A talk or presentation is a performance. Here are some tips to improve:
- Speak slower (rather than cramming in as many words as possible into your allotted time).
- Add emotion, meaning and engagement by varying your vocal inflection (rather than flat, monotone delivery).
- Practice by speaking aloud:
- If you have to take a breadth in a sentence then it’s too long – subdivide it.
- If you stumble over some words then you’ve found a phrase you need to simplify.
- Do you tend to repeat yourself (or ‘um’ and ‘ah’)? Record and auto-transcribe your practice. If there’s any repetition, edit the transcription and then rehearse by reading it. That can be particularly useful if you’re giving a talk in a second language.
- Make your slides legible to the whole audience, including people in the back row (a good guide is to use an 18+ pt font; and if that means your text doesn’t fit then reduce the number of words!).
- Before adding a chart or image, ask what you want the audience to see and make that legible too (too often labels, annotations, etc are so tiny they are noise not informative.
