Talking It Up

I had the pleasurable opportunity tonight of speaking with a roomful of professional people keen to hear what I had to say about public presentation – talking up an idea, a project, yourself. My take on presentation is to emphasise the human presence in the communication ‘transaction’ and to leave an audience feeling positive, enthused, possibly even refreshed and motivated to learn more or to get cracking on a job.

It’s always salutary to take questions afterwards; it provides food for thought and perhaps further investigation.  One that emerged tonight was why I advised not distributing handouts before the presentation, and I think the group was fairly evenly divided on this one; some liked them, others not. My take is that they are distracting, and that the focus in the room should be on the presenter who has a ’story’ to tell – why let the audience know the ending too soon? In addition, I often find handouts are printed copies of a slide-show presentation, and given the style of my own – heavy on image and light on text – such a handout would be pointless. Instead I provide the ‘paper’ of the presentation as an online document for downloading. It’s doing my bit for environmental sustainability too!

What’s your thinking on this one? To handout or not to handout? Which do you prefer and what are the best kind?