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Presentation Tips: How to Persuade Your Audience

Sep 24, 2022

It’s a feeling we’re all too familiar with. By the time the presenter flicks to the second slide in the deck, we realise: we’re trapped. We’re going to have to sit here while someone reads a deck of slides to us. In the time it takes the presenter to finish reading that slide, we’ve counted the number of participants and calculated the man-hours wasted. By the fifth slide, our minds have turned to other tasks our time would be better spent on. We may feel bored, annoyed, or even frustrated, but we’re certainly not feeling persuaded by the presentation. We’re barely listening. What a wasted opportunity.

This article gives you practical tips for producing more effective presentations when you have valuable content to convey and a precious opportunity to share it. It also provides examples of how we applied these presentation tips when designing TWi’s technical writing training course.

Importance of Resonating

Resonating with your audience is important when it comes to high-stake presentations. Whatever the subject or context of your presentation, whether you’re explaining a new concept, detailing data, or rolling out a new strategy, there is an implied element of persuasion. At the end of your presentation, you want your audience to understand, to be convinced, or even determined to get involved.

You can have the most essential piece of information, the most revolutionary idea, but if no one is listening, it won’t have the effect you were hoping for.

When done well, presentations are a powerful communication tool. However, few presenters invest the time required to think about how best to convey their message through a combination of what they say and what they display.

Competing Senses

During a presentation, the audience has to cope with competing senses: looking at the presenter, listening to the presenter, and looking at the slides. The visual always beats the audio. Therefore, if a slide contains lots of text, the audience is reading and no one is listening.

If you can achieve your goal by having your audience read your slides, then you shouldn’t be gathering people together and giving a presentation. Send them your bullet lists – you’ll save everyone a lot of time. However, if you want to persuade people or bring about any kind of change, it’s worth investing time in developing more effective presentations.

Presentation Best Practice

While researching presentation best practices for TWi’s writing skills training courses*, we came across Nancy Duarte. In her book, Resonate, she reveals the power of incorporating stories into presentations and describes a new approach to making them persuasive.

Presentation tips: include a call to adventure and a call to action in your presentation

Effective presentations invite the audience to adventure and action. Photo by Tommaso Fornoni unsplash.com/@tommytop.

Like all good stories, Duarte’s presentations have a distinct beginning, middle, and end, but with two crucial turning points:

  • Call to adventure
  • Call to action

The next sections elaborate on Duarte’s approach and illustrate how it influenced the design of our training courses, followed by some presentation tips.

Call to Adventure

By repeatedly moving between a description of what is (making it as unappealing as possible) and what could be (making it as enticing as possible), we hold the audience’s attention and persuade them that what we are describing is desirable.

For example, at the beginning of our module on audience analysis, we talk about content written from our perspective as writers, instead of that of the audience. We compare it to meeting a self-centred person at a party. The kind of person who, no matter where the conversation goes, always finds a way of bringing it back to themselves. It can be hard to stay interested in what they are saying. We then describe content that addresses the needs of the audience and how much more effective it is at holding their attention.

Call to Action

Following on from the vivid description of the potential outcome, by clearly and specifically stating the actions that the audience must take to achieve it, we persuade them to apply these strategies.

By the end of the module on audience analysis, we have called on the trainees to always try to resonate with their audience and give them the tools to do so.

Presentation Tips: Content Development

For anyone who regularly makes presentations, we thoroughly recommend reading the finer details as laid out in Resonate. In the meantime, we’ve pulled pearls gleaned from Duarte and other gurus into the following set of presentation tips for structuring and scripting your content:

  1. Think about your audience and what you want them to do with your information.
  2. Break your information up into ideas or individual points.
  3. Find a logical structure to connect your ideas.
  4. Write a script for what you want to say about each idea. Write in a natural, conversational tone that reflects your own voice.
  5. Develop links and hooks between your ideas so your presentation flows.
  6. Create a slide for each idea or individual point. Think of the slides as a backdrop to enhance the listener experience. See our slide design tips below.
  7. Practice the script, the tone, and the pace. The better you know your script, the less you’ll rely on it during the presentation. Instead of reading, you can then make eye contact with your audience, connect with them, and engage them in a more real and effective way.

Presentation Tips: Slide Design

To deliver your content more effectively, use these presentation tips to design slides that avoid distracting your audience’s attention away from what you are saying:

  1. Keep text to an absolute minimum.
  2. If you find yourself creating a bullet list, stop! If it’s important enough to put on a slide, it’s important enough to have a slide of its own. Separate those bullet items and create an impactful slide for each point.
  3. Find a simple, powerful image that supports your script. Linking content to an interesting image intrigues the audience enough that they tune in to find out what you’re saying and helps the audience remember the content for longer. For example, we use this image as a backdrop while speaking about removing bloated language from technical content. Later in the course, while discussing the power of recall of an image, we display the image again. So far, everyone has recalled the key points we made about bloated language. 
    Presentation tips: use simple, powerful images to convey ideas effectively

    Simple, powerful images convey ideas effectively

     

  4. Display a memorable quotation that underlines the key point you’re making. Resist the temptation to read out the quote: the audience reads it at a glance and it has more impact as a backdrop to what you are saying. In our training course, we use this quotation as a backdrop while speaking about the importance of using concise language.
    Presentation tips: use memorable quotes underline key points

    Memorable quotes underline key points

     

  5. When displaying facts and figures, include metaphors or real-life examples in your script. Facts are vital, but they can be flat. Make them persuasive and memorable by using stories to engage your audience and illustrate the point you want the facts to make.

The next time you make a presentation, resist the urge to open PowerPoint and lock everything into a series of bullet lists. Integrate a call to adventure, try our tips for effective slides, and finish with a call to action. By investing a little bit of time, and applying these presentation tips, you can create and deliver presentations that are interesting, engaging, and persuasive.

Further Resources on Effective Presentations

*TWi develops courses tailored to the needs of individuals who are involved in the delivery of technical documentation. Participants typically include a mix of quality, development, and engineering managers, subject matter experts, and inexperienced information developers. Our courses are designed to provide practical, hands-on experience in the most relevant areas of content development.

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