A resource for presentation skills tips and advice including development of public speaking and communication skills.
No one willingly gives a presentation when they don’t
believe in their presentation skills, but a lot of people are forced to in
their every day lives. Sometimes these presentations are required through
school or work or some other event but most people do have to give one sometime
in their life. No one wants to have bad presentation skills either, but
sometimes they just can’t get it right and none of the instructions on what to
do is working for them. Too often guides to becoming a good presenter focus only
on what to do and what are good presentation skills and they don’t even mention
what bad presentation skills are. Sometimes the traditional style of learning
doesn’t work for people and knowing what not to do helps them more than
anything else. Because of this need for information about bad presentation
skills, below is a detailed explanation of everything done wrong in a
presentation and why it’s bad.
There are always two steps to giving a presentation, and
because of that there are two steps in which poor choices are made. The first
is always going to be the organizational phase. The organizational phase is
when all the information for a presentation is gathered, sorted and processed
into a presentation. The number one mistake here is that it is done too late.
Procrastinating to the night before can be hard not to do, but even giving
yourself an extra day can help improve the presentation drastically.
The next example of bad presentation skills is poor
ordering. Simply throwing together all the information will create a hard to
deliver and hard to understand presentation. Along with the technical aspects
of the organization phase, it’s often viewed in bad light when you don’t write
anything down at all. Some people can naturally organize things in their head,
but all people will benefit from putting it down on paper, even if it takes a
little more time. These are the bad presentation skills that you should avoid
during the organizational phase.
The next phase, delivery, has just as many poor presentation
skills. The first and most common is muttering or speaking softly. While many
people are shy in front of crowds, muttering and speaking quietly will only
draw more attention to you than if you were to speak in a reasonable manner in
the first place; on top of that it makes your presentation impossible to
understand. The next example of bad presentation skills is ignoring the
audience. Without acknowledging they are there or making eye contact the
audience usually loses interest in what you have to say fast, and that will
make your entire presentation wasted. Finally, don’t acknowledge mistakes
during the presentation. It’s fine to discuss and reflect on how you could have
done better afterwards, but don’t interrupt the flow of the presentation to
dwell on a mispronounced word or mistake, simply correct yourself and move on;
often times an audience won’t even realize that you had made a mistake, so
acknowledging it in this fashion only makes it more pronounced. These are the bad presentation skills related to delivery.
There you have it, the worst and most prominent presentation
skills. Often time’s people won’t realize they are doing any of these and while
they’re actively utilizing the good presentation skills, they are oblivious to
the bad ones and are unable to fix them. Becoming a good presenter is a two
step process, the first is to cease using the bad presentation skills and the
second is to start using the good ones. Usually being aware of not to do will
be just as useful as knowing what to do. Knowing this is half the struggle to
become a great presenter.
