Issue link: https://epubs.iltanet.org/i/5394
www.iltanet.org Firm University 31 engaging your audienCe: Creating Persuasive Presentations your content and context. Some of them are no more high tech than a pencil and a piece of scratch paper. In his book "The Back of the Napkin," Dan Roam deftly explains the difference between looking, seeing and showing. He says that looking is about "collecting the raw visual information," seeing is "selecting what's important," and showing is "making it all clear" to others. In this book, he is talking about a process for solving problems and selling ideas with pictures, but you can easily adapt his system to creating presentations. Just like writing an article, a good presentation begins with research and collecting ideas. In this process, you will likely acquire a huge amount of content, which might include case studies, graphs, photos, quotes, etc. If you are "old school," you could elect to print everything you run across and keep it in a folder for easy reference. Another approach is to use a product like Evernote to collect all of your research. Evernote is like a digital shoebox where you can store and manipulate information. It's Web-based, so it's accessible anywhere. There are also desktop and iPhone clients for syncing your information to various devices. Whatever tools you choose to use to flesh out your thoughts, you can't hope to share your ideas effectively with others until you can clearly see them yourself. Another danger of drafting your ideas in PowerPoint is that it's almost inevitable that you will wind up with PowerPoint as your final product, even if that isn't the best format. Few of us are willing to throw out the work we've struggled with and start with a blank slate. It seems easier to edit what you already have than to recast it in another format, even if that extra work might create a better result in the long run. Start developing your thoughts long before you sit down at the computer. Make a list of some ideas on a piece of scratch paper or diagram your concepts on a whiteboard to see how they fit together. You might even write a few paragraphs in longhand describing what you hope to accomplish. Talk about old school! Just don't wind up replacing yourself as presenter and putting all that text on your final PowerPoint slides. poLIshIng the presenter: It's aLL aboUt yoU Remember the live part of the live presentation? That's you. If you are going to deliver a live presentation, you need to be the focal point for your audience. Just as important, your audience needs and deserves your full attention. Far too often, presenters focus on their slides and don't pay attention to their audiences. We've attended presentations where the presenter has had his back turned to the audience and was reading off his slides. Perhaps he was uncomfortable and used his slides a crutch, hiding behind them and hoping that the audience would barely notice he was there. But if you are reading directly from your slides, chances are your audience is doing the same, and you've become superfluous to the entire presentation. If you can't memorize the points you want to make, there's no shame in jotting down notes on index cards. If your setup supports it, you can also use the speaker view in PowerPoint or Keynote so you can see your notes on your laptop screen while displaying your slides to the audience. So how do you get your audience to focus its attention on you rather than on the giant words and images behind you? Try crafting your slides