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Thursday, January 15, 2015

Tip of the Week: Understanding Challenges Facing the Audience: #1 Multi-tasking

As noted in the previous post, there are five main challenges for listeners: multi-tasking, information overload, transitions, diversions, and slide fatigue.

A slide presentation is a synergy between oral and visual communication devices.  You are asking the audience to do a lot: read the slide, listen to you, watch the pointer, and watch you.  This is a complicated audience challenge.  An effective slide presentation involves creating synergies among these requests.  If you don't create a synergy then having slides is worse than not having them.  (I've heard "experts" say that the slides provide an alternative to your voice for the audience, in other words the audience is given two different ways to understand the same message.  Wrong!  Your voice and the visual need to create one unified communication mechanism).   Multiple paths are only confusing.

The purpose of your oral presentation is to explain the slides.  Use your pointer to connect your spoken words to the specific parts of the slide you are discussing.  If there are parts of the slide that you do not discuss then ask yourself why it is on the slide.  Above all do not create separate audio and visual narratives.  If you show a graph take a few seconds to explain each axis and use your pointer while you are doing it.

Common advice is to make continuous eye contact with your audience.  Not completely correct.  If you are only looking at your audience then you are not using your pointer to highlight specific aspects of your slides.  You need to go back and forth a bit.

A stick pointer is more effective than a laser pointer.  A stick helps create a physical picture that connects your mouth to the part of the slide you are talking about. 

If you have an all text slide with say 4 bullets, use your pointer to show the audience which bullet you are discussing at any particular instant.

What's really bad are those large rooms with 2 screens and one laser pointer.  You can't use a laser pointer on two screens at once.  If the room isn't too large, I'd ask for one of the screens to be darkened while you give your presentation.