Sharing the Addiction

I felt the need to blog about a really great course I went on yesterday. The title of the course is ‘Effective Speaking’ and it is run in Wellington city. I think that everyone who presents regularly should have the opportunity to take part in a course like this.

Key Points for me were:
1. Really distill what the key message of your speech is - down to a short sentence only!
2. For each ‘assertion’ you make in relation to this key point, make sure you have evidence to back this up. Evidence can be direct examples, metaphors, numbers and stats and expert endorsements. Assertions without evidence means that the audience is not engaged.
3. Put transitional phrases between each section of your presentation summing up the section you have just finished with and outlining the next one.
4. Use dark grey slides to focus the attention back to you as a speaker - you don’t need a slide for every aspect of your talk (I used the grey slides to remind myself to transition!)

This is just the tip of the iceberg! So many great practical tips. I even learned things about Powerpoint and I thought I knew a lot. Did you know that you can type a slide number during your presentation to jump to that slide?

This course goes for two days and I’m sure that the second day next Monday will give me even more tips so I’ll post more then.

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