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I just witnessed several clients reading scripts.  There was something very unsatisfying about the experience for me.   They lacked life and expression.  They didn’t appear to mean what they were saying.

Yet scripts are often useful and necessary.  So what are the pros and cons of written speeches?  And how do PowerPoint presentations stack up?

Written Speeches are More Formal

Whether you write your own speech, or hire a speechwriter to help you, you are committing yourself to taking a written document to the front of the room and reading it to the crowd.

There are pros and cons to this.  First, the pros.  You will appear to be prepared; speak in full sentences; present your thoughts in a more formal fashion; be more likely to address big thoughts and avoid data and details; have a written document for the historical record; and finally, avoid the terror of standing alone on the stage in front of a crowd with the possibility of going blank or saying something really dumb.

Compared to a presentation delivered without a script, a written speech requires more time writing, and less time rehearsing.  And the script is a huge security blanket.  With a script, there are times when you can just show up and read.  (Not a great thing to do, but sometimes necessary.)

However, there are cons to consider as well.  You have to be a good writer to write a good speech; speeches that are read are less alive than presentations that are spoken without scripts.  (It’s hard to read and sound like you’re talking.  Even great actors and politicians have trouble with this.  It leads to a lack of engagement with the audience.)

There’s less give and take because the speaker is constantly looking down to read, and the listeners see this, know that the speaker is reading, and feel obliged to sit still and listen.  It’s a monologue, more about getting the words out than engaging with the audience in the here and now.

PowerPoint Presentations are Less Formal

Now how about the pros and cons of a typical business presentation, one in which the presenter stands and talks from slides?

The pros?  More conversational; more opportunity to interact with the audience; more informal; more lively; more room for improv; greater ability to display data and dive deep into technical subjects.

The cons?  Bigger challenge to the stage-worthiness of the speaker; more rehearsal required to discover an efficient way of verbalizing the points; greater likelihood the speaker’s cup will run over with data, data everywhere and not a thought to think; the likelihood that the predictability of PowerPoint will undermine the impact of the speaker and the message; and finally, the greater chance that a charismatic speaker with an inferior argument will carry the day.

Quo Vadis?

Speeches have their place on formal occasions, and can be delivered brilliantly.  But it’s a rare person who can connect with an audience while reading a prepared text.

(Was it Dick Cavett who said, “Richard Burton can make reading the phone book sound like Shakespeare.  The rest of us make Shakespeare sound like the phone book.”?)

Presentations with PowerPoint provide a greater opportunity for connection between presenter and audience.  However, the over-use of text slides, the predictability of the typical format, and the demands on the speaker’s stage presence made by the wide open space of the typical meeting room cause many business presenters to struggle with the task of getting their point, and themselves, across to the audience.

The differences between the two seem to be getting blurred.  I recommend a speech when there is no real need for visual aids; when the occasion is emotional or commemorative; when the crowd is so big that a presentation with slides might be hard to see and hard to deliver.  (After all, as the audience gets bigger, the need increases for less information and more emotion.)

A speech is more formal and lofty.  A presentation is less formal and can more effectively accommodate the technical details of a narrowly defined subject.  A speech is like an opera.  A presentation is more like a chalk-talk, like a coach in the locker room diagraming on the blackboard what the team will do in the second half of the game. 

They both have perils and promises.  Choose wisely.

Sims Wyeth is an executive speech coach in Montclair, NJ specializing in presentation skills and public speaking training in order to give accomplished people the knowledge and skill they need to become accomplished speakers. Learn more public speaking tips at www.SimsWyeth.com.

I just spent two days with a private equity firm preparing the executives of a portfolio company for a sale to another financial buyer.

As you may know, the practice is standard:  Potential buyers meet with company executives to perform due diligence on the past performance, future opportunities, and to get a feel for the executives themselves.

In this case, an investment bank had prepared the slides.  The first order of business at the meeting where the current owners, the company executives, and the investment bankers gathered was to go through the deck, page by page, and attempt to agree on what should be said on each slide.

It was not pretty.  The executives were seeing the deck for the first time.  They knew their business inside and out, but they were not accustomed to seeing it presented as the bankers did.

A long day of haggling and nit-picking ensued.  Some executives were tongue-tied and frustrated trying to deliver the content as the bankers had drawn it up, and scripting by committee continued into the wee hours.

The prospect of a slide deck making the executives look less than professional and knowledgeable began to loom over the group. And the subsequent reduction in the perceived value of the enterprise also flitted through the collective consciousness in the room.

While there are many lessons here, the simplest take-away is to let the speaker find his own way into the vast terrain of his knowledge.  A deck prepared by outsiders sends him into his own head from a point he’s unlikely to have encountered before.  As a result, he feels lost—a stranger to his own experience.

Don’t start with the slides, unless they ignite your passion and curiosity about the subject.  Start instead from a place that seems right to you, the speaker. 

Some of us prefer a wide angle shot of the topic, a broad overview supported by a deep dive into the underlying information.

And others prefer quite the opposite—a close-up view of one telling detail followed by an explanation as to why that granularity is representative of the whole.

Still others want to speak of their own experience, why they love the topic, or simply give a clear outline of the points they will make.

In fact, there are as many ways of organizing a talk as there are people.  But the way should be suited to the person, not to the third party that wrote it for hire. 

The speaker must find the thread that leads his own mind into the dense fabric of his expertise, and allows him to weave for the listeners a vision of his knowledge.

Once he’s got that, he can prepare the slides.  Without it, he will stumble around in a web of information, with no grasp of a through-line, and create at best a patchy image of the thing he’s trying to describe.

Don’t start with the slides.  Start with what you want to say, and say it the way that makes it yours.

Sims Wyeth is a speech coach in Montclair, NJ specializing in presentation skills and public speaking training in order to give accomplished people the knowledge and skill they need to become accomplished speakers. Learn more public speaking tips at www.SimsWyeth.com.

As PowerPoint reaches its 20th birthday, Lee Gomes of the Wall Street Journal reflects on our love/hate relationship with “one of the most elegant, most influential and most groaned-about pieces of software in the history of computers”:

While PowerPoint has served as the metronome for countless crisp presentations, it has also allowed an endless expanse of dimwit ideas to be dressed up with graphical respectability. And not just in conference rooms, but also in the likes of sixth-grade book reports and at PowerPointSermons.com.

He also interviews PowerPoint’s creators, Robert Gaskins and Dennis Austin, to learn their perspective on how their well-intentioned brainchild has changed the world of communication. Surprisingly, he writes, “they aren’t the least bit defensive about the criticisms routinely heard of PowerPoint.” Gaskins, in fact, agrees with the harsh appraisals of infographics expert Edward Tufte, who basically fingers PowerPoint as a key culprit in the dumbing down of our civilization.

Mr. Gaskins reminds his questioner that a PowerPoint presentation was never supposed to be the entire proposal, just a quick summary of something longer and better thought out. He cites as an example his original business plan for the program: 53 densely argued pages long. The dozen or so slides that accompanied it were but the highlights.

Since then, he complains, “a lot of people in business have given up writing the documents. They just write the presentations, which are summaries without the detail, without the backup. A lot of people don’t like the intellectual rigor of actually doing the work.”

One of the problems, the men say, is that with PowerPoint now bundled with Office, vastly more people have access to the program than the relatively small group of salespeople for which it was intended. When video projectors became small and cheap, just about every room on earth became PowerPoint-ready.

Many of us use PowerPoint as both written and spoken communication. We expect our decks to serve two purposes. First, to be a compelling display of visual evidence, and second to be a complete record of our research, analysis and thinking.

Often because of this dual purpose, the visual evidence is actually not visual at all, but rather written in the form of bullet points, which demand that we read and listen at the same time, causing us to lose concentration.

Further, because we expect the document to be clear and useful to someone unable to attend our talk, the data, analysis, and recommendations are often obscured because we write complete sentences on the slides, distracting from the more relevant graphical evidence.

Even more fundamental, the experience of witnessing a PowerPoint presentation can feel like a disconnected jumble of thoughts. The slides are rarely arranged in a way that feels logical to the listener, even though we’re given an agenda. They seem to be separate from each other–they don’t often flow like a story–and so they are hard to remember.

Tufte suggests that PowerPoint decks tend to be NOT rigorous enough for scientific and engineering presentations, while being too busy and congested for some other purposes.

For instance, there is no reason why the CEO has to use PowerPoint when speaking about the values and attitudes he hopes to instill in the people who work for the company.

And scientists, engineers, and researchers ought to prepare a thorough and formal report on their work, and then use PowerPoint simpy to summarize their findings and recommndations.

We continue to use PowerPoint in the way that everyone uses it, except we don’t know if the way everyone uses it is optimal for creating clarity and understanding.

Something needs to be done. Huge amounts of time and money go into the creation of PowerPoint decks, and as far as I know, none of us know whether our approach is effective and efficient.

I suspect we can do better.

There are men and women who live on the back porch of their souls, and when you walk up on the front porch and knock on the door, they take a long time to open up.  You can hear their footsteps echo as they come cautiously down the hallway of their lives.  They open the door a crack, wedge their faces forward, and ask you what you want.

I spent a day with a thoughtful presenter whose wit and vitality was there, but it was far back in her persona.  She had great depth, it seemed to me, but not much surface appeal.  She needed more surface!

All communication has substance, structure, and surface.  Most speakers have a ton of substance.  What they need is structure and surface.

Surface is a bunch of things.  It’s the look and feel of the PowerPoint slides.  It’s the hair, clothing, and style.  But mostly it’s the ability to manifest on the skin what transpires down in the depths.

“They do not love that do not show their love,” said William Shakespeare, and I say I need to see temperament and conviction in a speaker.

I am not talking about theatrics, or histrionics, or vocal volume, or “sawing the air” and “tearing a passion to tatters.”  What I need to see and hear is a high degree of intention in a speaker–enough intention to warrant my attention.

My client, this wonderful, sensitive person with much to say, was considered very effective in small groups but ineffective in large settings, and her career depended on her ability to connect with large groups.

I asked her to stand still, as though her feet reached into the ground and her head was tangled up in stars.  I asked her to look only at the people in the back row, and look at each one of them for long periods of time.

I asked her to use her voice as a long arm–to imagine her hand on the shoulder of her listener in the back, and tell him what he needed to hear.

I asked her to reach into her mind with each inhaled breath, and only speak when the long arm of her breath had found and grasped the exact words she wanted to say.

I asked her to throw fire with her hands, like a wizard or a witch.  Zeus could throw thunderbolts. Why couldn’t she imagine throwing sparks and beams of light with her intention?  She could make those in the back row feel her gaze (I told her); she could touch them with the intensity and clarity of her thinking.

As someone said to me, we need to make the people in the back row feel as though they’re sitting in the front.

That’s more than arm waving and shouting.  That’s radiating through the skin your desire to get your point across.

Few listeners will care if the speaker doesn’t care.  To paraphrase The Bard, “They do not care that do not show they care.”

We need a surface!

I recently bought a book called The Craft of Scientific Presentations by Michael Alley, which begins with a quote from Isaac Asimov.

On March 21, 1949, I attended a lecture given by Linus Pauling… That talk was the best talk by anyone on any subject that I had ever heard…  The talk was more than a talk to me.  It filled me with a desire of my own to become a speaker.

The book belongs on your bookshelf if you deliver scientific presentations, or presentations that report research of any kind.  It provides scores of examples from contemporary and historical scientific presentations to show clearly what makes an oral presentation effective.

What is most intriguing to me is his study proving that the proper use of PowerPoint slides can in fact boost audience comprehension.  Alley calls the most effective use of PowerPoint the “Assertion-Evidence” method. This means that the headline of a slide should be an assertion–a complete sentence–that is proven by the visual or graphical evidence below it.

I know several of my client companies in the consulting business do this, including McKinsey and Health Strategies Group, although the practice is not universally adopted in either firm.  But they are on the right track, according to Alley.  His study demonstrated an 11% boost in audience comprehension with the “Assertion – Evidence” model vs. the standard use of a phrase as the headline–such as “Market Share” or “Toxicity.”

It is time that those of us responsible for communicating ideas and information of strategic importance use PowerPoint in a manner that is based on research, and not on ease of use or corporate culture.

The book is called The Craft of Scientific Presentations.  The author is Michael Alley.  It’s worth owning, if you care about excellence in presenting ideas.