Key Techniques to Enhance Persuasiveness in English Presentations: Avoiding Data Dumping and Practicing Effectively

So I would say one of the problems that people run into in sort of more persuasive or informative heavy presentations is data dumping. So for me what I call data dumping is they get to a section that has a lot of evidence, or a section that has a lot of graphs or ideas and they just lump it all together. Well odds are that's pretty hard to follow along with. So a couple of years ago I was working with a dean at a big important presentation. So we were working on this presentation. And there was a section where he went over a bunch of enrollment figures. Well I probably spent about a minute, minute, and 15 seconds just kind of rattling off these enrollment figures. It was too much. It was hard to listen to and you certainly couldn't follow along with. It would have been great on a handout where the reader could sit there and look through those individual enrollment figures and make sense of them. But it didn't really work all that well in the presentation.

So I think when you're presenting and you reach those periods where you've got sort of big chunks of evidence, what you want to do is provide a little bit of context, get into the evidence, explain what you just said, then move on to the next chunk. So there needs to be this back and forth movement between explaining what the evidence says, showing the evidence, and then explaining the evidence again. Don't just sort of lump all the evidence or the ideas into one big chunk.

I would say the most important thing is don't treat practice as something that only comes at the end. There are so many times I work with people where they've thought about the speech, they've drafted some ideas, they pulled it together in outline, they may have even written a manuscript and only then do they start practicing. I think that's too late. I think you may have written stuff that looked good on the page but isn't going to work for you in the presentation. I think it is far more effective and ultimately time saving to practice throughout the entire composition of the speech.

So normally what I do if it's a big presentation is I'll get some ideas done on paper, I'll outline it, and then I'll stand up and try to talk my way through it. What's happening in that moment is I'm figuring out stuff, what sounds good, what do I want to talk about. I'll take those ideas and I'll translate them back onto the outline. Then I'll make some revisions to the outline, stand up, try doing it again. I'm paying attention to what feels good, where do I bore myself? That probably needs to be revised. I'm listening for what works and what doesn't work. I go back and forth between outline and practice and this allows the resulting presentation to really exist as an oral performance, not something that you're just reading that was designed as a visual written artifact that then you talk through. If you do this, sometimes it sounds like so much work, but if you do this way of practicing it, it'll be easier to remember, it'll be easier to perform, and it'll be ultimately easier for the audience to listen to.