I’m going to start this post with an exercise I sometimes do with my students.
Ever tried to get someone to ‘hear’ a tune by humming it? This almost always works okay because there’s enough information about he tune, rhythm, and pitch. However, if you try tapping out the beat with a pencil, its another story entirely. It almost never works. The tapper focuses only on the beat, and cannot convey anything about the melody, pitch, and atmosphere. The listeners are confused and almost never guess the tune being tapped.
When the tapper hums the tune, the listener suddenly hears the connection between the tapping and the melody. They cannot believe that it was ever difficult to hear.
As you gain more knowledge about a subject your ability to communicate goes down. This concept is important for anyone involved in doing a specialized presentation. There is an important balancing act here – you need enough content to be credible but too much might turn the audience off. How do you get a good balance?
A strategy that I use with students on the presentation training course is conversation. The presenter puts up their key slide and get their peers to ask them questions on it. I encourage students to ask any questions – even ones that even feel a little stupid. Often concepts get explained much more clearly than during the presentation run.
I then ask ‘Were you surprised by any of the questions?’ and ‘Did you expect the audience to know more?’. Usually students say that they overestimated how much background knowledge the audience hard in relation to their subject.
Secondly, I always remind students to explain what a graph is showing. For example, ‘One the x axis is the day of the week and on the y axis is how much I sleep’. The line shows how much I sleep over the course of a week.’. I found that so many student did not say what the graph shows before discussing what they think the results mean.
Finally, see if you can find a way to personalize the content. You can tell a short story, ask the audience a question, and even use an interesting image. I’ll post more about these strategies in later!
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