Follow the old preacher's simple, practical advice, "Tell 'em what you're gonna tell 'em. Then tell 'em. Then tell 'em what you told 'em." These simple words to speak by, the core advice for organizing an oral presentation, are expounded upon in this section.To organize an oral presentation you must do four things:
- Make it short
- Make the organization obvious
- Make the ideas simple and vivid
- Summarize and be prepared for questions
It Takes Twice as Long to Speak as to Read
No speaker has time enough to say all that she would like to say for the simple reason that people can read faster than she can talk. Thus, a paper which takes you ten minutes to read silently will take you twenty minutes to read aloud. Try it for yourself. It will take you about twenty minutes to read aloud a journal article which runs for only five pages.
Stick to a Few Main Points
Because the spoken version must be shorter than the written one, the best thing to do is to carefully select the major points to present. (Most listening audiences seem to be able to recall a speaker's points, provided there are only three or four of them. Six or seven points are too many for most people to remember.) Arrange these few major points like an outline, with subheads indicating the details to be included under each.
Practice it Aloud
As a speaker you should make sure that every word counts. The best way to do this is to say the speech several times as you think it might go, trying it out for sound. But do not memorize it. The trouble with memorizing is that if you miss a single word, the whole speech is likely to come apart.
Time It One Minute Short
Nearly every speaker gets excited in front of an audience, thinks of new words and phrases, and automatically inserts them into the speech. Thus, little by little the speech gets longer and longer. For this reason it is wise to time the speech in practice to run 30 seconds to one full minute shorter than the time allotted you.While the 5 to 7 minutes you have per speaker for SI505, may seem like a lot of time to fill. In reality, most speakers go on too long rather than end too soon.
An illustrative anecdote: I have a professor friend in the Psychology department who interrupted her vacation to present her work at a professional conference. She flew to Toronto, switched planes, went through customs, and arrived at the conference as scheduled. As one of a three-person panel the two speakers ahead of her completely filled the available speaking time! The moderator apologized and said it was unfortunate as her work was probably the most interesting. She flew back and rejoined her family and not surprisingly vowed never to participate in a panel presentation again.You should plan to come in slightly under your time limit. If you are the last or next to last speaker and your team is already running out of time, the presentation is either not short enough or not well enough rehearsed. So you must make it short. (Coming in at or slightly under your time limit for SI 505 is fine.)
So, first, make it short.
Acknowledge the Introduction and the Audience
It is simply bad manners to merely stand up and start talking after someone introduces you. Moreover, it gives you a stock phrase to begin with and helps get you started. So the first words you should say are: "Thank you _____. Welcome to ____________."
Then Tell 'Em What You're Gonna Tell 'Em
Follow the old preacher's simple, practical advice, "Tell 'em what you're gonna tell 'em. Then tell 'em. Then tell 'em what you told 'em." Remember that a listening audience can't stop the speech and go back over it. So you must make the organization very, very obvious so they will know what to listen for.Say for example: "Today I (we) would like to tell you four things about _____: first, _______; second, _______; third, ________; and fourth, _______." It not only assists the audience, it also helps you by reminding you of what you planned to say. This may sound like hackneyed advice, but you will probably find that the audience will congratulate you on the clarity of your organization.
Then Tell 'Em
Once you are through with that forecast, state the first point all over again. Then explain it and illustrate what it means with an example or an instance. Then when you have finished with this first point, restate it, as, "Thus, my first point is ______," so that people will know that you are through with that point and are ready to hear you say, "My second point is _____."Ray Ehrensburger (Ref. 3) has found that three or four repetitions, widely scattered through out the speech, enable the audience to remember what has been repeated. It is your main points you want them to remember, and you have mentioned each point in the forecast, repeated it as you started to discuss it, and repeated it in a third time as you finished discussing it.
Then Tell 'Em What You Told 'Em
When you have finished with the last point, conclude your speech by repeating your main points one final time, as, "Thus, I (we) have told you four things about ______: one, _____; two, ______; three, ______; and four, ______."This completes Ray Ehrensburger's four repetitions, widely dispersed, and should fix those four ideas firmly in the minds of the audience.
Obviously with a 4 to 5 person team and a 30+ minute presentation, you may have more than four main points overall, but probably not per speaker. So the advice above is still mostly applicable. Modify it as necessary, but keep in mind the rationale behind the advice, that it is hard to listen and remember and your goal is to keep your audience oriented and clear on the presentation's main ideas.
So, second, make the organization obvious.
Put Your Ideas in Verbal Pictures
The listening audience, unlike a reading audience, cannot go back and listen to part of your speech over again if they don't understand an idea. You must make sure that your ideas are clear right now! Since most people have visual imaginations--that is, they dream in pictures--try to show them how things look.
Explain Your Strategy (where you are trying to go)
Before Your Tactics (the details of your route)
Experts of any kind sometimes baffle and lose an audience because they start with the details of what they did before they explain why they did it in the first place. It merely confuses the audience to start with the technical details before explaining the ramifications of the project and why the audience should care. The audience needs to know why the results of your project are important and what will be done with them before they hear the details of how the results were collected and analyzed.In general, this also implies avoiding a chronological organization. That is, the audience wants a logically organized capsule summary of the results and ramifications, not a diary like journey of all the steps along the way. (A chronological organization may be appropriate for some subsections.)
Illustrate the Math With a Real Life Application
Mathematics is inherently abstract, and thus boring to listen to. Provide your listeners with a real life application as an example.Richard Feynman, the Nobel Prize winning Physicist, insisted on real life examples (Ref. 1). He writes:
"At all of these places everybody working in physics would tell me what they were doing and I'd discuss it with them. They would tell me the general problem they were working on, and would begin to write a bunch of equations."Wait a minute," I would say. "Is there a particular example of this general problem?"
"Why yes; of course."
"Good. Give me one example." That was for me: I can't understand anything in general unless I'm carrying along in my mind a specific example and watching it go. Some people think in the beginning that I'm kind of slow and I don't understand the problem because I ask a lot of these "dumb" questions: "Is a cathode plus or minus? Is an an-ion this way, or that way?"
But later, when the guy's in the middle of a bunch of equations, he'll say something and I'll say, "Wait a minute! There's an error! That can't be right!"
The guy looks at his equations, and sure enough, after a while, he finds the mistake and wonders, "How the hell did this guy, who hardly understood at the beginning, find that mistake in the mess of all these equations?"
He thinks I'm following the steps mathematically, but that's not what I'm doing. I have a specific, physical example of what he's trying to analyze, and I know from instinct and experience the properties of the thing. So when the equations says it should behave so-and-so, and I know that's the wrong way around, I jump up and say, "Wait! There's a mistake!""
Use Rhetorical Questions To Keep the Audience's Attention
Some speakers seem to be talking entirely to themselves. But a good speech should sound like a conversation with the audience. One way of achieving this is to use "rhetorical questions," from the Greek word "rhetor" meaning "speaker." This simply means that the speaker puts a question in the mouth of a member of the audience, as "You are undoubtedly asking, what is the difference between a capacitor and a condensor?" Now the speaker does not let the audience answer the question. They will almost always return the wrong answer. Instead, the speaker quickly supplies the answer. "The answer is, there is no difference. They are simply different words for the same thing." This helps make the speech sound conversational.
So, third, make the ideas simple and vivid.
Repeat the Main Points in Conclusion
At the end of the speech remember to "Tell 'em what you told 'em," as, "Thus, I have told you four things about _____: one, _______; two, ______; etc. I (we) would be happy to answer any questions." This makes an effective conclusion and tells the audience that you are now finished.
Repeat Each Question for the Benefit of the Audience
If there is a question period following the speech, some of the questions make come form those in the first two rows of the audience. But since they are close to the speaker, they don't talk very loudly, and the rest of the audience can't hear the question. If the person presiding, or the speaker herself, does not repeat the question, the rest of the audience doesn't know what the answer is about. Thus, always repeat the question. Moreover, if the question is a sticky one, repeating the question--slo-o-owly--gives the speaker time to think of a good answer.In our case, with a small room and a small audience repeating the question may not be necessary if you are sure everyone heard.
Reword Clumsy Questions
Often the question is long, involved, and clumsy simply because the questioner can't figure out how to phrase it. However, the speaker can often see what the questioner is driving at, so don't hesitate to rephrase the question into a more concise and more sensible form. It also a good way to confirm that you are answering an appropriate question. For example, "So, if I understand you correctly, you want to know _______. Is that right?" This should avoid the frustrating experience of answering a question the questioner did not intend.
Wait Until After the Speech to Pass Things Out
If you have pictures, samples, or other things you would like the audience to inspect, distribute them only after you have finished. If you pass things out during the speech, you can watch parts of the audience stop paying attention to you as they bend over to study what is being passed around.
So, fourth, summarize and be prepared for questions.
Thus, to organize an oral presentation you need to do only four things:
- Make it short
- Make the organization obvious
- Make the ideas simple and vivid
- Summarize and be prepared for questions