Page 107 - Today’s Business Communication; A How-to Guide for the Modern Professional

96 TODAY’S BUSINESS COMMUNICATION

1. When writing your script, imagine you are writing to one person and one person
only. When proofreading your script, put the words “hey, Joe” or “hey, Jane” before
a sentence and read it aloud to yourself. Does it sound like you’re speaking to a
friend?
2. When rehearsing your delivery, imagine you are speaking directly to one person and
one person only. Even if your audience has thousands of people in it, you still must
reach one person at a time.
3. When presenting, avoid looking at your screen if you are using one for projecting
images. Rather, look at one person at a time in your audience and speak directly to
him or her. If you wish, glance at your screen or gesture to it, but never speak to it.
4. When writing, and later when presenting, seek ways to connect emotionally with
your audience.
5. When rehearsing, imagine the one person in your audience who will be the most
difficult to reach. Spend extra time figuring out how best to reach that one hard-to-
reach person (in marketing terms, this person is your target).
6. When speaking, get out from behind the lectern. how many dinner conversations
have you had from behind a lectern?
Figure 7.5 Tips for achieving conversational delivery style

Designing Slides and Decks for Memorable Presentations

Please don’t tell Bill Gates, but we really hate Microsoft’s PowerPoint
software. It isn’t that the product is bad. It’s that the product is awful.
PowerPoint has allowed people with little or no graphic design taste to
create slide presentations. These presentations are sometimes referred to
as “decks.” Many professors and other professionals rely entirely too much
on slides. How so? They simply read what is on their slides (or decks). For
these situations we borrow the term “death by PowerPoint,” because it
describes how these excruciatingly mundane presentations bore people to
death. In this section, we will give you a few pieces of simple advice that
will eliminate most of the errors that create “death by PowerPoint.” For a
detailed treatment of slide and deck design, we recommend the work of
Garr Reynolds, who wrote Presentation Zen, which outlines an approach
where less, much less, is more. If you are a nondesigner like us, then you
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will also find Robin Williams’ book, The Non-Designer’s Design Book, to
be useful.
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Consider the slide in Figure 7.6. It breaks the one rule you should
always follow in slide design: You are the presentation! The slides should
reinforce your message, not hijack it. If your audience can read your
slides, then they have no use for you.
How did the presenter end up with such a wordy slide? The main cul-
prit is sloth. PowerPoint and similar programs are designed with default