# Making Presentations **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [April 10, 2014, 3:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/making-presentations/685803 "2014-04-10T15:50:20Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 18\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [April 10, 2014, 7:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/making-presentations/685803/21 "2014-04-10T19:00:22Z")
> [@TriPolar](#): > > Start with a joke. Warm up the audience before you get into your presentation. Bring a hammer and a piece of wood and pound it whenever the audience drifts off. Ok, you can use a wooden gavel, but a big gnarly claw hammer has a better effect when you pull it out of your briefcase/bag/pocket/whatever. During the presentation make direct eye contact with individuals in the audience. If you can’t take your eyes off your notes while presenting then you’re not ready to be making that presentation yet. Sprinkle more jokes into the presentation, plan them out, keep them simple, stupid puns work well. If you get a couple of people to chuckle the others will pay more attention. Gesticulate as you speak, this makes the audience pay attention to you instead of thinking they’ll just hear what you say which leads them to pay no attention at all. Don’t allow interruptions for questions, schedule stopping points along the way for questions. > > Also, smile, if you don’t look like you’re enjoying the presentation it’s reasonable for the audience to think they won’t enjoy it either. Bring some food, get them to like you from the git go. Great advice - if you do standup as a sideline. Otherwise, not so much. If you think a few people snoozing is bad, try telling a joke to dead silence. Which will happen. Food doesn’t work well when you have an audience of 200. And the worst gig in the world is lunchtime speaker in a buffet environment where people are still getting food, eating it, and chatting to their table mates during the speech. If made presentations during lunch at small meetings and that was bad, but there people had to pretend to listen to me. ---
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [April 10, 2014, 7:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/making-presentations/685803/22 "2014-04-10T19:08:28Z")
> [@Duckster](#): > > One caveat. If you are doing a presentation, and required to meet federal accessibility requirements, you not only have to read the slides but make sure you announce each slider number, title, etc., as well. What it boils down to is slides should onld be used to support your presentation, and not carry it. > > Sadly, most presenters with slides, fail at presenting. Never had to worry about that - though if you are presenting at a meeting that is an audio conference where listeners have a copy of the slides, saying where you are is a good idea. One more thing my adviser taught me. If you are speaking in a session after other speakers, who are often speaking on the same subject, listen to them, and jot down something they said that is relevant. For instance “Fred told you that veebleforts are green in his talk, just like I found also, so you gotta believe it.” Or, conversely, “John said they were blue, but I’ve got some good experimental results here showing they are actually green.” Don’t ignore contradictory information - you’ll get a question about it. ---
**Author:** ![HoneyBadgerDC](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/honeybadgerdc/32/1033_2.png) [@HoneyBadgerDC](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/HoneyBadgerDC)\ **Post date:** [April 11, 2014, 4:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/making-presentations/685803/23 "2014-04-11T16:40:38Z")
I appreciate all the sugestions and help. My primary interest at the moment is a written presentation. Using many of the suggestions above I went to work last night preparing it. This particular project is a concept for developing a non profit model for a social medium targeting all types of creative individuals. Arts, crafts, inventions, theories etc. Very broad spectrum. I see myself as taking a back seat to more qualified individuals if and when the concept garners enough support from the target audience. So my main purpose is to simply get the idea off the ground. In a presentation that would be presented via social media I would hope to convey how this would work, the benefits, how it could grow and the impact that it could have on our personnal lives. This is where I am struggling. I feel like I need to effectively express in one paragraph enough information as to encourage the reader to click on a link with all the details. I plan to spend the next week or so on that one paragraph while at the same time refining the details that it would link to. ---
**Author:** ![Hello\_Again](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/85e7bf/32.png) [@Hello\_Again](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hello_Again)\ **Post date:** [April 11, 2014, 5:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/making-presentations/685803/24 "2014-04-11T17:22:15Z")
The number one cause of paralyzing doubt and dull verbosity is focusing on what you want to say, rather than what your audience needs to know. The corollary is that if your knowledge of your audience is amorphous or nonexistent, you will have an incredibly hard time crafting an effective presentation. ---
**Author:** ![snowthx](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/snowthx/32/10660_2.png) [@snowthx](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/snowthx)\ **Post date:** [April 11, 2014, 5:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/making-presentations/685803/25 "2014-04-11T17:35:54Z")
Many presentations lack the hook that makes people interested. I always try to explain, in the first slide, why we are here and what problem we are going to solve. You need to be clear on the problem statement - illustrate the “pain point” if you will, to the audience. This will help them relate to the problem, and want to hear more of what you have to say. If you go in with guns blaring about the solution, before the problem has been identified, people will be spending the whole time trying to figure out what the issue is, and probably making the wrong assumptions. Don’t let them do that - you need to control how the problem is defined, so that your solution will look like the best course of action. One way to do that is to identify the _ **lack** _ in the community of what you are proposing as the problem. ---
**Author:** ![HoneyBadgerDC](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/honeybadgerdc/32/1033_2.png) [@HoneyBadgerDC](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/HoneyBadgerDC)\ **Post date:** [April 11, 2014, 5:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/making-presentations/685803/26 "2014-04-11T17:42:12Z")
> [@snowthx](#): > > Many presentations lack the hook that makes people interested. I always try to explain, in the first slide, why we are here and what problem we are going to solve. You need to be clear on the problem statement - illustrate the “pain point” if you will, to the audience. This will help them relate to the problem, and want to hear more of what you have to say. > > If you go in with guns blaring about the solution, before the problem has been identified, people will be spending the whole time trying to figure out what the issue is, and probably making the wrong assumptions. Don’t let them do that - you need to control how the problem is defined, so that your solution will look like the best course of action. One way to do that is to identify the _ **lack** _ in the community of what you are proposing as the problem. I will use this approach, I feel like I can identify with it. ---
**Author:** ![Superhal](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/b4bc9f/32.png) [@Superhal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Superhal)\ **Post date:** [April 11, 2014, 6:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/making-presentations/685803/27 "2014-04-11T18:21:41Z")
The key is feedback. I use a standard survey form and always ask the same two questions: What part did you like best? What part did you like least? I preface this survey by saying that this is so important to me, I’ll pay everyone to do it with as much detail as possible. Usually candy or cookies. As you get feedback, you make changes based on what people say. If you are not a good presenter, you should make changes only if more than 5 or so people agree on what your weakness is. For those things that people liked, figure out why they liked it and apply it to other parts of your presentation. I know a guy who always puts a nice photo between sections of his powerpoint and ties it in to what he’s talking about. For me, the strongest part of any presentation I have is the very beginning, also known as “an icebreaker.” This is simply a question that gets people to think about the topic, and then I call on a few people to tell me what their answer is before I launch into the main presentation. For example, I recently did a report about accreditation. I briefly listed a few key ideas from the source material and asked everyone: which ones do we have at this company, and which ones are missing? Another trick is group work. In the above example, after I got feedback on what is missing from this company, I put them into groups and asked them what obstacles are preventing them from having them. Lively discussion ensued. In a nutshell: the only way to find out how to improve your presentations is to ask the audience. To be an effective presenter is not to have an attitude of “Why don’t they like what I’m doing?” and change it to “What _should_ I be doing?” ---
**Author:** ![HoneyBadgerDC](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/honeybadgerdc/32/1033_2.png) [@HoneyBadgerDC](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/HoneyBadgerDC)\ **Post date:** [April 11, 2014, 6:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/making-presentations/685803/28 "2014-04-11T18:28:01Z")
> [@Superhal](#): > > The key is feedback. I use a standard survey form and always ask the same two questions: > > What part did you like best? > > What part did you like least? > > I preface this survey by saying that this is so important to me, I’ll pay everyone to do it with as much detail as possible. Usually candy or cookies. As you get feedback, you make changes based on what people say. If you are not a good presenter, you should make changes only if more than 5 or so people agree on what your weakness is. For those things that people liked, figure out why they liked it and apply it to other parts of your presentation. I know a guy who always puts a nice photo between sections of his powerpoint and ties it in to what he’s talking about. For me, the strongest part of any presentation I have is the very beginning, also known as “an icebreaker.” This is simply a question that gets people to think about the topic, and then I call on a few people to tell me what their answer is before I launch into the main presentation. > > For example, I recently did a report about accreditation. I briefly listed a few key ideas from the source material and asked everyone: which ones do we have at this company, and which ones are missing? > > Another trick is group work. In the above example, after I got feedback on what is missing from this company, I put them into groups and asked them what obstacles are preventing them from having them. Lively discussion ensued. > > In a nutshell: the only way to find out how to improve your presentations is to ask the audience. To be an effective presenter is not to have an attitude of “Why don’t they like what I’m doing?” and change it to “What _should_ I be doing?” Would you consider something like facebook a good place to get feedback? ---
**Author:** ![TriPolar](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/tripolar/32/3008_2.png) [@TriPolar](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TriPolar)\ **Post date:** [April 11, 2014, 7:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/making-presentations/685803/29 "2014-04-11T19:03:27Z")
> [@Voyager](#): > > Great advice - if you do standup as a sideline. Otherwise, not so much. If you think a few people snoozing is bad, try telling a joke to dead silence. Which will happen. > Food doesn’t work well when you have an audience of 200. And the worst gig in the world is lunchtime speaker in a buffet environment where people are still getting food, eating it, and chatting to their table mates during the speech. If made presentations during lunch at small meetings and that was bad, but there people had to pretend to listen to me. I got the hammer thing from my high school science teacher, worked then, works now. If you can’t tell a joke then you may be a boring speaker and nothing you do will help much. But every speaker has to use their own abilities, and if they don’t have any that are conducive to making the audience pay attention then they shouldn’t be speaking. Oral presentations are often over-rated anyway, except for small groups with a lot of interaction it’s a less effective way to convey information than visual media, unless you are an effective engaging speaker, and not everyone can do that. ---
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [April 11, 2014, 8:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/making-presentations/685803/30 "2014-04-11T20:07:57Z")
> [@HoneyBadgerDC](#): > > I will use this approach, I feel like I can identify with it. I agree with what **snowthx** said - but when you are laying out the problem, try to make it personal. Instead of saying “soap makers in small cities have this problem” say “Helen Jones, a soapmaker in Hicksville, population 2400, has this problem. Studies show she is not alone.” I trust you have some real examples to use. This advice comes from listening to critiques of articles from my writing teacher - not mine, but others. ---
**Author:** ![HoneyBadgerDC](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/honeybadgerdc/32/1033_2.png) [@HoneyBadgerDC](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/HoneyBadgerDC)\ **Post date:** [April 11, 2014, 8:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/making-presentations/685803/31 "2014-04-11T20:28:17Z")
> [@Voyager](#): > > I agree with what **snowthx** said - but when you are laying out the problem, try to make it personal. Instead of saying “soap makers in small cities have this problem” say “Helen Jones, a soapmaker in Hicksville, population 2400, has this problem. Studies show she is not alone.” I trust you have some real examples to use. > This advice comes from listening to critiques of articles from my writing teacher - not mine, but others. Thats a good point and something I would be very comfortable with, also gives me a chance to inject some humor. I have never been a joke teller but can handle a humorous story pretty well if as you say I personalize it. ---
**Author:** ![TriPolar](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/tripolar/32/3008_2.png) [@TriPolar](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TriPolar)\ **Post date:** [April 11, 2014, 8:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/making-presentations/685803/32 "2014-04-11T20:39:26Z")
> [@HoneyBadgerDC](#): > > Thats a good point and something I would be very comfortable with, also gives me a chance to inject some humor. I have never been a joke teller but can handle a humorous story pretty well if as you say I personalize it. Here’s some perfect humor for you (although maybe not in this circumstance). Make one of those hats with an arrow going through it. Put it on at the start of the presentation and say “Sorry, I have a splitting headache”, then give them a big smile. If you have humorous story to tell in addition they’ll certainly listen and be more likely to pick up on the humor. You have to grab them right at the start, if you can do that it will all get easier. ---
**Author:** ![The\_Hamster\_King](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/8edcca/32.png) [@The\_Hamster\_King](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/The_Hamster_King)\ **Post date:** [April 11, 2014, 9:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/making-presentations/685803/33 "2014-04-11T21:11:55Z")
Try to put yourself in the position of the people sitting in the audience. What could you say to them that will make THEM care about what you’re saying? For example, sometimes it’s my job to tell the people in marketing about videogames we have in development. For the most part they don’t care how the games PLAY (although that’s the part I find interesting). They care about how they’re going to SELL. So in my presentation I’ll tell them just a little about how games play and a whole lot about the unique selling points they can use as marketing hooks. They pay attention because I’m telling them the stuff they care about, not the stuff I care about. Please resist the urge to tell jokes. If your talk is good, you don’t need jokes. And if your talk is bad, jokes just make it worse. ---
**Author:** ![HoneyBadgerDC](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/honeybadgerdc/32/1033_2.png) [@HoneyBadgerDC](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/HoneyBadgerDC)\ **Post date:** [April 11, 2014, 9:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/making-presentations/685803/34 "2014-04-11T21:16:47Z")
> [@TriPolar](#): > > Here’s some perfect humor for you (although maybe not in this circumstance). Make one of those hats with an arrow going through it. Put it on at the start of the presentation and say “Sorry, I have a splitting headache”, then give them a big smile. If you have humorous story to tell in addition they’ll certainly listen and be more likely to pick up on the humor. You have to grab them right at the start, if you can do that it will all get easier. I like that!! I actually have quite a few funny stories archery related. ---
**Author:** ![HoneyBadgerDC](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/honeybadgerdc/32/1033_2.png) [@HoneyBadgerDC](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/HoneyBadgerDC)\ **Post date:** [April 11, 2014, 9:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/making-presentations/685803/35 "2014-04-11T21:21:13Z")
[quote=“The\_Hamster\_King, post:33, topic:685803”] Try to put yourself in the position of the people sitting in the audience. What could you say to them that will make THEM care about what you’re saying? ``` That is precisely what I am attempting to address. If I did a video of myself is it permissable to post a link here? It would be a rough draft in development. ``` ---
**Author:** ![tellyworth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/977dab/32.png) [@tellyworth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tellyworth)\ **Post date:** [April 11, 2014, 11:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/making-presentations/685803/36 "2014-04-11T23:37:18Z")
Cut everything by half. Halve your words. Halve your slides. Cut half of everything out of the slides that remain. The only thing you need more of is practice. Trying to be funny is the hardest thing you can do in a presentation. ---
**Author:** ![Superhal](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/b4bc9f/32.png) [@Superhal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Superhal)\ **Post date:** [April 12, 2014, 10:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/making-presentations/685803/37 "2014-04-12T22:13:48Z")
Another bit of advice: go to some high school/college graduations and listen to different types of speakers. Liberal arts background speakers ramble and usually are incredibly boring. Business leaders are more to the point and back up their points with relevant, real-world examples. A few speakers from any background have excellent humorous timing without telling jokes. Simply showing the difference between theory and real life is usually enough for a laugh. ---
**Author:** ![Lakai](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/9de0a6/32.png) [@Lakai](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lakai)\ **Post date:** [April 12, 2014, 11:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/making-presentations/685803/38 "2014-04-12T23:50:15Z")
> [@HoneyBadgerDC](#): > > That is precisely what I am attempting to address. If I did a video of myself is it permissable to post a link here? It would be a rough draft in development. I can’t speak for the mods here, but I don’t know of any rule that would prevent this. If you post something that’s less than ten minutes, I’ll watch it and give you feedback. Another question that might help you out: Who is your audience? Can you describe the type of person who will most likely be watching your presentation? [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/making-presentations/685803.md?page=1)