We’ve all sat through webinars, lunch & learns, sales calls, and other informational sessions where the presenter did nothing except read their slides, bullet by bullet. OMG! Please won’t somebody put them and the audience out of our collective misery?
If you don’t know the material in your deck well enough to talk through it without reading the slide verbatim, you really should come up with something to go with the bullet points in the deck. Stories, anecdotes, tall tales, surely you know more about the material than you put on the slide.
If you recognize yourself in the rant above, for the sake of audiences everywhere, please stop!
All right, all frustration and criticism aside, typically a novice or very nervous presenter will read from their slides. I’ve done it, you’ve probably done it. But no one likes it when it’s done in front of us.
Here are a few reason not to read your slides.
- Your audience can read faster than you speak.
- Trust that your audience will both read your slide and listen to your words.
- It’s boring, no one wants to look at your back or watch as you read from your laptop screen at the podium.
Breaking the teleprompter habit
- Make your presentation shorter. If you cut the number of pages by a third or more, you have more time to speak to the actual topic.
- No more than 3 major bullets on a page.
- Pictures and graphs pack more punch. Take advantage of the fact that a picture is worth 1,000 words.
- Speak about examples relevant to the topic.
- Use the Titles of Your Slides to drive home your points. Using titles like, Introduction, Observations, Best Practices etc., is boring and ineffective.
In short, if you are making presentations to an audience, make sure you have something to say and that you say it in the most effective and entertaining manner possible.
We are all storytellers, let’s show our audience why they should listen to what we have to say.
-- this post originally appeared on LinkedIn --