Section 2. Supplementary Reading

The Seven Deadly PowerPoint Sins

PowerPoint® is the predominate presentation tool used in the world today. It can also be the most assured way to lose an audience's attention and kill your message.

Why? Because PowerPoint® is the most misused presentation tool used in business today.

When used correctly, PowerPoint® can enrich a presentation and make the message more memorable. The problem is most people don't use this terrific invention even remotely effectively.

Below are the top seven mistakes people make when using PowerPoint®. If you are guilty of any of these, make changes to your presentations immediately. Your reputation as a speaker will improve and your message will be more memorable.

1) Too much content on a slide. Use only a few key words or phrases on each slide. Think 4 X 4: No more than four words per line, no more than 4 lines per slide.

2) All words, no images. Use fewer words and more images. Use an interesting picture or a key word on a slide to launch your talk about each topic or message you want to deliver.

3) Too many slides. Do not use a slide for every point you want to make. The main focus should be on you, not the slides.

4) Wild and crazy animations. Swooshing sounds and flying words are distracting to the audience and weaken your presentation.

5) Using the slide presentation as the handout. Sorry, but that is the lazy way out. Prepare separate handouts with as much detail as you want. Use simple PowerPoint® slides to enhance your oral message, not serve as the leave-behind.

6) Reading from the slides. Don't turn your back to your audience and read the slides. Instead, maintain eye contact with your audience while delivering your key points in a conversational tone.

7) The Star Wars "laser saber" show. Leave the laser pointer home. The piercing red beam probably won't really take an aircraft down, but it will definitely kill your audience's attention.

Carmie McCook, the president of Carmie McCook & Associates, is a nationally recognized expert on effective communication skills, specializing in media interview, public speaking, presentation, crisis communications, and executive media training

Some Rules for Making a Presentation

Golden rule

Human attention is very limited. Don't cram too much information, either in each slide, or in the whole talk. Avoid details: they won't be remembered anyway.

Organization

· Have a very clear introduction, to motivate what you do and to present the problem you want to solve. The introduction is not technical in nature, but strategic (i.e. why this problem, big idea).

· Don't put all the details in the talk. Present only the important ones.

· Use only one idea per slide.

· Have a good conclusions slide: put there the main ideas, the ones you really want people to remember. Use only one "conclusions" slide.

· The conclusion slide should be the last one. Do not put other slides after conclusions, as this will weaken their impact.

· Having periodic "talk outline" slides (to show where you are in the talk) helps, especially for longer talks. At least one "talk outline" slide is very useful, usually after the introduction.

· Especially if you have to present many different things, try to build a unifying thread. The talk should be sequential in nature (i.e. no big conceptual leaps from one slide to the next).

· Try to cut out as much as possible; less is better.

Mechanics

· Use a good presentation-building tool, like MS PowerPoint. Avoid Latex, except for slides with formulas (Leslie Lamport himself says that slides are visual, while Latex is meant to be logical). Good looks are important. If you need formulas, try TeXPoint, George Necula's Latex for Powerpoint.

· Humor is very useful; prepare a couple of puns and jokes beforehand (but not epic jokes, which require complicated setup). However, if you're not good with jokes, better avoid them altogether. Improvising humor is very dangerous.

· The more you rehearse the talk, the better it will be. A rehearsal is most useful when carried out loud. 5 rehearsals is a minimum for an important talk.

· The more people criticize your talk (during practice), the better it will be; pay attention to criticism, not necessarily to all suggestions, but try to see what and why people misunderstood your ideas.

· Not everything has to be written down; speech can and should complement the information on the slides.

· Be enthusiastic.

· Act your talk: explain, ask rhetorical questions, act surprised, etc.

· Give people time to think about the important facts by slowing down, or even stopping for a moment.

· Do not go overtime under any circumstance.

· Listen to the questions very carefully; many speakers answer different questions than the ones asked.

· Do not treat your audience as mentally-impaired: do not explain the completely obvious things.

Text

· Slides should have short titles. A long title shows something is wrong.

· Use uniform capitalization rules.

· All the text on one slide should have the same structure (e.g. complete phrases, idea only, etc.).

· Put very little text on a slide; avoid text completely if you can. Put no more than one idea per slide (i.e. all bullets should refer to the same thing). If you have lots of text, people will read it faster than you talk, and will not pay attention to what you say.

· Don't use small fonts.

· Use very few formulas (one per presentation). Do not put useless graphics on each slide: logos, grids, affiliations, etc.

· Spell-check. A spelling mistake is an attention magnet.

Illustrations

· Use suggestive graphical illustrations as much as possible. Don't shun graphical metaphors. Prefer an image to text. Great presentations tend to have 80% of the slides with images.

· Do not put in the figures details you will not mention explicitly. The figures should be as schematic as possible (i.e. no overload of features).

· Do not "waste" information by using unnecessary colors. Each different color should signify something different, and something important. Color-code your information if you can, but don't use too many different colors. Have high-contrast colors.

· A few real photos related to your subject look very cool (e.g. real system, hardware, screen-shots, automatically generated figures, etc.). Real photos are much more effective during the core of the talk than during the intro. I hate talks with a nice picture during the introduction and next only text; they open your appetite and then leave you hungry.

· For some strange reason, rectangles with shadows seem to look much better than without (especially if there are just a few in the figure).

· Sometimes a matte pastel background looks much better than a white one.

· Exploit animation with restraint. Do not use fancy animation effects if not necessary.

· However, there are places where animation is extremely valuable, e.g., to depict the evolution of a complex system, or to introduce related ideas one by one.

· Use strong colors for important stuff, pastel colors for the unimportant.

· Use thick lines in drawings (e.g. 1 1/2 points or more).

· Label very clearly the axes of the graphs. Explain the un-obvious ones. Use large fonts or labels; the default fonts in Excel are too small.

 

And don't forget to have a bit of fun-you don't have to be boring.
3. Intercultural factors when making International Presentations

Because English is so widely used around the world, it is quite possible that many members of your audience will not be native English-speakers. In other words, they will not have an Anglo-Saxon culture. Even within the Anglo-Saxon world, there are many differences in culture. You should try to learn about any particular cultural matters that may affect your audience.

Making a presentation in front of international audiences is not for the fainthearted. People from different cultural backgrounds with varying language skills are definitely more challenging than a homogenous local audience. Are international audiences any different from local audiences? From a biological point of view, there are almost no differences as all humans behave similarly in response to basic stimuli like hunger and heat. The differences become crucial when one considers cultural conditioning.

Let us take the classical example quoted in many places. If the world were a village of 1,000 people, it would include: 584 Asians, 124 Africans, 95 Europeans, 84 Latin Americans, 52 North Americans, six Australians and New Zealanders, and 55 people from the former Soviet republics. They would speak more than 200 languages and reflect an astounding mix of different cultures. Fortunately, you would most likely never get such a mixed audience. Remember, what works in one culture doesn't always work in another. How can you make your presentation a success among people from different parts of the world?

Many factors influence audience behaviour e.g., culture, profession, gender, age, reason for being in the audience, state of mind, time of day and year and general mood. In fact every audience is unique. An audience of insurance salesmen in Germany is very different from an audience of German chemical engineers. So whenever a typical behaviour is associated with certain nation states, you have to be extremely careful with these stereotypes.

The language barrier plays a very important role, both for the speaker and the listeners. Many people in your international audience actually have jumped over large chasms of language and cultural divides in order to be there in that very audience listening to you. "Can I understand everything that is spoken there as they are speaking in English and my English is very bad?" or "What if someone asks me a question and I can't answer it in French in this seminar held in France?" These are typical fears that many people have overcome before they turned up in the international gathering.

In mixed audiences the language used is bound to be a foreign tongue for someone, if not for the speaker. Deficient language skills might considerably limit their ability to grasp much of the presentation and they have no way of dealing with that frustration with themselves. The fear of losing face in front of other people is very common, more so in Asian cultures. Many people think in their mother tongue and speak with the help of simultaneous translation. Many ideas are very challenging to be put into another language. So the task of the presenter is to make sure that central ideas come across easily and even to people who are not natives to the language of presentation.

Culture influences how people in different countries prefer to receive information. How interactive a presentation is, depends much on the culture. Typically English speaking cultures like presentations to be lively and interactive. Paradoxically there are similarities among Far Eastern, Slavic and protestant cultures like Germany and Finland. There presentations are formal and there are few interruptions. Questions are answered either when the presentation ends or quickly as they arise.

Many Europeans, particularly Scandinavians and Germans prefer to receive information in detail, with lots of supporting documentation. They want their presenters to be systematic and build to a clear point within their presentation. The Japanese business audiences, where senior managers are more likely to hold technical or management degrees are very similar. American and Canadian audiences, on the other hand, like a faster pace. Many Asian and Latin cultures prefer presentations with emotional appeal.

Different cultures gather and process information differently, in a way that is unique to that culture. We assume that speaking Spanish is a safe option in all countries where Spanish is spoken, but Hispanic employees from different countries even have different words for the same thing, and this can create conflict. Sometimes logic or reason can evade us. For example, there is no concept of guilt in some Eastern cultures. There is no Heaven or Hell, but there may be karma and shame. The Chinese are very strict about Mianxi, not losing face. When a Chinese person doesn't understand something due to language problems, she still says, "Yes, yes it is clear." People from a western background often have difficulties understanding this.

Presenters use humour skillfully to relax the atmosphere. Another very powerful tool is telling personal anecdotes which reveal humaneness connecting the speaker with members of the audience. There must be a relevance to the topic or theme, as speakers who talk very much about themselves are often considered self-centred and even tiresome.

The response to humour varies greatly across different cultures. Humour based on making fun of someone else is not understood in many areas of the world and is considered disrespectful. In some cultures like Japan, laughing aloud is a sign of nervousness and is not appreciated.

How audiences respond to presentations varies across cultures. In Japan, for example, it's common to show concentration and attentiveness by nodding the head up and down slightly-and even closing the eyes occasionally. Don't think that they are falling asleep. In Germany and Austria, for example, listeners seated around a table may show their approval by knocking on the table instead of applauding. Applause is accepted as a form of approval in most areas of the world but in the U.S, you might even get a few whistles if you have really made a great impression. If you hear whistles in many parts of Europe, you had better run because someone might start throwing tomatoes and eggs next. If you were finishing a speaking engagement in a Latin American country like Argentina and you waved goodbye, the audience might all turn around and come back to sit down. For them the waving gesture means, "Come back! Don't go away."

Ways of handling questions are very different across cultures. Brits or Americans almost always ask challenging questions. In Finland or in some Asian cultures, audiences are more likely to greet a presentation with silence or just a few polite questions. This is not always indifference but a show of respect.

Cultural differences can also be seen in body language, which we have just discussed. To a Latin from Southern France or Italy, a presenter who uses his hands and arms when speaking may seem dynamic and friendly. To an Englishman, the same presenter may seem unsure of his words and lacking in self-confidence.

As a presenter, you should have a clear goal of what you want to accomplish and how you will accomplish it. The goal should be easy to understand - even to someone outside of your organization or industry. If you can't summarize your message, how can the listeners? When the audience is international, you'll need to step out of your own frame of reference and focus on making communication relevant for your target group. The aim is to "localize." By focusing on the audiences' own frames of reference, you acknowledge their importance and pave the way for them to come closer to you. If for example, you are using a metaphor about snow blizzards and sleet to sub-Saharan people, they might not get your point, as they have no experience of snow blizzards. The most vital thing to remember is that each and every member in your international audience is a fellow human being. If they feel treated well and get something for being there, they will appreciate your efforts. Good luck!