Delivering without pain

Ever since I started relaxing away from official chores two years back, I have been attending quite a number of lectures- some on social topics, some on religion, on sale of insurance &  some on subjects like banking , software testing, cyber crime and on a myriad other matters. Some of these were delivered so well that I got riveted to the speaker and was left with very little time even to observe other trivia. But, some are so lethargic and in such a monotone that the trivia suddenly loomed larger than the topic. The worst was from presentations beamed on screen and a voice reading all the contents, without any emotions (like "Floods in Bihar " in the erstwhile Films Division newsreel in Cinema theaters , without additional inputs and least of all concern for the audience. At times, I had to rudely shake myself and struggle to realize where I was and come back to this mortal world!

To make matters worse, those that were more unprofessional were mostly from the erudite with elite background. I was reminded of my brother's saying "The more scholarly a person is , the more he struggles to teach students, as he finds to difficult to come down to their level".

Some months back, a senior bank executive was just quoting the extracts of the Book of Instructions from his bank, which every bank staff is aware of!

Last month, a criminal lawyer was defining the basic law points from his slide which again lulled the audience into a blissful sleep!

On the other hand, I was fortunate to hear a senior Supreme Court judge, nicely elucidating from few points on the screen and bringing out points relevant to the subject.

Here, the religious exponents perform better as they always manage to bring different connotations of the same epics!

As they say, experience makes a man perfect and my takeaways from these sessions are:

• Do not clutter your slide with paragraphs of text.
• Follow the 8 by 8 rule in a slide- each slide to have 8 bullet points and each bullet not more than 8 words
• Never read every point from the slide
• Give only indicators as points over which one has to expand.
• Do not reproduce the definitions on a slide, unless the contents are absolutely essential for the topic; Unless you have something to add on, never quote the basics
• Speaker must attempt to provide more information around each point. If he has nothing to elaborate on, just leave the point there, as everyone is capable of reading
• Prepare the presentation with pleasing and printable colors.  Do not have jarring colors which does not go well when projected or printed.
• Animations are kid stuff and are a strict 'No No'
• The only sound should be from the speaker's voice box and not from the slide unless the intention it to shake the audience out of their slumber
• Request someone to handle your presentation on the laptop , wherever possible , so that you could focus on the lecture
• Have a pointer instead of touching the screen with hands
• Last but not the least, it's not only a good habit to start on time but also finish on the stipulated time

On the other hand, if the speaker opts to go extempore without any presentations, let him be well prepared with the points, sequence and flow. Else, he would land up in a situation where a speaker started speaking and could not proceed beyond the words " I conceive". When repeated attempts from the audience failed to energize him, a wag commented " Well, the speaker conceived many times, but failed to deliver" !!