During our public presentation skills training course last week we were using some ‘famous presentations’ as texts for an exercise and someone was lucky enough to be working on Martin Luthor King’s fantastic “I have a dream”. Interestingly these famous words didn’t make an appearnce until well into the speech as you cans ee for yourself if you’ve got twenty mintues to spare by looking at the full thing here….. thanks to videogoogle!
It’s a fantastic piece of oratory, building but without being crudely obvious. The design and structure of the piece is almost flawless and if you find yourself making big presentations you can’t do better than study this.
Notice how King allows his voice to do the work – no PowerPoint showing images of people being beaten or (worse!) lists of bullit points about where people have come from and what they have suffered. Can you imagine the awful slide which would accompany this these days in corporate presentations? The slide would be titled “Dreams I have” and there would be the inevitable list of these….. God save me from this kind of presentation!
The authority of King’s voice is so evident it’s startling, even allowing for the relatively crude recording systems of the time!
