Archive for the ‘notes’ Category

Scatter Your Notes

Friday, December 14th, 2007

I am a big believer that audiences reward speakers who don’t appear to be reading from scripts or notes. The keyword here is “appear.” I also know that most people, me included, don’t have an extra 40 hours a week to memorize speeches.

That’s why I use notes for my speeches. As I have written about before, I make sure my notes fit on a single sheet of paper, no more than three words across, and written in large type. This way I never have to touch the notes, pick them up, turn them over or hunch over to see them.

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Don’t Read, Even If Your Audience Can’t See You

Thursday, August 23rd, 2007

If you’ve been asked to deliver a presentation via a teleseminar or a webinar, this is likely to be your first reaction:

“Great! This will be simple. I can just read my script or PowerPoint. No one will see my face or my eyes. No one will know. This will be a piece of cake!”

Wrong!

Your audience can hear you reading. This is a big problem. If you haven’t rehearsed your presentation dozens of times or unless you are a professional newscaster, your reading will sound awful. Here’s why:

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Contract and Shorten

Thursday, August 9th, 2007

Sooner or later, if you are a busy executive, someone will thrust a script in your face and ask you to read it. It may be audio for a teleseminar, a webcast, an audio book intro, or a radio or TV Public Service Announcement.

Here are several tips to help you make the best of a hurried situation.

1. Convert (quickly in your own mind) everything into contractions. Say “I’ll” instead of “I will,” say “don’t” instead of “do not.” Chances are your script was written by someone who isn’t a professional script writer. That means it was written for the eye and not the ear. If you don’t use contractions, you will sound stuffy, pompous, and non-conversational.

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How to Prepare for A Major Speech You Must give In the Next 24 Hours

Tuesday, June 12th, 2007

On no! You have to give a big speech on major trends facing your business and industry to a large group of important people tomorrow! In less than 24 hours! And you haven’t started preparing yet.

What do you do?

Step one. Spend one hour with a colleague or two brainstorming major themes and ideas you’d like to discuss. Try to write down as many themes as you can in one sentence or less. Don’t debate these themes and don’t flesh them out. Don’t analyze or criticize. Just blurt out and write down as many interesting ideas you can think of that relate to your area of expertise and that would also be of interest to your audience.

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Make Your Notes BIG!!!

Friday, May 25th, 2007

It’s fine to use notes and outlines when you are giving a speech—in fact I encourage people to do so. But the less noticeable your notes are to your audience, the better.

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