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PREPARED, PLANNED, PRACTISED
AND DELIVERED IN PRESENTER’S OWN WORDS – IN A CONVERSATIONAL MANNER AND WITH
APPROPRIATE FORMALITY.
appropriate visual aids, including
PowerPoint slides
brief headings written on a card
appropriate objects
quotations read from the source
charts
handouts
AUDIENCE ADVOCACY
For the
presenter to connect in conveying a message, the audience must be brought into
equal focus with the presenter’s objectives: eg
Audience Advocacy.
This
means learning to view yourself and your story (message) through the eyes of
your audience.
Aristotle, the pioneer in the art of persuasion identified the key element and
most important one, Pathos.
Pathos refers to the ability to connect with the feelings, desires,
wishes, fears and passions of the audience.
Think of empathy and sympathy.
Aristotle wrote:
‘Persuasion
may come through the hearers when the speech stirs their emotions.’
SHIFT IN FOCUS FROM FEATURES
TO BENEFITS
A
Feature is a Fact or Quality – a Benefit deals with the idea you are advocating.
Whereas
a Feature may be irrelevant to the needs or interests of your audience, a
Benefit, by definition, is always relevant.
Without Benefit you have no Audience Advocacy.
For people to act on anything, they must have a
reason to act, and the reason must
be their reason, not yours.
THE ART AND BENEFITS OF
BRAINSTORMING
Spoken
Language is governed by the Right Brain
of creativity rather than focusing on the
Left Brain
which deals with grammar, structure,
syntax, consistency etc.
When
most people sit down at the computer to write a document, homily, or speech,
their minds are front-loaded with Left Brain functions: logic, grammar, spelling
and punctuation. Rather than
bouncing freely from one idea to the next, dragging in names, references,
pronouns, and concepts that may or may not be clear, they move methodically
through a sequence of points, meticulously self-correcting their syntax and
logic as they go.
But
because the writer ruled by the Left brain is concentrating on the rules of
logic, grammar, and so on, the natural flow of concepts is often impeded.
Almost inevitably, the writer omits ideas that are necessary or includes
ideas that are unnecessary, overly detailed or irrelevant.
Starting
the work of developing a
presentation with Left-brain considerations such as logic, sequence, grammar,
and word choice is simply not effective.
Crafting a presentation is a Creative
task; it must start with the kind of creative resources that are
available only on the right side of your brain.
Use the right tool for the right job.
Therefore, start the story development process by doing what your brain is going
to do anyway: follow the stream of consciousness and capture the results during
Brainstorming.
BRAINSTORMING: DOING THE
DATA DUMP PRODUCTIVELY
1
Set up a large whiteboard or
big pad of sketch paper. Have on
hand a supply or markers in several colours.
Use different colours to indicate different groups of levels of ideas.
2
Write your central theme or
idea in the centre of the page.
3
There are no bad ideas in
brainstorming – let them all flow.
4
Launch your ideas by writing
single concepts. Explode the
concept of each idea – using a different colour for each concept.
5
Be flexible!
Add ideas as they arise. As
the brainstorming process progresses, you’ll find that ideas pop up all over the
place. The ideas will shift,
connect, disconnect, and duplicate as they seek relationships with other ideas.
This is your Right brain at work.
Let it happen. Relationships
will emerge, change, and develop. Capture all the activity on your whiteboard or sketch pad.
6
Consider all ideas during
the brainstorm. Avoid thinking in
structure, sequence or hierarchy.
7
Data Dump all ideas that are
not relevant to your central theme.
8
Move from this idea of
generating a host of ideas in relative chaos to an organized clearly known
technique known as clustering.
This is an essential technique for organizing material.
So far
you’ve held off selecting any sequence of ideas for your presentation.
Get your story/message straight; then and only then can you think about
the most effective sequence of concepts for presenting that story persuasively.
In developing your presentation, keep the proper order of the creative
process in mind:
Focus before Flow.
Now,
having set the context with the Framework form,
having poured out all the concepts that might be relevant to
your presentation by Brainstorming ,
using an efficient Data Dump and
having distilled those concepts and ideas by
Clustering, you’re ready to develop
the flow and structure of ideas that will guide your presentation.
Following this technique will enable you to deliver your presentation in
EXTEMPORANEOUS MODE.
Claire Marsh
Speech
Resource:
Presenting to Win, The Art of Telling Your Story; by Jerry Wiessman
Publishers:
Pearson, Prentice Hall, 2006