In an interview with Olivia Mitchell, Rowan Manahan mentioned that during an effective presentation, the audience should be “captivated without knowing why”.
When you do a PowerPoint presentation without those dreadful bullet points, you will find that your audience will pay attention to you and at the end of the presentation, they will come up to you and compliment you on keeping them awake. But very rarely will they notice that they have not been bombarded with bullet points. They just know they you have captivated them and they don’t know why!
This happened to me when I did my 2-day seminar on environmental regulations in southern California a month ago. The topic of environmental regulations can be deadly dull. An attendee came up to me at the end of the two day seminar and said:” I don’t know what you did. But I was paying attention to you all two days.”
So – try it. Try it without bullet points and see the results! You will like it and your audience will like it even more.
I was watching the Governors Conference yesterday on CSPAN. There was a speaker – a former ambassador – who gave a talk on infrastructure. Cannot tell you what he was talking about because all I saw was his shinny bald head as he READ his entire “talk” from written notes.
Excellence in Presentations 