Best practices for handouts

There are a lot of good things about giving handouts during a presentation. No only do you get to reinforce your message, it gives something for people listening to your presentation to follow along with while you are talking.

Here’s the downside, people are following along while you are reading. You become the distraction when you should be the main act.

Here are a couple of tips on best practices for handouts:

 Make the handouts a bonus. The handouts should contain extra information, places to get more information or footnotes. If the handouts are simply a printout of your Powerpoint presentations then one of either the speaker or the handout isn’t needed.

 The handout should be stand alone. Giving a presentation and a handout are two different forms of communication and both should be approached differently to effectively get your message across. The test is whether you can give the handout to someone not familiar with the presentation and they understand the conclusions you’d want anyone who listened to the speech to come to.

 Give handouts at the end of the presentation. Remember you are the star attraction, a handout only distracts from the presentation. Most people are busy skipping through the presentation while you are talking. Better yet, have them collect the handout as they are leaving, it gives people the opening to ask questions one on one and gives you an opportunity to extend the conversation.

 What tips do you practice when giving out presentations?

Three Keyboard shortcuts you should know in PowerPoint.

Love it or hate it, as a speaker the one thing you should be relatively capable at using is Microsoft PowerPoint. However even the most deft tech-savvy speaker can find themselves fumbling when navigating PowerPoint. Here are three Powerpoint keystroke commands every speaker should know and use.

1. Starting a Presentation. Not matter how nimble and rehearsed you are with starting a Powerpoint, it’s still a very clumsy, mouse drive activity. The easiest and fastest way to launch a powerpoint is to click the “F5” key.
2. Black your presentation out. While presentations are great, if you are in the middle of saying something the slide, at best, may not be applicable to what you are saying, at worst distracting. Remember you are the star of the presentation, not PowerPoint. Hitting “B” on the keyboard will turn the presentation black while you talk. Any button starts the presentation again at the current slide. To see the power of a blacking out a presentation to building drama, check out any Steve Jobs presentation in the last few years. Press “W” to turn it white.
3. Advancing your presentation. Seems like a no brainer, but you do not have to click on the mouse to advance a slide. There are a few buttons that do the same thing, the right arrow key, the “N”, right Arrow, Down Arrow, or PgDn. By far the easiest to find is the space bar. It’s a lot quicker then any other method and you can’t miss it.

Bonus hint: To view all the available keyboard shortcuts in Powerpoint, while the show is running click on F1.

Good luck and happy speaking.

Without futher ado: A proper way to make an introduction

One of our more advanced toastmasters mentioned last week gave us a demonstration of how to make a proper introduction. Although I got the gist of it, I wanted to learn more. Here is what I found from the Traffic Toastmaster site:

The T-I-S Formula for Introductions
Like a well-prepared speech, an introduction should be natural, smooth and free of grammatical errors and oral stammers. An ideal method is the T-I-S formula taught by Dale Carnegie in his public speak classes: T-I-S stands for Topic, Importance, and Speaker. When making an introduction, remember to maintain eye contact with the audience, not the speaker.

• Topic. This is the title and purpose of the speech.
• Importance. This explains the relavance of the speech to the audience. It can specify what the audience will gain or learn from listening.
• Speaker. This tells the audience why the speaker is qualified to speak on the topic, but includes only qualifications pertinent to the topic and the audience.

To see how this works, let’s pretend we are going to introduce John Doe who will speak on automotive safety to a group of driver education students. Using the T-I-S method, an introduction might sound something like this:
“Good evening and welcome to tonight’s symposium, titled ‘Arrive Alive.’ We all need to know how to operate a motor vehicle safely, because statistically out of the 40 people here tonight, 10 of us will be involved in as serious accident during our life. By reducing the number of accidents we not only save lives, but we lower the cost of insurance premiums.

“Our speaker is the former director of the National Transportation Council. He designed and patented the first three-point safety belt and was instrumental in developing the airbag, now a mandatory requirement for all passenger cars. He has been a licensed driver since age 11 and has never been involved in an accident. Please help me welcome John Doe!”

Great suggestion and well worth remembering,

Presentation advice from Edward R. Tuft

Edward R. Tufte is a informational graphics guru and does near infinate amounts of public speaking. Here is a run down of some of hi tips for speaking:

Show up early
Something good is bound to happen—if there’s no need to fix a mechanical problem or resolve a room conflict, you can always mingle with the audience.

How to start

• Clearly tell the audience: What the problem is, who cares, and what your solution is.
• Write out your own introduction.

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