Presentation Skills: Speechwriting, Slides and Delivery Specialization

“99% presentations suck!”, — said Apple former evangelist Guy Kawasaki in 2005. Up to now the situation hasn’t improved yet. Why?

Most public speaking courses focus on “how” instead of “what & why”. How to stand, walk and talk during delivery with little attention paid to “what” — the quality of storytelling itself. Thereby a usual result is a looking slightly confident speaker with mesmerizing voice delivering an obscure mess of facts, figures and claims. In this course we take a more systematic approach, focusing on the content. How to structure your ideas, facts and data into a logical convincing story using a narrative structure. This course covers fundamentals of scriptwriting, packing, argumentation and language. This course is not about how to fabricate a catching tale, but rather how to structure your ideas, facts and data into an interesting story you are going to tell during your presentation.

“Powerpoint slides are like children: no matter how ugly they are, you’ll think they’re beautiful if they’re yours” — Scott Adams, author of the comic strip “Dilbert”. Due to this cause or another, it’s a huge stress to look at most Powerpoint slides. Depending on the “design” skills of the speaker and audience’s taste slides create different emotions from a slight annoyance to physical sickness.

But that is not the worst thing. The worst thing is that instead of improving the presentation such slides confuse the audience, distract it and finally oblige the speaker to explain them rather than being quite self-explanatory. The goal of this course is to change that by equipping learners with a set of tools to create simple, clear and aesthetic slides which improve the presentation of the speaker. The course covers universal design principles, templates, colors, typefaces, slides’ typography, use of photos and pictograms, composition rules and ways to create clear and meaningful charts and diagrams. This course is not a PowerPoint fundamentals course. You should have a basic knowledge of either Microsoft PowerPoint or Apple Keynote software. Don’t meddle, make your slides matter.

Mumbling, stumbling, worrying, trembling, sweating and fearing are the outcomes of the low delivery skills.

In this course, we are not going to teach you how to replicate the best bits and traits of the acknowledged speakers. Dumb replication of someone’s successful behavior may help you only to an extent. That extent is the situation. When you are facing a different context, a different situation such “skills” might not work at all. Instead, we try to get to the core issues that stand behind the troubles with delivery and start honing your skills from there. Topics we are going to cover: 1) Preparation — how to deal with fear and anxiety 2) Voice, pace and gesture — how to speak, stand and move. 3) Getting live feedback — how to interact with the audience. 4) Taking Q&A and Improvisation So don’t meddle, start the course and make your delivery better.