Choreographing SpeakerAudience Interaction

Choreographing Speaker/Audience Interaction

What? This isn't a dance routine, is it? Technically, no, but the whole idea behind choreography is to plan ahead of time where you're going to move and how you're going to get there. Unless you plan to plant yourself behind a podium, this section's for you.

Using Speaker Notes

You probably think of speaker notes as supplemental information to share with the audience. This might be true, but they're also valuable as stage notes to you, the presenter, to remind you what to do, where to click, when to move, and so on.

For example, consider the slide shown in Figure 15.14. If you've just prepared the slide and practiced the presentation, you probably already know what to do. But if you're returning to the slide show after a few days (or weeks), you might forget that clicking the eagle plays a video clip of an eagle in flight. That's the sort of thing that ought to go in your speaker notes. (Figure 15.14 shows speaker notes below the slide.)

Figure 15.14. You can use speaker notes to remind you where hidden action settings are.

Speaker notes might also include the following:

• A reminder to pause at a particular point and field questions

• A note to tell you to spend only five minutes on questions

• A suggestion to bring up lights and go into the audience for a discussion

• A reminder that if you click an object, you'll jump to a slide that adds to or reinforces the current slide

• The amount of time left in the presentation (for example, 30 minutes), to let you know whether you're moving too fast or too slow

Speaker notes can be anything you need to help you pace yourself or to jog your memory about information or about what you should be doing at any point in the slide show.

How should you access speaker notes? You can view speaker notes while presenting a slide show. However, what you see, the audience sees as well. It might not go over well to show them something like "They're not going to get this, but take a couple questions anyway." Perhaps a better way is to print for yourself either speaker notes or thumbnail pictures of the slides, along with speaker notes.

For information on printing speaker notes, see p. 310.

Moving Around While Presenting

Standing, pacing, gesturing...all these elements have a bearing on whether people pay attention to you and how effectively you communicate with them.

I'm not going to pretend to provide you with hard-and-fast rules here. In fact, quite the opposite. However, please do consider some of the following, just to get yourself thinking about movement:

• If you stand still, people have little reason to watch you. You become like a narrator's voice behind a much more interesting visual presentation. Thus, you lose your powers of nonverbal communication.

• If you move too much or too quickly, you become a distraction. The audience will be thinking more about whether you're going to knock over your laptop computer or fall off the edge of the stage than about your presentation.

• You should find an anchor point, a spot to which you always return. If you don't have a remote-controlled mouse, that doesn't mean your laptop has to be the anchor. In fact, your computer's location should only be somewhere you go to and come back from.

• If you do use a remote-control device, you should practice advancing slides from various locations to make sure the computer picks up the signal. You don't want to be standing there saying that you know your blankety-blank mouse was working last night. In fact, if you choreograph slide advances properly, the audience will hardly know it's you that's moving the slides.

• You should try to avoid blocking the view of the screen. Yes, you might want the audience members to watch you, but if you block their view, they'll ask why you even bothered to bring your slides.

• The closer you are to the screen, the easier it is for audience members to move back and forth between you and the slide. If you're presenting a slide with a lot of detail, you should move closer to the screen so the audience doesn't have to make a choice between watching the slide and glancing at you.

• The farther away you are from the screen, the more likely it is that audience members will watch either you or the screen, but not both. With a simple slide, you can get the audience to look at you much more easily. To force people's eyes off the screen, press the B key to black the screen. Press B again to turn it on.

With some of these ideas in mind, you should also observe effective presenters. How do they move, what position are they in when they want your attention, and how natural does it all seem?

Finally, practice does indeed make a difference. If you can, gain access to the room you'll present in and try walking around a bit to get a feel for the distances and the obstacles. Practice using your mouse or otherwise advancing slides. Look for ways you can get up close with the audience and where you can go when you want to minimize attention on you and maximize attention on the slides. All this can go a long way toward giving you a more comfortable, home-court-advantage type of feeling.