7 Steps To Giving A Great Presentation
by Sebastian Sharp
The 7 Steps
Chapter 6. Write a script
Is this your company presentation?
Definition of Success
What is your definition of success? What kind of presenter do you want to be? Do you want to try to be a great one? Do you want to make your audience sit up, listen intently to you & react to what you’re saying & what you’re asking them to do? Do you want to see a result from your presentation, to see it have an impact on the world?
You’ll Get Haters
If you do then I have some bad news for you. You are going to get & have haters. The people who think all this kind of thing is unnecessary. The ones who think you should just carry on as before, that it’s too much trouble to change, that things are ok just the way they are. If you try to change, people will hate on you & you’ll have to endure it & work through it before you can be successful.
Where’s My Notepad?
Here’s some examples of when I’ve had haters. I never print out my presentations. I don’t want anyone to see them before I give them & I don’t want to carry around a huge pile of paper. Everything is on my iPad. One time I was presenting in London & my audience of 1 was furious because there was no copy of the presentation. Not because he wanted the presentation, but because he wanted something to write his notes on.
Can’t Afford Excel?
I don’t make presentations in PowerPoint. Using Apple products means using the Apple software Keynote. I find it simpler so it helps create simpler presentations. Sometimes I make the slides in other apps then put them into Keynote as pictures. I’ve even hand drawn slides. One young audience members was horrified at the hand drawn charts; ‘can’t your company afford excel?’, he exclaimed.
Is That It?
Some have been upset at the simplicity of the presentations I give, which make a point rather than dump data. The absence of the usual mass of numbers & words has been too much for several audience members who thought I was trying to hide some vital information or as one put it at the end of a meeting, ‘is that it, is that really your company presentation?’.
Writing A Scrupt
A Clear Story
Once you’ve brainstormed your theme which might be something like how to help people make a great presentation, you can move on to writing a full script. This will help you in several ways. It will help you to come up with a clear story or argument, it will help you to make your story flow in a way your audience can easily understand & itt will help you to present your presentation later.
The Main Topics
To make your script you need to divide up your theme into acts like a play, or like the chapters in a book. If your theme was the 7 steps to make a great presentation then the topics would be each of the 7 steps. When we make a presentation and have decided on a theme, the topics are usually quite logical and easy to decide. Write them out as a list.
Which Odd Number?
When it comes to how many topics, I like to stick to an odd number, & not too high an odd number otherwise you are starting to write a novel. Why an odd number? Like 3 it just works better. For a short speech which is a common format for me, it’s usually 3, for a presentation you can use 5 & for a longer presentation 7-9. The longer the time you have, the more topics you use.
Shorter or Longer
You can vary the length of your presentation by adding or taking away detail. For example a journey could include traveling there, what you did & the traveling back, 3 topics. Or it could have traveling there, what arriving was like, what you did there, what you ate there & the journey back (5 topics), or planning the trip, travel, arrival, first impressions, what you did, food, travel back (7 topics).
Like Newspaper Headlines
Think of your topics as newspaper headlines. You want to use them to grab audience attention. You can be creative & imaginative about how to make your topic intriguing. Sometimes it’s easier, for example with the first of the 7 steps, make a calendar, brainstorm a theme & write a script are already catchy & unusual in the context of presentations.
Your Sub Topics
The next step
The next step is to expand your script by dividing your main topics into sub topics. This is the way to explain yourself on each topic, to go into the detail & depth. Your sub topics will also be quite logical. For example if the topic is making a calendar, you need to explain that it begins with the event, works backwards & usually gives 2 days for each step.
Rule of 3
For a normal presentation go back again to the rule of 3 & break your topic down into 3 subtopics. As we mentioned before, the rule of 3 is a writing tool to break up your story into easy to remember parts, like beginning, middle & end. You could expand to more if you needed to do a longer presentation, but 3 just works so well.
Story In Detail
This is the opportunity to really tell your story in detail & as you fill in the subtopics, you will really start to feel your script coming to life. You may even find as you go through this process that new ideas come up. The sub topics should be quite easy to fill as long as you did your brainstorming and carefully selected your theme first.
Individual Presentation Parts
You should be able to write down the subtopics pretty quickly without thinking too much. Don’t worry, yes you can also adjust them as the arc of the presentation becomes clearer. Once this part of the process is finished, if you used the rule of 3, you will now have 3 to 9 topics with 3 subtopics each, a total of 9 to 27 individual parts to your presentation.
Short & Catchy
Now we come to the wording of the script. You want to make sure the presentation is simple & easy to remember, you don’t want too many words. I’ve usually found that if I try to write something freely, it ends up too long. You can achieve short & catchy with the help of technology. Can you think of a modern writing tool that focuses on short & catchy?
Write In Twitter
Me & Donald
You might have guessed that the short & catchy technology you can use is... Twitter. Yes I recommend you write your whole presentation script by composing tweets. I’ve been doing this for years. It’s been so long that I’ve probably written more words in twitter than even the most famously frequent tweeter, President Donald Trump.
Copy & Paste
I recommend you literally open up your Twitter app if you have one, set up an account if you don’t, & compose the words for each of your 9 to 27 points in tweets which you then copy paste into your presentation script. This may sound crazy, but you’ll get used to it. Each tweet is about 55 words so you will end up with a script of 500 to 1500 words & at 100 words a minute that’s a 5-15 minutes Presentation
Be Very Disciplined
Be very disciplined. The 7 steps is all about a disciplined approach to presenting, to get the result you are looking for. That’s the great thing about using twitter to write, it forces you to be very disciplined. Act like you will send the tweet, try not to go over the limit, edit to make your script fit into the maximum characters so it is even more crisp & precise.
Copy To Evernote
When I’m writing my script, I like to use another app, Evernote. This is a shareable notes app where you can keep a library of documents, photos, files & notes. You can share it with your team, so others can read & edit your work. It also has a great screen formatting where the text fits the iPhone screen perfectly. Copy & paste the tweets in one by one as you write.
Then Hey Presto
One of the great things about Evernote is it works across all your devices, computer if you have one, iPad & iPhone. You can work on the script on different devices at different times. I especially love using the iPhone to work on scripts because it goes with me everywhere. Finished? Hey presto. Like magic, you now have your full presentation script.
Definition of Success
What is your definition of success? What kind of presenter do you want to be? Do you want to try to be a great one? Do you want to make your audience sit up, listen intently to you & react to what you’re saying & what you’re asking them to do? Do you want to see a result from your presentation, to see it have an impact on the world?
You’ll Get Haters
If you do then I have some bad news for you. You are going to get & have haters. The people who think all this kind of thing is unnecessary. The ones who think you should just carry on as before, that it’s too much trouble to change, that things are ok just the way they are. If you try to change, people will hate on you & you’ll have to endure it & work through it before you can be successful.
Where’s My Notepad?
Here’s some examples of when I’ve had haters. I never print out my presentations. I don’t want anyone to see them before I give them & I don’t want to carry around a huge pile of paper. Everything is on my iPad. One time I was presenting in London & my audience of 1 was furious because there was no copy of the presentation. Not because he wanted the presentation, but because he wanted something to write his notes on.
Can’t Afford Excel?
I don’t make presentations in PowerPoint. Using Apple products means using the Apple software Keynote. I find it simpler so it helps create simpler presentations. Sometimes I make the slides in other apps then put them into Keynote as pictures. I’ve even hand drawn slides. One young audience members was horrified at the hand drawn charts; ‘can’t your company afford excel?’, he exclaimed.
Is That It?
Some have been upset at the simplicity of the presentations I give, which make a point rather than dump data. The absence of the usual mass of numbers & words has been too much for several audience members who thought I was trying to hide some vital information or as one put it at the end of a meeting, ‘is that it, is that really your company presentation?’.
Writing A Scrupt
A Clear Story
Once you’ve brainstormed your theme which might be something like how to help people make a great presentation, you can move on to writing a full script. This will help you in several ways. It will help you to come up with a clear story or argument, it will help you to make your story flow in a way your audience can easily understand & itt will help you to present your presentation later.
The Main Topics
To make your script you need to divide up your theme into acts like a play, or like the chapters in a book. If your theme was the 7 steps to make a great presentation then the topics would be each of the 7 steps. When we make a presentation and have decided on a theme, the topics are usually quite logical and easy to decide. Write them out as a list.
Which Odd Number?
When it comes to how many topics, I like to stick to an odd number, & not too high an odd number otherwise you are starting to write a novel. Why an odd number? Like 3 it just works better. For a short speech which is a common format for me, it’s usually 3, for a presentation you can use 5 & for a longer presentation 7-9. The longer the time you have, the more topics you use.
Shorter or Longer
You can vary the length of your presentation by adding or taking away detail. For example a journey could include traveling there, what you did & the traveling back, 3 topics. Or it could have traveling there, what arriving was like, what you did there, what you ate there & the journey back (5 topics), or planning the trip, travel, arrival, first impressions, what you did, food, travel back (7 topics).
Like Newspaper Headlines
Think of your topics as newspaper headlines. You want to use them to grab audience attention. You can be creative & imaginative about how to make your topic intriguing. Sometimes it’s easier, for example with the first of the 7 steps, make a calendar, brainstorm a theme & write a script are already catchy & unusual in the context of presentations.
Your Sub Topics
The next step
The next step is to expand your script by dividing your main topics into sub topics. This is the way to explain yourself on each topic, to go into the detail & depth. Your sub topics will also be quite logical. For example if the topic is making a calendar, you need to explain that it begins with the event, works backwards & usually gives 2 days for each step.
Rule of 3
For a normal presentation go back again to the rule of 3 & break your topic down into 3 subtopics. As we mentioned before, the rule of 3 is a writing tool to break up your story into easy to remember parts, like beginning, middle & end. You could expand to more if you needed to do a longer presentation, but 3 just works so well.
Story In Detail
This is the opportunity to really tell your story in detail & as you fill in the subtopics, you will really start to feel your script coming to life. You may even find as you go through this process that new ideas come up. The sub topics should be quite easy to fill as long as you did your brainstorming and carefully selected your theme first.
Individual Presentation Parts
You should be able to write down the subtopics pretty quickly without thinking too much. Don’t worry, yes you can also adjust them as the arc of the presentation becomes clearer. Once this part of the process is finished, if you used the rule of 3, you will now have 3 to 9 topics with 3 subtopics each, a total of 9 to 27 individual parts to your presentation.
Short & Catchy
Now we come to the wording of the script. You want to make sure the presentation is simple & easy to remember, you don’t want too many words. I’ve usually found that if I try to write something freely, it ends up too long. You can achieve short & catchy with the help of technology. Can you think of a modern writing tool that focuses on short & catchy?
Write In Twitter
Me & Donald
You might have guessed that the short & catchy technology you can use is... Twitter. Yes I recommend you write your whole presentation script by composing tweets. I’ve been doing this for years. It’s been so long that I’ve probably written more words in twitter than even the most famously frequent tweeter, President Donald Trump.
Copy & Paste
I recommend you literally open up your Twitter app if you have one, set up an account if you don’t, & compose the words for each of your 9 to 27 points in tweets which you then copy paste into your presentation script. This may sound crazy, but you’ll get used to it. Each tweet is about 55 words so you will end up with a script of 500 to 1500 words & at 100 words a minute that’s a 5-15 minutes Presentation
Be Very Disciplined
Be very disciplined. The 7 steps is all about a disciplined approach to presenting, to get the result you are looking for. That’s the great thing about using twitter to write, it forces you to be very disciplined. Act like you will send the tweet, try not to go over the limit, edit to make your script fit into the maximum characters so it is even more crisp & precise.
Copy To Evernote
When I’m writing my script, I like to use another app, Evernote. This is a shareable notes app where you can keep a library of documents, photos, files & notes. You can share it with your team, so others can read & edit your work. It also has a great screen formatting where the text fits the iPhone screen perfectly. Copy & paste the tweets in one by one as you write.
Then Hey Presto
One of the great things about Evernote is it works across all your devices, computer if you have one, iPad & iPhone. You can work on the script on different devices at different times. I especially love using the iPhone to work on scripts because it goes with me everywhere. Finished? Hey presto. Like magic, you now have your full presentation script.