Who is your audience *really* listening to?

Introduction

In my career, I've presented in front of a wide variety of audiences. From wedding speeches and dissertation defenses to 4-star generals and middle school classrooms, I've seen it all. I've seen audiences pick fights with the presenters in Academia, and I've seen student's eyes light up during that elusive "Aha!" moment.

A picture is worth 999 words (the last word belongs the the presenter)

During my years as an undergraduate, I was dating a journalist...for clarity, let's call her "Rebecca". During our courtship, Rebecca and I had many different conversations; one of the most frequent subjects of those conversations, though, was her main passion: journalism.

The topic of journalism was interesting to me as well. At the time, I was a photographer for the same college paper that Rebecca wrote articles for. While none of my photographs ever headlined for any of her articles, it led to one very interesting question: when people first pick up a newspaper, which element draws their attention more? The words of the article or the picture depicting the event?

Needless to say, we strongly disagreed on the subject. As the photographer, I believed that the image captures the audience's attention. After all, "a picture is worth a thousand words" and gives the audience an immediate impression of the word jungle they're about to wade through. On the other hand, Rebecca argued, headline is made of words, and the context of the image is useless without the article. Needless to say, Rebecca and I are not together anymore.

The structure of your slides

For the sake of illustration, let's say Rebecca and I were both asked to make a presentation over point of view. If we take each argument to its logical conclusion, Rebecca's presentation should consist entirely of words, and my presentation should consist entirely of images. Realistically, neither is true -- many presentation formats, including newspapers, take the best of both worlds. Often times, images are included when they can boost the article's impact, and use words when no other method will suffice. This begs another question: How many images should your presentation use? Even more fundamental than that, where is my audience looking when I present?

The answer to the latter question will differ from audience member to audience member -- some people learn better when they read material, and others learn better when they listen to the same material being read aloud. In the end, though, a presentation is two sources of information happening at once. It is not easy for anyone to listen to the speaker while reading; their minds tend to either read the words of the slide and block out the presenter -or- listen to the presenter and loosely follow along with the words on the slide. So what do we do?

In many of my presentations, I tend to bias my slides heavily towards images. If the audience has no words to read, they cannot block out what I am saying. In the case that I have to use words (in very technical presentations, for example), I'll point out early in my presentation that the words I say will closely match the words on my slide -- there's no use in reading the slides unless you want to read them later. In doing so, I'm trying to bias the audience's attention towards my words and my verbal presentation. This approach has a few advantages: (1) There's no pressure to reproduce every detail in my slides, (2) fewer words means fewer mistakes in spelling and grammar, (3) it gives me the flexibility to transition between slides using anecdotes that I have not included in writing, and (4) it enables me to grab the audience's attention without leaving the first slide.

Interestingly, statistics from the International Listening Association seem to support my hypothesis. The statistics suggest that 85% of our learning is derived from listening -- clearly, verbal communication plays a big role in information transmittal. Unfortunately, the same statistics indicate that listeners can only recall 50% of what they heard immediately after hearing someone say it. The words you say during your presentation, then, must be impactful, concise, and memorable.

Conclusion

Each one of you reading this article will have a different presentation style. Some of you may prefer to work with images more -- they can be explained detail by detail, they're easy to make as the single focus of conversation, and, more simply, you "think" in images. Others still may prefer to work with words -- they can be italicized, made into bullet points, and you can cover them one-by-one in a logical fashion.

The presentation style is up to you. Try not to rush and remember that your presentation has flexibility. YOU are they key to your success; the more time you spend on preparation and becoming comfortable with your material, the easier it will become to deal with unexpected circumstances during your presentation. We're all in this together, and I'm pulling for you.

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