Free from Harvard comes this excellent video series on public speaking skills, by Professor Patrick Winston. It has a different focus than many similar resources: instead of the corporate PowerPoint-driven presentation, he discusses the lecture format of universities. But the core principles of how to “give a talk” are  of course the  same. The video is nicely broken up into convenient 2-4 minute chapters.

Hat tip to soulsoup.

A little different take, with a refreshingly informal register. Great advice on what is all too often overlooked: hardcore practice.

Nice interview with substantive answers. The answers are a nice length for teaching input and discussion - I’d probably choose a few and break them up and use one to three for a class, or more for higher levels.

Best answer for our BE students:

You should rehearse at least three to four times all the way through and rehearse the first three minutes at least ten times or more. You also need to do a formal dress rehearsal in front of a real audience such as coworkers who can give you constructive criticism.In some ways good presenting is like good writing, you’ve got to pare it down and dump the superfluous and the non-essential. But since we are so close to the material it is hard for us to see what works and what does not, or what is repetitive, etc. This is why you cannot only rehearse alone. You’ve got to rehearse in front of others so that you can experience the nerves, the blank stares, etc.

The more you rehearse the more the fear of the unknown is removed. The more the fear is removed, the more confident you will become. As you become more confident you will feel more relaxed and your confidence will shine through. The thing about confidence is that it’s impossible to fake, but with practice you will indeed become a confident speaker.

Many of our students work in multinationals, and so have limited design choices because they receive a PowerPoint “deck” they have to follow. I wonder at what point the stricter client companies will realize how they squander their intellectual assets by constraining them this way - our students basically just plug the numbers in pre-formatted slides. It’d be great if the culture moved towards allowing more flexibility in presentations.

In my experience, most of the time our students are crunching numbers until the last minute, so a full run-through is often difficult to pull off. What I do is help them develop and practice the introduction and conclusion many times, and group classes are perfect for the “formal dress rehearsal in front of a real audience such as coworkers” that Reynolds recommends. We also make sure the key messages for each section are clearly established, and practice the transitions, intros, and conclusions for each section as well.

From the wonderful xkcd.com.

Here’s an interesting post on Found|READ on being a “Tactician” vs being an “Inspirer”, and how that is reflected in the presentation styles of Clinton and Obama respectively, with links to video of both. This could provide some great class discussion, and Obama’s speech is masterful as always.

Also interesting is how Obama focuses his message: it’s about the audience. Rarely do you see a politician decline to talk about himself or herself. In Obama’s message the key word is “you”.

Another comment on Obama’s communication style:

Yet if Clinton’s answers come off as well-intended lectures, Obama is offering soaring sermons and generational opportunity. In 1960, the articulate Adlai Stevenson compared his own oratory unfavorably with John F. Kennedy’s. “Do you remember,” Stevenson said, “that in classical times when Cicero had finished speaking, the people said, ‘How well he spoke,’ but when Demosthenes had finished speaking, the people said, ‘Let us march.’ ” At this hour, Obama is the Democrats’ Demosthenes.

Intercultural communication note: the context of these speeches is a political campaign in the US, so naturally there is a fair amount of nationalistic…I guess “fervor” could be the word. This may be off putting to some students, especially in Europe, where the culture of political communication is more emotionally restrained in my experience (and read the comments here.)

Here’s the personal “Top ten best (and worst) communicators for 2007” of Burt Decker of Decker Communications.

There are links to video examples for many of the presentations cited, including some truly disastrous performances, which would be good “awareness raising” input and tasks in class.

Note: some of the examples won’t be well known to people outside the US or US culture, but many are, such as Al Gore and Steve Jobs.

Once again via Guy Kawasaki, a collection of the “Top 10 Best Presentations Ever” from the folks at KnowHR. There are some classics here, and a nice variety. Delicioius goodness for business English teachers and learners.

From the inimitable Guy Kawasaki, an analysis of an amazingly powerful presentation. The speaker is Marjora Carter, and is short enough that it’s easy to use in class as a model. Together with the 15 tactics that Guy riffs on, this is some super sweet learning content for more advanced learners.

Most of our business English clients are presenting from the typical corporate 120-slide .ppt deck, and don’t have the flexibility to use many of these techniques the same way that Ms Carter does - the company culture and audience expectations are very different. But with some careful modification, many of these tools can add impact to even the most “choreagraphed-from-HQ” presentation templates. And you could make the argument that the constraints inherent in pre-organized decks are actually liberating - the only way to kick the audience in the butt is to use these types of rhetorical tools.

It’s great to watch the speaker get into her rhythm - she’s quite nervous at the start and reading off her notes, but once she hits stride - watch out. Despite her nerves, she is so real as she presents - so absolutely present - that the sustained standing ovation she recieves is hardly surprising. This connection with the audience should encourage our lower level students to worry less about grammatical accuracy and nerves and more about connecting with the audience as a fellow human in a way that transcends language skill.

Now, the extent that you can help students do that in a presentation about supply chain logistics will depend on the Ss’ passion for the topic and ability to connect it to the big picture. And while that may depend on the company’s mission, unless your student works for, say, big tobacco, everything that improves execution helps deliver value to people, which after all is what it’s all about.

Last year I had a great “helped-the-client-kick-butt” moment with a presentation on, yes, supply chain logistics. She was an ALTE B.1 or so and worked for a pharmaceutical lab. We had a 60-slide deck to work with, and so we focused on the intro and conclusion as the best places for her individuality to stand out. We scripted her introduction to connect with her passion and commitment to her job, and we did it in 20 seconds and without intruding on the deck (her audience was upper management for logistics from HQ and wouldn’t have approved of any deviation). We used three off-deck slides, photos with no text, presented Lessig-style for only 3 seconds each as she spoke. Here’s what we wrote for her intro - slide underlined and speech in italics (name changed):

Title slide

Good morning everyone. My name’s Maria Fernandez and I’m the logistics coordinator here in Venezuela. First off I’d like to thank you for giving me the opportunity to show you the work we’re doing in this challenging economic and regulatory environment.

Before we move to the deck, I’d also like to say one thing. Like everyone is this room, I’m passionate about the details of getting our raw material from Ireland to our plant. But sometimes my focus on these details hides the true reason behind our job, and I want to share with you what I do when that happens…

Black slide

Pause…when I lose sight of the reason we’re doing this I just remind myself that every minute we save, and every dollar we squeeze out of the process, are precious resources that we can send here

Photo of company research headquarters

…so that we can discover and manufacture these…

Photo of company’s breakthrough drug

…so we can save the life of her.

Photo of 2-year-old child in hospital

Pause…so let’s get started and see how we can best do this.

First slide of deck

We pulled the photos off the company website so they were somewhat familiar to the audience, and the little girl was of course a real patient and real case. It took about twenty seconds and it framed the rest of her presentation in way that “made meaning” and connected her with her audience in a way that her peers didn’t - she recieved a tremendous amount of praise for what could have been just another of the 8 presentations that day. It doesn’t always work out this well for our students, but when it does, it’s great.

Here’s a nice post on eliminating fillers (the “uh”’s and “um”’s) from your Ss’ presentations. Mother Tongue Annoyances is a new blog for me and looks like it might be interesting, and although personally I get bored with the grammar police, there seems to be a lot of content here that’ll be useful for our clients. Via Visual Being. (BTW Visual Being did you ever retract/correct your silly attack on Kathy Sierra?)

Via Guy Kawasaki, here’s a cool resource for presentations skills that looks like it has some useful clips on different examples and presentation styles.