noticed.
There is a lot of helpful information on making presentations on Lenny Laskowski’s web site, including some topics that we’ll be discussing tomorrow night and in future workshops:
Since I cut the video short by a few minutes last night, I found the full version of “I Have a Dream” on YouTube.
I thought class went well last night. Everyone will get two speaking opportunities next week, so there will be ample time for all of you to be able to continue to practice your skills.
One of our topics tonight in class will be nonverbal communication, which is just as important as the words we speak and how we say them. There is an interesting story behind how I came to discover this article from Ritts and Stein, which I may be able to share with you in class. While this is mostly aimed at an audience of teachers, I think that the overall nonverbal behaviors would be of use to any public speaking situation.
Eye contact
Facial expressions
Gestures
Posture and body orientation
Proximity
I left paralinguistics and humor off the list, as they are largely verbal attributes in my opinion. So, really, our six ways to communicate are down to five (even though there were seven in the original list). I don’t know if they used “new math” to count them or what, but maybe that was some of that humor they were trying to impart.
I look forward to meeting everyone (finally) for our class tonight.
