Part II What to Write on the Slides 6 Titles
9.14 Design pie charts so that the audience can immediately understand them
The two pie charts below represent the percentages of time spent on three aspects of preparing a presentation.
9.14 Design pie charts so that the audience can immediately understand them 93
The secret to pie charts is not to have too many slices. Given that in the first chap- ter of this book I outlined 10 stages for preparing a presentation, there could have been 10 slices in the pie. But 10 slices would be hard for the audience to decipher on the slide and difficult for the presenter to explain. Plus it would be almost impossible to put clear labels on each slice. In any case, you can always tell your audience that you have considerably simplified the chart, and that if they are interested in seeing the full version they can see it in your paper, on your website, etc.
Notice how the two pie charts are not the same size. This tells the audience that the second chart is the one they should give the most attention to.
If you do reduce a pie chart to its most important elements, it will be easy for the audience to understand immediately. It will also require minimal comment by you, as highlighted by the revised version below:
ORIGINAL REVISED
In the next slide we can see a comparison between the typical practice of presenters during their preparation of a presentation and the ideal practice. Pre-slide preparation in the normal practice is allocated 5% of the time in comparison with 40% in the ideal time. On the other hand, in the normal prac- tice 90% of the presenter’s time is dedicated to slide creation. . .(63 words)
I think these pie charts are self-explanatory.
People spend too much time on designing slides, rather than preparing what they want to say and then practicing it. (27 words)
Note how in the original version above, the presenter gives no extra useful information—it is merely a tedious description of the information contained on the chart. The revised version simply limits itself to interpreting the data.
An alternative to the above pie charts is not to have a slide at all. You could simply walk to the whiteboard and write 90 and 20% in large characters. You then say to the audience,
If you are like most presenters, you probably spend about 90% of your time preparing your slides. This leaves you only 10% to think about what you will actually say and to practice saying it. The result is often very poor presentations. Instead you should reduce the slide preparation time to 20% and use the other 80% of the time for deciding exactly what to say and then how to say it. (72 words)
Note how the presenter directly addresses the audience using you (rather than saying “Typically presenters spend about 90% of their time preparing their slides”).
This alternative is useful if you already have lots of figures in your presentation and so it provides variety. Also, it immediately attracts the audience’s attention if you walk over to the whiteboard. However, it does mean that you will have to spend more words explaining everything (72 words rather than 27).
So another alternative is to reproduce the pie chart on the whiteboard—which should not take more than about 10 seconds—and then give you explanation as in the revised version above.
The moral of the story is to always think about the most audience-oriented and quickest way to present information. In the case above, a pie chart (whether as a slide or on a whiteboard) is the quickest, easiest, and most effective way for you to convey information to the audience.
What all the figures in 9.11, 9.12, and 9.14 highlight is that the easier a figure is to understand, the less time you will have to spend on explaining it. Likewise, the more complex it is, the more difficult it will be for you to explain—and the conse- quence will be that you will be less relaxed and therefore more likely to confuse the audience and make mistakes in your English.
Please note that all the information presented in these figures is only very approxi- mate and is based purely on my personal observations.
Chapter 10
Getting and Keeping the Audience’s Attention
You will learn how to
• attract and retain your audience’s attention throughout your presentation
• understand when audience attention is at its highest and lowest Why is this important?
According to the presentations expert Shay McConnon, Juries typically remember only 60% of what they are told. Why? The case is not about them. No matter how hard they try, people have difficulty paying attention to presentations that aren’t about them.
95 A. Wallwork, English for Presentations at International Conferences,
DOI 10.1007/978-1-4419-6591-2_10,CSpringer Science+Business Media, LLC 2010