After a resent presentation we were at together, a dear friend of mine told me Hemingway was the greatest writer in the world, ever. I’ve learned not to argue with her. \u00c2\u00a0It’s safer that way. \u00c2\u00a0Certainly he wrote perhaps the shortest of short stories in the world<\/p>\n
“For sale: baby shoes, never used”.<\/strong><\/p>\n In just six words he presents us with everything we need to know (because we fill in our own backstory).<\/p>\n On a similar note, when I was a researcher at University, I aspired to write a ‘killer’ academic paper, published in one of the major journals and have, under the heading Results<\/strong> one simple sentence: The results are shown in Figure One<\/span>. Of course I never managed it – all my Results sections were pages and pages long! :)<\/p>\n My presentations getting better though. \u00c2\u00a0I’m getting better and telling people what they need to know and only<\/strong> what they need to know.<\/p>\n Why is that last bit important?<\/p>\n Because your audience listens to everything you say and some of it won’t be relevant to them. Fine – you can’t hit a bullseye all the time. The thing is, however, that your audience doesn’t know what you’ve just told them is irrelevant until after<\/strong> you’ve tole them it, they’ve heard it, assessed it and either assimilated it or rejected it.<\/p>\n Every bit of information (or opinion!) you give them has to go through that process.<\/p>\n And if you’ve got too many irrelevant bits of information in the flow your audience’s head doesn’t have enough time to assimilate the relevant stuff before there’s another thing to assess… and another… and another…. and…<\/p>\n And anything that can’t be assimilated can’t be retained – in short, they’re going to forget it; sadly, that means you might as well not have said it.<\/p>\n So before you give your audience too much information, think about how relevant each and every slide, nay, each and every sentence is. \u00c2\u00a0If you can cut, cut.<\/p>\n As old-fashioned hi-fi junkies would say, your presentation needs a good signal to noise ratio!<\/p>\n PS: \u00c2\u00a0You can go too far the other way, of course, and I’ll talk about that another time, but TBH, it’s not as common a problem… \u00c2\u00a0:)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" After a resent presentation we were at together, a dear friend of mine told me Hemingway was the greatest writer in the world, ever. I’ve learned not to argue with her. \u00c2\u00a0It’s safer that way. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-856","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-personal-blog-related","category-presentation-tips"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/856","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=856"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/856\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=856"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=856"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=856"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}