Monday night I need to deliver a roughly six minute presentation on Ayurvedic medicine to a group of twenty pharmacy students. For some reason, no matter how many dry runs I go through, my presentation comes across as stiff. I sound like a child reading his summer vacation report. I think the main problem is my inability to rapidly relocate my place in the text when I make eye contact with the audience and then glance back to the paper. Would it help if I double-spaced the text that I’m reading from? Does that lend itself to quickly locating text on a page?
What is the purpose of double spacing? All college professors demand that submitted materials be double-spaced. This must be primarily to give them room to write comments and criticisms, but does it also somehow make it easier to read?
IME, reading word-for-word a prepared speech from a script will always come across as stilted. My preferred method for delivering content orally with this long a time frame would be to distill each paragraph down to a single note card which lists that paragraph’s key point. Then, in giving the speech, I’d be able to glance down at the notecard to see which item I’d planned to talk about next, and shuffle it to the bottom of the stack while I improvised a paragraph along the lines of what I’d written, without trying to reproduce it word-for-word. When I finish explaining that point, I glance down, and the next card has the next point to explain.
Obviously, you need to be very familiar with your material to give a speech this way. But presumably you are, or you wouldn’t have been asked to present on it, right? Also, number the cards, in case you drop them. :smack:
Alternatively, you could try to memorize the whole thing. But I doubt it would be worth your while.
That’s the bitch of it—I got thrust into this on the spur of the moment and had about three days to write the damned thing and prepare for the delivery. The last time I gave an oral presentation it was twice as long and wasn’t even in my native language, and I gave a beautiful, flawless delivery. But I had two months to prepare, and I memorized the whole thing.
Just plan where you intend to look at the audience. Highlight the start of the next phrase. They will be easy to spot even on the fly as they will be well spaced.
Giving a good oral presentation can be a real bitch. What I found works is to go into a room and do the presentation out loud (using your power point slides or what ever you will be using).
As you say the speech out loud you ear will hear the clunky parts. When you stumble stop right then and reword it on the fly till it sounds natural. Write down this change.
Continue, until you have done the entire presentation.
If you need complete notes to give your talk, retype them with changes. Type them in A big font and use either 1.5 space or double space.
Represent your talk to an empty room until it sounds natural.
Go get em tiger.
A 6-minute talk is really a pretty short talk. If you don’t want to sound stilted, then don’t read from a prepared text. Have the key points on note cards but make the points in your own words. Before you know it, the 6 minutes is over. If you’re required to turn in the written text of your talk, then write that up with all the proper grammar, syntax, etc. Your talk does not have to be as formal as the written text if you want it to sound more natural and extemporaneous.
My best talks are read from prepared text. I skew the stack considerably, so the right edges of the pages are significantly shingled, making it easier to turn pages one at a time. I hold the sheets with both hands and with my right hand keep shifting position down the page to mark where I am.
But, most important, I don’t wind up reading. The areas I am more comfortable with, the areas that are more conversational in nature, I wind up saying roughly what is on the paper but not in that exact language. The areas that are more difficult, for example with longer strings of technical terms all of which have to happen correctly and in correct order, I will more nearly just read.
Try to seek this comfort zone where it is easy to sort of read but also to be more in contact with the audience.
One time I felt particularly uncomfortable, with a large audience, and I said so and recounted to them that I had heard you’re supposed to imagine the audience naked to help deal with this. I told them that now, not only did I have stage fright, I also felt confused and alarmed that they all had come to my talk without any clothes.
By the way, if you try this bit, be thoughtful about whom you’re making eye contact with at the end of it.
Actor’s trick - hold your speech in both hands and move your thumbs (not the fingers!) down the page as you read. Any time you look up, look for your thumbs when you come back to the page. Takes about 10 minutes to get used to, and it’ll save your bacon.
Like when you read music, you need to develop the trick of having your eyes well ahead of what you’re actually reading, by at least 3 or 4 words, and preferably by almost a sentence. That can take longer to get the hang of…
I would disagree with the advice to hold your speech if you have a table or lectern available. You will tend to fiddle with the pages, especially if you are at all nervous. Type it out in large font and slide the top page off to the side when you’re done with it. This is less distracting than holding or flipping pages. If you must hold your notes, try to keep it to one page and use a clipboard to keep pages from rustling.
If you can get to the point where you are speaking from bullet points, not a word for word document, so much the better.
Have you got some slides?
A visual aid improves any presentation, and it gives you a short break.
Have you got a joke, or at least a witty comment?
Of course it’s a serious subject. Nevertheless we’ve all sat through what feels like an interminable series of facts.
If you relax your audience at the start, they will:
be more interested
concentrate in case you are amusing again
remember things better
I speak as a teacher with over 30 years experience. I feel more confident with the above and I know that the audience like it too.
The best lecture I ever saw was on mathematical probability. It was a dry topic, with much analysis. The presenter started with an introduction. We got ready to think hard. Then he showed a youtube video of a penguin tripping another penguin! :eek:
We roared with laughter and sat up expectantly. And I still recall what he said about the maths.
I agree that six minutes is actually pretty short. If you have that much text on a page that you lose your place when you look up, you WILL sound stilted when you deliver your talk, because very few of us have developed the skill of reading as though we were simply speaking. You are also likely trying to cram way too much information into the time allotted.
As much as I hate PowerPoint presentations when done poorly, setting up your talk as a series of slides might help you get help you bring a more natural feel to your talk. For a six-minute talk, I tell my students to speak for no more than one minute per slide, so they should aim for a maximum of six to nine slides.
Then break your talk down accordingly. What are the key points? These are your slide titles/outline headers. Give no more than three to four pertinent details for each. The goal of your speech should not be to spill as much info about Ayurvedic medicine as possible into six minutes, but rather to leave your audience with just enough information to learn and retain.
Then, as someone else said above, if you have to hand in a typed version of your talk, you can do so in appropriate written style, which should be different (more formal) than your speaking style.
I can’t speak for everybody else, but double-spacing does make it a lot easier to comment on students’ papers, especially when you have a lot of comments to make. sigh
I have to ditto the “don’t read from a prepared text” crowd. I use notecards or powerpoint to highlight the key points then discuss them (1 minute per slide or card seems about right). The key is that I practice many times to get the timing and flow down.
I have to ditto the “don’t read from a prepared text” crowd. I use notecards or powerpoint to highlight the key points then discuss them (1 minute per slide or card seems about right). The key is that I practice many times to get the timing and flow down.
Please don’t use PowerPoint for a six minute presentation. Not unless you’re in the middle of some other long meeting that is already a PowerPoint fest.
A good guideline is 5 minutes per slide. It is so rare for someone to spend less than that on a slide. If **tiger lily’s **students are really getting through 9 slides in 6 minutes, the slides must be absolutely trivial. It’s much more likely to wind up in a “your 5 minutes were up 10 minutes ago” situation.
So for a six minute presentation, if you happen to have a great chart, or some eyecatching photos of medicines, maybe one slide. But there is nothing to be gained by putting your words on PowerPoint slides. Especially if the idea is so you can turn around and face backward and read them. Plus, you buy yourself the headache that is making sure the projection equipment is going to work without delay.
Using an actual visual aid might be good, if you have something to show. Maybe show an ayurvedic product in contrast with a non-ayurvedic product used to treat the same condition. Tip: only show your visual aid while you are actually referring to it, then put it out of the way so it doesn’t distract while you talk.
Five minutes per slide can be okay if you have an hour-long presentation, and I often do this in a classroom setting for slides that are high on graphical content, and need to be explained. But when you have a very limited time frame - and six minutes sure as heck is limited - your discussion has to be limited to the most important highlights of your findings. This is called cutting to the chase, and is definitely not a trivial exercise. I don’t know what field the OP is in, but I can assure you that at the national professional meetings I attend, where 12-minute talks are standard, spending more than an average of one minute per slide means you never get through what you have to say before the session conveners boot you off the dais. The rule of thumb is one slide per minute, unless you are simply going to show a couple of quick images as illustrations.
I don’t know that the OP is going to use Powerpoint, or even wants to. But the framing of a talk in outline form as you would have to do for a Powerpoint talk makes it much more tractable if the OP wants reminders of the points they want to cover, without reading word-for-word from a sheet (which is deadly dull, in my opinion, though I have seen it done).
Yeah, I go to those meetings, too. But those presentations aren’t examples of good communication. People conform to meet the expectations of the setting. At one of my professional meetings, I actually saw Edward Tufte present, and he most definitely did it without slides, with a real real visual aid, and was the hit of the conference.
5 minutes per slide means fewer slides and more cutting to the chase, not less. It means having 4 minutes of communicating with your audience and one minute of referring to a supporting visual.
Framing the talk as if you were putting it on slides, I can get behind. Showing those few words you have chosen to outline your talk on slides–totally not worth it for 6 minutes.
I’ve given and listened to a lot of talks and you really don’t need slides for a short 6-minute talk. However, if you MUST use slides, no more than 3 or 4 (and that includes the title page!) and with content that’s more graphical than text. Or the whole audience will be snoozing.
Another vote for notecards. (I don’t use them myself – a printout of a PowerPoint is plenty, and before computers, I’d just fill up a single sheet of paper – but I realize that might not work for others.)
The question isn’t about preparing for the presentation, it’s “Do you know your subject?” Assuming you do, then all else falls into place. Your notes should only be the start of your talking points, not your entire speech.
Remember – you know more about the subject than anyone in the audience. As long as you get it close to being right, you’ll be fine.
Start by passing around pieces of ginger or mildly sweetened ginger for them to try and begin by telling them that ginger is used in Ayurvedic medicine. Maybe you could do this as they come in and you can chat with them casually. You could mention the pleasures of sipping a little ginger in hot water on a cold day.
If you are going to use typed pages, by all means, double space. But giving a talk is much better that reading aloud what you’ve written. Relax. Don’t be formal. Have fun with it!
