There is a tendency among most presenters when using visual
aids – in particular PowerPoint – to display a slide and then start talking
about it. The result is that their presentation is then being driven by their
slides – the visual support has ended up in the spotlight! Presenters need to
remember that they are the show –
anything else is simply to help them to deliver their presentation and the
audience to understand it.
Hence the advice from Presentation Skills coaches such as
myself: “Say it, then show.” The
perils of doing the opposite – showing,
then saying - become all the more acute when a presenter displays a list of
bullet points, or a selection of visual images, all at once. This means that
the presenter loses any control of where the audience’s attention is directed,
as they will inevitably start reading ahead.
Most, but not all, slides therefore need to be displayed in a series of
‘builds’ so that the audience is looking at the point that the presenter is currently
talking about.
Part of the reason for presenters taking a back-to-front
approach to say it, then show is that
they are often uncertain as to what comes next and use the appearance of a
slide as their own prompt. To make an impact you must know what is coming next – so that you can ‘cue’ the reveal
appropriately. This is made easy for you with the ‘Presenter View’ (aka
Presenter Tools) facility that is built into Macs and is increasingly available
on PCs as well. For me, this is the most valuable tool to any presenter as,
rather than simply displaying the slide currently being projected, it also
displays the next slide, the entire run of slides (enabling you to jump
seamlessly to any point in the presentation) and other features such as Notes
and a clock.
Finally, in order to make the say it, then show principle work to best effect you need a slide
changer – and one with which you are completely comfortable, so preferably your
own. And be sure to practice – cueing is, after all, about timing!
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