{"id":1435,"date":"2012-04-19T12:46:43","date_gmt":"2012-04-19T12:46:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/presentation-skills-blog.co.uk\/?p=1435"},"modified":"2012-04-19T12:46:43","modified_gmt":"2012-04-19T12:46:43","slug":"presentation-tips-oldschool","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/presentation-tips-oldschool\/","title":{"rendered":"Presentation tips oldschool!"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The old ones are the best, so they say&#8230; I\u2019m not sure it\u2019s true about music and jokes but in the last few weeks I\u2019ve sat through some presentations that disappointed me &#8211; not only did they not use the techniques for effective presentations, they actively tried (it seemed to me!) to break the basic rules, never mind the advanced ones!<\/p>\n<p>With that in mind, perhaps it\u2019s time to go back to basics, to bring out some of the old, old tips.<\/p>\n<p>So here we go &#8211; oldies but goodies.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><span class=\"Apple-style-span\" style=\"line-height: 18px;\">Don\u2019t look at the screen. That\u2019s right, not just don\u2019t read of it, don\u2019t look at it. Your audience didn\u2019t come to see the back of your head, they cam to see your face (in as much as they came to see you at all!). Don\u2019t be so rude as to turn your back on people you\u2019re supposed to be talking with.<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span class=\"Apple-style-span\" style=\"line-height: 18px;\">Use the B key. It toggles the screen to black (and back again). If you want to get your audience to really, really concentrate and concentrate on you in particular, black out your screen. Fading into a black slide is nicer, of course, but sometimes even the best of us get taken by surprise and decide to go black. When that happens, simply tap the B key and when you want to start the slides again, hit it again. You can also use the W key to go to a white-out screen, but I can\u2019t think why you\u2019d do that, to be honest!<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span class=\"Apple-style-span\" style=\"line-height: 18px;\">Don\u2019t step into the cone&#8230; that\u2019s the cone of light between your projector and the screen. You\u2019ll get shadows on your screen and the image that should be on your screen will be on your chest. Neither of these is a good thing, believe me. The only time you want to case shadows like this is when you\u2019re making bunny shapes on the wall to entertain children.<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span class=\"Apple-style-span\" style=\"line-height: 18px;\">Dress smartly. I\u201dm not saying you need to be in a three-piece suit, or the women\u2019s equivalent, but you should be at least as smart as your audience &#8211; and preferably a step smarter to give yourself a little bit of authority. Don\u2019t go overboard and turn up in a killer suit if everyone else is in scruffy jeans as it\u2019ll just set you too far apart from your audience. I f they\u2019re in scruffy jeans, you should be in smart jeans&#8230;&#8230;.<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span class=\"Apple-style-span\" style=\"line-height: 18px;\">Don\u2019t use a script. Almost no one can write a script that works well when it\u2019s spoken out loud. Those that can are professional speech-writers and if you\u2019re reading this blog I\u2019m assuming that you\u2019re not! Write you outline, pick your keywords and rehearse, rehearse, rehearse. In theory it\u2019s possible to over-rehearse but I\u2019ve only ever seen it once in my entire career.<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span class=\"Apple-style-span\" style=\"line-height: 18px;\">Rehearse. Yes, I know I\u2019ve just said it, but people don\u2019t listen. Only experts can improvise &#8211; and even then they can only do it after a lot of rehearsal. Seriously.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The old ones are the best, so they say&#8230; I\u2019m not sure it\u2019s true about music and jokes but in the last few weeks I\u2019ve sat through some presentations that disappointed me &#8211; not only [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1435","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-presentation-tips"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1435","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1435"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1435\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1435"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1435"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1435"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}