tempsora.info

How to Design Your English Presentation

Part of any Business English Course that deals with presentations will look at how to design or develop your presentation. How do you start? What do you put into it? In a Business English course this is the method or process that I would advise my students to use when developing their presentation. The method that I suggest using is to start at the result that you want at the end of your presentation and work your way backwards to the introduction. This should help you to develop a concise and effective presentation that does not contain unnecessary information. This is not a new idea, but it is one that I taught my students before actually finding it in an English presentations text.

What result do you want from your Presentation?

At the same time as you decide on the result you want you should also decide on who your audience will be and what to write for them. As well, decide what you want them to know or do after participating in your presentation. After this start with what is the end result you want from your presentation. Is it just an information presentation where you want to impart data or knowledge, do you want them to make a particular decision, or do you want them to make a purchase from you. There are other results you may want, so start with the end result that you want from your presentation. As I mentioned and as you probably noticed we will be working backwards in designing the English presentation.

Key Points for Your Presentation Result

When you have determined the result that you want you then need to think about what are the 3 or 4 key things you want them to know or think about in order to get the result. The key points should come easily after you know what you want to happen after the end of the presentation. These will be the points you bring up in your summary so that they are fresh in the minds of your audience. By doing this you will limit the amount of information that you will need to add into the presentation. You don’t want to use the shotgun approach when designing an English presentation.

Information needed to Support Your Presentation’s Key Points?

After you have decided on the key point that you need it will be easy to decide or determine what information or data you need to support these key points. Because you know the data that you need to include, you will not need to include excess information, thereby shortening your presentation and making it more concise.

The Finish of Your Freshly Designed Presentation

You have designed most of your English presentation by deciding on your conclusion or result, determining your key points, and adding information to support your key points. Now you only need to work on the introduction to your presentation. You know the end result or conclusion, you have your key points, and your presentation now contains the data or information needed to support the key points. So you can use these to write your Outline and Introduction, which should now be a ‘piece of cake’ (easy).

I would advocate using the process outlined above because it should make designing your presentation easier. It may seem to be against common sense by starting at the end and working your way to the beginning, but the end result will be a more focused English presentation which gets to the point without all the fluffy padding. It will be less boring, and it will contain less useless information. I hope you enjoyed this brief look at how to design an English presentation.

When you negotiate, to what degree do you allow time to influence you? Do you even give consideration to the constraints time has in and during a negotiation? All of us have the exact same amount of time. Some of us become more successful than others based on what we do with our time. The same holds true when negotiating.

When you plan a negotiation session(s), give careful consideration to the implication of time. Be astutely aware of how time will bound your session.

One of the key ingredients to negotiating successfully is to gain awareness of the time constraints placed on the other party. To the degree you have information about their time constraints, you have a powerful tool in your arsenal of strategies and tactics you can employ. If you know they are under a very tight time constraint and you’re the only source from which they can get what they need, you’re position becomes even more powerful  (note: if at all possible, try never to place yourself in a position of only having one source from which to obtain what you seek).

As you negotiate, use the strategy of time constraint wisely. By that I mean, if you give the other person a deadline by which to address a situation, first, tie some form of penalty to that deadline. Then, if he does not meet the request tied to the deadline, be ready to apply the penalties.

If you allow a deadline to expire without applying penalties, or exacting some toll for its expiration, you will weaken your negotiation position, if you try to use time in the same fashion as before. In addition, your overall negotiation position will be weakened, because things you say after that point will be brought into question, as far as your ability to follow through.

When it comes to using time as a constraint, a tool, or a strategy, always consider the implication of it not being adhered to. Use time wisely and you’ll come out ahead every time … and everything will be right with the world.

The negotiation lessons are …

• Always understand the value of time when negotiating. The greater your knowledge about the other person’s time, the greater your negotiation position.
• Apply time constraints only when you’re prepared to back them up with some form of penalty. If you fail to apply a penalty to a time constraint, you reduce the effectiveness of the constraint.
• Remember, time as a strategy is a double edged sword. You can enhance your negotiation position by using it at the appropriate time, but without some form of enforcement, your position will be weakened and you run the risk of not being able to strengthen your position past that point should you try to use time again in that manner.

Presentations are one of the most common avenues for lawyers to communicate their expertise and convince potential clients to hire them for legal work. These presentations may be in conference settings or in a client office. After a recent review of ten presentations (with a total of over 450 slides) posted on the web sites of top law firms such as McMillan Binch Mendelsohn, Gowlings, Cassels Brock and Aird & Berlis, some areas for improvement are apparent. By improving the communication of their message to clients and potential clients, lawyers can increase their billings.

The common issues found in the presentations can be separated into two categories. The first are design issues such as templates and use of slide layouts, which can be solved by marketing and administrative staff. The more critical issues are with the content and can only be solved by the lawyers who specify the content and what format it should take. Here are solutions to five problems that were seen over and over in the presentations.

Use less text
Lawyers are so familiar with text on printed documents, that it seems they think that slides should be filled with text as well. There were some instances where points were made using graphics or visuals, but generally few and far between. Prof. Richard Mayer in his book “Multimedia Learning” found that visuals combined with explanatory text increased the understanding of the audience. To have better impact, lawyers should look for more visual ways to present some of the information they have. It will break up the long periods of text that the audience sits through and help the audience remember the topic better.

Make the message clear
In many cases the text on the slides is a statement of relevant law or statute, which is important to support what is being said. But relatively few times did the slide also include text stating the key point, leaving the audience wondering what the message really was. It is necessary to include references to the law, but lawyers must also give the audience an explanation of what that law means to the audience and their business if the audience is expected to act upon the presentation. Meaningful text should also be short and concise, instead of the full sentences and paragraphs observed far too often in legal presentations.

Use diagrams to increase visual impact
One of the easiest ways for lawyers to start replacing text with visual formats is to use simple diagrams. Many times a table could replace a text list. On one slide the lawyer listed examples of two types of documents by creating a long sentence. It would have been more effective to create a simple table listing the two types of documents in columns, which would have better visually differentiated the examples. One good use of tables was shown in a chart that contrasted how a particular law is applied in different jurisdictions. Diagrams are also a better way to show relationships than simply paragraphs of text. A Venn diagram is a good way to show where items overlap and where they are distinct.

Group ideas instead of continuing ideas over multiple slides
When there are a number of items to be discussed in a section of the presentation, it was good to see that lawyers no longer use the annoying former practice of reducing the font size to squish all the text on a single slide. But what has now happened is that the points are split across multiple slides with each subsequent slide title saying “(continued)”. By the last slide in this group, the audience cannot remember how all the points fit together. A better approach would be to consider how the ideas can be grouped into sub-groups and present each sub-group with its appropriate slide title.

Use callouts to highlight scanned documents
Lawyers use scanned documents as examples in their presentations, but too often the scanned image was put on the slide and was virtually unreadable due to the small size of the text on the image. The lawyer is then forced to use a laser pointer or try to explain something the audience can’t really see, leaving the audience frustrated. A better approach is to use callouts that take the salient point of a scanned document and superimpose it on top of the scan in larger readable text, highlighting the key point the lawyer wants to make.

By integrating more visual representations of ideas into their presentations, lawyers can stand out from the barrage of text that usually represents a presentation and clients will be more compelled to act upon the presentation, resulting in higher billings.