Notes for public speakers

I’ve been attending quite a few conferences lately — a condition that seems to afflict academics and professionals in their 40s and 50s — giving me the chance both to make and to listen to presentations on various subjects of literary interest. That means talking and listening to other writers from all over the world, which can be as thrilling and as informative as either your wedding night or watching paint dry on the wall.

While there’s no doubt that there’s important knowledge to be gained at these conferences, the practical truth is that half the time, sitting in the gallery, your thoughts are elsewhere halfway around the planet, because the speaker simply isn’t connecting with you. It’s a sad waste of the speaker’s effort and the listener’s time, something that could be prevented if speakers are as mindful of their audience as they are of their message.

This is probably one reason why academics make poor politicians: they’re used to mumbling and droning among themselves about the most obscure subjects. Given a larger, more diverse crowd to address, they retreat into their competencies — their comfort zones.

Some people, you might say, are born speakers — and yes, some of them not only become politicians but make great despots. Those who aren’t could yet improve, without having to resort to the reputed method of Demosthenes of speaking with pebbles in his mouth. If you’ve seen The King’s Speech, you’ll see how it’s possible to correct even the worst of speech defects.

I’ve been told that I have a good speaking voice — a blessing all the males in the family got from our late dad — but voice is hardly the make-or-break factor in public speaking. It helps, but if you have nothing to say or are saying something badly, then silence will be preferable to your boring baritone.

What I’d like to deal with today isn’t so much a problem of the tongue as of the mind, having to do with making sure that your message is getting across to its intended recipient.

Herewith, some tips for the presentation-challenged:

Mind the audience. Establish, even before the event, who and how many they are, where they come from, what their special or unique circumstances are, so you can tailor your pitch to their realities and expectations. Audiences need to feel relaxed to be receptive, and only when they’re receptive can you introduce serious or significant ideas for their consideration.

There are easy, casual ways of getting the audience to relax — typically with a joke, but jokes can backfire if they’re poorly delivered or poorly chosen. If you have to talk about yourself, do so self-deprecatingly. Listeners bristle and stiffen if they sense aloofness or arrogance.

I think the best way to connect with the audience early on is to find and acknowledge some commonality — the weather, their discomfort, the lunch menu, the pigs in the yard, last night’s starlit sky. And then find another point of connection between that and your subject proper, and you’re on your way.

Mind your presentation. This is what you came to the event for, something in which you’re presumably an expert, so you should be able to adjust it to suit the audience and the speaking environment. By this I mean adjusting the coverage, the focus, the pitch, and the manner of delivering the speech or the lecture. Generally, younger audiences prefer shorter, punchier, bullet-point-type presentations with a few sharp concepts or key phrases they can walk away with. Older listeners appreciate slower but deeper explanations that touch on something they already know or think they know.

I strongly believe that any presentation should bring some new knowledge or insight to the table — even if it may disturb the audience, which is all part of the process of advancing knowledge. There’s a way of doing this without being offensive, of engaging the listeners’ intelligence rather than just their emotions. But good speakers should be ready and willing to tell people what they should hear, beyond just what they want to hear, which is the way of the demagogue.

Mind your medium. I’ll go straight to one of the big problems in presentations today, which might be expressed in the question: PowerPoint or no PowerPoint? Programs like PowerPoint (and its Mac counterpart, Keynote) have been a great help in giving presentations a visual dimension — which should therefore make them instantly more interesting, right? Wrong.

I’ve seen too many speakers use PowerPoint in the most numbing of all possible ways: flashing the bare text of the speech onscreen and reading practically every word. If that’s all you’re going to do, why even bother?

I’ve used Keynote on occasion — such as when I’m introducing Philippine culture and history to a foreign audience — but most of the time, I prefer to rely on my voice and on eye contact to carry the written word across. Some topics lend themselves to PowerPoint more naturally than others. (I’ve been known to say, perhaps too archly, that no self-respecting novelist uses PowerPoint, but of course we don’t talk about novels all the time.)

One of the best uses of PowerPoint that I’ve seen so far was Isagani Cruz’s presentation in Perth a couple of weeks ago on “Jose Rizal Online,” having to do with Rizal’s role and representation in the digital age. Using no notes or written script but obviously thoroughly familiar with the material, Gani moved effortlessly through a series of images and Websites, reintroducing Rizal and the issues surrounding his heroism to a rapt audience that included members of the local chapter of the Knights of Rizal. Again, mastery of subject is key, not technology.

Mind the time. One of the worst offenses of people giving talks and reading papers — particularly in a symposium setting, with three or four people sitting on a panel — is to go over one’s allotted time, thereby eating into the next fellow’s portion, or into the Q&A (what we like to call the “open forum”). Some speakers “cheat” by giving long introductions to what they’re about to read; after three minutes of chit-chat about this and that, they then launch into their 30-minute lecture, blithely ignoring the hapless moderator, who’s been waving “Time! Time!” since the 15-minute mark.

Going overtime is not only an act of disrespect toward the other speakers and the audience, suggesting that your time is more valuable than theirs; to me, it actually suggests insecurity and inexperience, as if you were so desperate for attention that you just had to hog the stage.

When I direct a symposium or chair a panel, I always request speakers to rehearse their presentations beforehand (yes, maybe even read their papers aloud in the bathroom), so they can tell how they’re doing, time-wise. I also ask them to pre-test their PowerPoint presentations using the available equipment, so no time is wasted setting things up.

Writing a speech or lecture is difficult enough; but getting it across so that it resonates with the audience should be well worth the extra effort.

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E-mail me at penmanila@yahoo.com and check out my blog at www.penmanila.ph.