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.In fact, some ofthese points are likely to come up in the time left for questions ifstyle is to alternateyou have successfully interested your audience.regularly betweenBecause you are so familiar with your field you may think yourselfthe general and theboring when you slow down your presentation to give your listenersthe time to catch up.You certainly would be boring if you simplyparticular.repeated exactly the same message over and over for three minutes.But if you cleverly approach the same subject from different angles,you will allow the full impact of what you are explaining to becomeprogressively apparent to the audience.Some angles will be moresuccessful with some listeners than with others because they willbe associating your information with different information that they already know.Afterall, association with what we know is the way that most of us learn and retain information.Fortunately, in a spoken presentation, you have much more liberty to repeat yourself thanin a written one.In fact, because readers of written articles can check things out as theygo and pace the rate at which they absorb your information and listeners cannot, you areobliged in a good oral presentation to help the listener to catch up.So, you can summariseas you go.Your summary will allow the listener to reflect on what you have just saidwithout feeling that they may be missing what you are about to say.One successful wayof summarising and, at the same time introducing variety into your style, is to alternateregularly between the general and the particular.A series of details can become dull unlessSCI ENTI FI C WRI TI NG = THI NKI NG I N WORDS82 they are broken up by a generalisation that sums up what all the details mean.Similarly,broad generalisations can be enhanced and clarified by giving specific examples, especiallyones to which a listener is likely to relate, to illustrate the impact of those generalisations.As you talk you will most likely have some visual material to help you, electronic slides,pictures, graphs and tables or sometimes interesting physical material that can act as adramatic visual demonstration.Each of these allows you to reinforce the point that youare making and to give the listener time to draw level with your thinking without yourbeing obviously repetitive.Experienced presenters become skilled at reading the response of their listeners byobserving closely their responses to what is being said.When they notice that attention isbeginning to waver they use this as a signal to move to the nextmajor point.When they reckon that listeners are still coming toterms with the current information and need more time, they slowdown to allow that time before moving on.Slowing or speedingNo one willyour rate of delivery within reasonable limits, of course cankeep the pace of your presentation in unison with the capacity ofcriticise you if youlisteners to follow it.read only if youAll of this may suggest that your presentation should be an adseem to be reading!lib affair, delivered according to your assessment of the audiencerather than according to a pre-planned structure.Not at all.Ifyour talk is to have a good chance of being successful, it must becarefully structured and presented as closely as possible to thatstructure.Minor adjustments to suit the mood and the aptitudeof the audience are fine, but whimsical flights of fancy that cometo mind for the first time in mid-presentation are potential recipes for catastrophes.Youcan never be sure of how long they will take to get across and you will have even lessidea of the effect they will have on the listeners.And once you leave the structure youhave carefully set for yourself, it can be a nightmare trying to recover it again.Even if youhave admired a particularly gifted presenter who appeared to have no notes at all andwho seemed to improvise the whole talk, do not be deceived.If the talk was a good one,it had probably been prepared and rehearsed over and over to polish it to the level thatyou finally witnessed.So, stick to your script, but remember that the impact you make will be lessened if theaudience notices you obviously reading it and thinks that you depend on a prepared script.One strategy is to rehearse the whole talk and commit it entirely to memory so that yougo to the rostrum to deliver it without any obvious notes at all.But, this can be dangerousbecause, without back-up, you can be very vulnerable to even minor lapses of memory orconcentration.A safer option is to take your notes with you.No one will criticise you if youread only if you seem to be reading! The key therefore is to have your notes to help youbut make sure that you do not appear to be reading them.That is not as difficult as it mayfirst seem if you follow three simple guidelines.THI NKI NG AND WRI TI NG BEYOND THE SCI ENTI FI C ARTI CLE83 1.Rehearse your talk so that you know what is in your notes, if not by heart, then wellenough to pick up prompts from a few words rather than needing to read the completenotes.2.Never read and speak simultaneously.Try to spend every moment that you are speakingmaking eye contact with the audience.When you read, read in silence.3.Time your periods of reading to coincide with either the dead time after introducinga new overhead or the end of the delivery of a piece of information that the audiencewill need a few seconds to digest.Your audience will interpret your silence as goodmanners or skilful timing.The chances are that they will be so preoccupied with theirown thoughts that they will not even realise that you are reading the main elements ofthe next part of your delivery.Another option is use audio-visual aids, not only to help the audience but to act as promptsto keep you on track as well.In fact, some audio-visual software allows you to have promptson the screen that you see but not on that seen by the audience.However, the same guidelinesapply.Do not be caught reading text verbatim from the screen.It is even easier for theaudience to catch you out than when you read from notes on a piece of paper.By all means,make what you say reinforce what you have placed in front of your audience to read, and viceversa but use different words and, preferably, a different approach.In any case, the materialon screen should be brief dot points or headings, certainly not long tracts of text, so you willautomatically be obliged to elaborate on them in your own words and so appear spontaneous.Dead timeWe normally think of an audience as a group of people who are there to listen to whatwe have to say.However, the moment that you present them with material on a screenyou are asking them to do two things at once, listen and read.In fact, most people cannotsatisfactorily do these two things simultaneously and you should keep this in mind whenconstructing your presentation
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