{"id":259,"date":"2009-01-28T18:08:36","date_gmt":"2009-01-28T17:08:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.elementally.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/?p=259"},"modified":"2009-01-28T18:08:36","modified_gmt":"2009-01-28T17:08:36","slug":"over-the-shoulder","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/over-the-shoulder\/","title":{"rendered":"Over the shoulder ?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Anyone who\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s ever read even the most basic of tips-for-public-speaking will have read this simple tip&#8230; if you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re using PowerPoint (or anything similar such as Keynote) <strong>don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t face the screen<\/strong>; face your audience instead.<\/p>\n<p>It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s mind-numbingly obvious and I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m not gainsaying it &#8211; far from it!  However, I <em>did<\/em> see an occasion recently when it might have been a good idea for the speaker to glance over his shoulder at the screen.  Let\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s call him Boris.<\/p>\n<p>Like most speakers in this country, Boris isn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t a \u00e2\u20ac\u0153professional speaker\u00e2\u20ac\u009d but is a \u00e2\u20ac\u0153normal person\u00e2\u20ac\u009d who has to do some public speaking &#8211; which means it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s unlikely he\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s going to be equipped with all the possible gadgets that there are out there.  Importantly, like every non-professional speaker I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve seen, Boris didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t have (or at least didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t use) a laser pointer.<\/p>\n<p>Boris <strong>did<\/strong> have reasonable slides though, despite the common problems of too many words on them and over-using bullet-points.  Critically however, for one of his slides, he felt the need to highlight a particular spot.  Without a laser pointer, Boris needed to point.<\/p>\n<p>Obviously, brave Boris isn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t standing directly in front of the slide (otherwise no one would be able to see it) so, unfortunately, when he points, he does so with a \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcsideways slant\u00e2\u20ac\u2122.  The shadow of his finger, of course, has a different slant.  The result is that Boris is pointing to what he thinks is important &#8211; but he\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s pointing to it from <strong>his<\/strong> perspective while the audience can barely make out his finger&#8230;  but they <em>can<\/em> see, very clearly, the shadow of his finger on the slide.<\/p>\n<p>Unfortunately, of course, his shadow is a couple of feet away (on the slide) from where Boris thought he was pointing to.  Sadly, this lead to confusion on the part of the audience, as you can imagine because from their point of view, Boris was talking about one bullet point but pointing at another.<\/p>\n<p>Sometimes a quick glance over your shoulder isn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t such a bad idea after all&#8230;&#8230;.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Anyone who\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s ever read even the most basic of tips-for-public-speaking will have read this simple tip&#8230; if you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re using PowerPoint (or anything similar such as Keynote) don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t face the screen; face your audience instead. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s [&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":[34,37,46],"class_list":["post-259","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-presentation-tips","tag-powerpoint","tag-presenting","tag-tip"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/259","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=259"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/259\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=259"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=259"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=259"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}