Full disclosure: I am always looking for opportunities to speak at international conferences and conduct training events around the world.
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Over the past four weeks, I have done a lot of pitch coaching for startups. One thing that many of the pitches had in common was very busy slides. The presenters intended for the slides to look impressive and show that the team members had "done their homework". Instead, the slides made the message more difficult to receive due to information overload and data dumping.
To put it simply, slides aren't handouts. Slides are meant to work with the speaker and help the audience understand when showing is more efficient and effective than simply telling. Examples of this include photos for visual imagery and charts and graphs for data. Handouts are for audience members to take home and read at their leisure so it doesn't matter as much if each page is jam packed with information. That being said, no one enjoys squinting at tiny font when trying to read the bottom corner of a busy slide that is showing 18 different things. Last week when watching one of the pitches, there was a particularly busy slide that the presenter showed but only chose to talk about one section of it. I asked him why he put so much extra information on the slide but didn't bother to explain it. He seemed surprised that I would ask. The next slide was also packed with information in various formats and it took him quite a long time to cover everything. In this middle of his detailed explanation, I asked him where my eyes should be on his slide. Again, he looked confused. He was missing two important aspects of slide design. One: if you don't plan to say it, why show it? Two: information needs to be given in small amounts. There are many other mistakes that presenters make with the slides. They write what they are going to say and then read from their slides. They fail to use animations for lists. They turn away from the audience and talk to the screen. But for now, let's focus on the process of sitting at your computer and designing a slide. Ask yourself what you want the audience to focus on and build a slide around that. Giving information to an audience is like feeding a baby, you need to give small bites and time for digesting is needed. Your slides will have much more impact if they focus on one thing each and what the audience is hearing matches what they are seeing. Comedian Jerry Seinfeld said, "According to most studies, people’s number one fear is public speaking. Number two is death. Death is number two. Does that seem right? That means to the average person, if you have to go to a funeral, you’re better off in the casket than doing the eulogy." I don't think I've met a person who actually feels this way but it is a funny quote. So what is it about presentations that many people find scary?
The first thing has to be the unknown. Many religious people will tell you that they know what happens after we die, but since different religions disagree about this I think it's fair to say we don't know for sure. Similarly, we can't be sure how a presentation is going to go. There are so many variables that can go wrong and it only takes one of them to really embarrass the speaker. What if the tech doesn't work even though you tested it in advance? What if there is a jerk in the audience who thinks he is a comedian? Even if we prepare thoroughly and have lots of experience, there are things that can pop up and throw us off. This leads us to the second thing, the multitude of things we need to concentrate on at the same time to deliver a solid presentation. I tell people who attend my training sessions that presenting is like juggling. You have to focus on what you are saying, how you are saying it, what you look like while you are saying it, and how much time you have left to say it. Throw in presenting in a second language and you might as well be trying to juggle four live squirrels and adding in a chainsaw. Third is the power dynamic. A lot of people don't like to be in the spotlight. Having everyone's eyes on you while you are trying to manage all the presentation elements is tough; doing it while you are standing up or on a stage adds an extra layer of stress. I know a lot of people that can speak confidently from their seat but when you ask them to stand up and come to the front of the room, they freeze. It's just easier to talk to people when you're on the same level, literally and figuratively. The fourth thing that makes presentations scary is when they are for high stakes. Sales presentations, job interviews, speech competitions, and presenting in front of your boss are all stressful because of what happens if you mess up. The best case scenario might be that you lose out on some future opportunity but the worst case scenario can be that you lose what you already have, like your job. I think we can all agree on how stressful can be. Finally, it can especially scary when we don't feel like an expert on our topic. Maybe the topic was assigned to us or we have read a lot of the topic but don't have any personal experience with the topic to fall back on. We don't have a story to tell and have to rely on the information that we found. Impostor syndrome can kick in and really mess with our confidence. So, yes, giving a presentation can be stressful, but so was driving a car for the first time. Imagine getting behind the wheel and focusing all your attention on the things that could wrong. Your tire could pop on the highway, someone could change lanes and hit you, the brakes could fail. Sure, these are all true, so we are taught to focus on what we can control. Pay attention to what's going on around you, learn basic car maintenance and take it in for regular service, try to obey the rules of the road and things will usually be ok. A final thing that I tell trainees is that you don't have to be a great presenter, just try not to be a bad presenter. Try to avoid big mistakes and control what you can control. If you do it enough, presenting can become as routine as driving a car. As you increase the size of the audience or increase the stakes, it might feel like learning to drive a bus or even flying a plane, but with training and practice people learn to do these things all the time and it stops being so scary. Hopefully presenting can be the same for you. For a guy who makes a good portion of his living giving talks and training others to give talks, I was really terrible at giving talks when I was in university. I was probably bad in high school too but I don't remember ever being asked to do it. I wasn't afraid to raise my hand during class and ask a question or make a general observation about something from my seat but I don't remember having to speak in front of the class until university.
Giving a presentation isn't like performing in a play or singing in a choir. You aren't playing a character and you aren't part of an ensemble. It's just you, as yourself, on the stage, in the spotlight, talking to a room full of people. I remember the presentation I gave during a marketing class in university that let me know I was not a good presenter. It was a group presentation, and like many university students we waited until the last minute to divide up our speaking responsibilities so I didn't have a lot of time to think about what I was going to say. I felt woefully unprepared and I'm sure it showed. When it was over and I sat down I couldn't remember anything that I had said. It was like temporary amnesia and that feeling stuck with me for a long time. I tell that story when I'm conducting presentation skills seminars now and talk about the hurricane in the brain. When I got my first teaching job at a small language school in South Korea in 1996, I remember feeling very nervous and completely unprepared once again. I had no teaching experience and my training had consisted of shadowing one of the other teachers in a couple of classes the day before. Looking back, she had been working with her students for a while and had already established a good rapport with them, so assuming that my new students would respond the same way to me as hers did to her was pretty unrealistic. In any case, before I walked into my first class I tried to give myself a little pep talk. I told myself three things that I thought were true. 1. I know more than they do about English. 2. This knowledge is something that they want, so it has value. 3. They came here to get my help. This helped me calm down and remind myself what was important. My job was to find ways to help them and give them what they wanted. When I gave my first conference presentation in 2005, I had already been a teacher for five years. (Yes, I know the math doesn't work. I went back home and tried some different things for a while.) There's something different about speaking to your students and speaking to your peers. It can feel like you are being judged in a way that you just don't feel when you're teaching. The power dynamic in the room is different, especially when there are more experienced teachers in the audience. But here's the thing, you should still know more about the topic you are speaking on that most of the people attending your talk. The content you are sharing needs to be useful to them and, thus, have some value. Finally, the people who attend conferences often come to take away a few ideas to use in their classes or to think about teaching in a slightly different way so, in essence, they are there to get some help. Keeping these three in the back of my mind has helped me become a more confident speaker and I find that it also helps my students brainstorm possible presentation topics. They need to ask themselves: 1. What do I know more about than my classmates? 2. Will it be interesting and/or useful for for them? 3. How can I convince them that it has value? They can then turn their answers into a complete introduction with a hook and once that has been done, sharing their content with confidence and enthusiasm gets a lot easier. In this post I want to share some advice from my own experiences as a writer, university writing instructor, and editor. Whether you are writing in your first language, writing in a foreign language, or translating from one language to another, there should be something that will be useful for you.
Tips from a Writer
Tips from a Writing Teacher
Tips from an Editor/Proofreader
 I don't know about you, but my Google search history includes a lot of "retiring in (insert country here)". This isn't new for me, I've been doing it for over a decade. Part of me dreams of living in another foreign country just to see what it is like (I've been in Korea almost 20 years) and the other part just wants a new adventure.
When I think of retirement there are two main factors and then a plethora of sub-factors to consider. The two main things are: 1. What do I want to do with my time? and 2. Will I have enough money to pull it off? Since an endless supply of books, internet access, and red wine doesn't sound that healthy, it's probably a good idea to keep my online editing business active. This will help me maintain the "sense of purpose" that you hear about so many retired people losing and missing. Also, if I'm living in another country I won't have as many in-person training opportunities as I do now, and if I did, they probably wouldn't pay as well. Here's why... The list of places I've been learning about just in the past week include Tunisia, Malaysia, Indonesia, Ecuador, Colombia, Panama, and the east coast of Italy. Living in these places means I wouldn't expect to do much work (if any) inside the local economy. Instead, I would just try to keep up with my online editing work and slowly begin to phase it out when it becomes too much. As a teacher turned freelance communications consultant, I'm looking for a places with lower cost of living and a climate that doesn't get too hot (and especially too humid) or too cold. I'd like to live in a place that isn't too noisy or crowded but is still close to an international airport. There are other factors to consider such as the difficulty of the local language, the local food and drink scene, the tax situation, visas, and a whole list of other factors that are too silly to mention here. I have a former co-worker who has a cabin in rural Canada that he stays in during the summer and then every winter he chooses a new country, closes up the cabin, and heads out. That could be an option if I wanted to keep Korea as a base, but Korean summers are no picnic. So for now, I'll just keep dreaming and continue to travel whenever I can. I've had great experiences in a lot of interesting places but I don't think I've found that one perfect place yet. Maybe the thrill is in the search. If you follow this blog you know that January and February are slow months for me. A lot of government offices in Korea don't start new projects until after the Lunar New Year holidays. This gives me more free time than I would normally like to have and puts a dent in my bank account. A couple of years ago I used this slow period to write my book on teaching presentation skills. Last year I had the Olympic project to keep me busy. This year was slow again so I needed to make up ways to be productive.
This winter I got back into Twitter. I started interacting with some amazing teachers based in Europe and shared more of my blog posts via Twitter. Even though I only have a small number of followers, some of them have large followings so when they liked or shared my posts my blog would get a good number of readers. The numbers were similar to similar posts on Facebook and much higher than from LinkedIn. I also channeled my boredom and frustration into writing a couple of articles and sending them to various teaching magazines. My article on freelancing was published recently in EFL Magazine. You can read it here. Another article on Business English projects will come out in English Teaching Professional in May. Be sure to keep an eye out for it. A third thing I did was to contact a publisher in Korea and ask to be added to their database of freelance editors. They replied and said there was a project coming up for adult learners that I would be a good match for. Fingers crossed that it works out and turns into both editing and presenting opportunities. Finally, I used some of the down time to work on two new presentations. One was on teaching tips for new teachers and education majors and the other was on presentation tips for teachers. I debuted them on my trip through Turkey, Hungary, and Serbia and the reactions were very positive. I even got some suggestions for ways to improve them so they will be even stronger when I give them again. I wouldn't wish down periods on any freelancer, but if they do come, be sure to plant some seeds. You may not get instant gratification but you will see results in time. If the down periods come at the same time every year, you will need to start packing some savings away during the busy times or be prepared to take some jobs that you normally wouldn't take so you can make ends meet. You might also want to try to plant some seeds earlier in the year so that they start to bear fruit around the time things start to slow down. Hi. I can see you’re a little uncomfortable about going up there to give your talk. You’re nearly out of breath and not making eye contact with anyone. It’s pretty clear that you are in your own head right now.
Let me ask you a question. Are you thinking about what could right or what could go wrong up there? Ah, that grin leads me to believe it’s the latter one. That’s normal but that’s also the problem. So many speakers focus on what could wrong and forget to concentrate their energy on making the things that they can actually control go well. I’ll give you an example. Are you worried about the technology messing up at that critical point in your talk, maybe when you want to show a video? Ok, did you come in here earlier and test it out? You did? Awesome, that’s one less thing to worry about. Put it out of your mind. Are you worried about forgetting what you were planning to say on Slide 5? Do you think anyone here knows what you were planning to say? Trust me, we don’t. If you forget something you were planning to say, skip it. We’ll probably never know unless you announce it to us. “Ummm, sorry everyone, I forgot what I was going to say here.” Yeah, don’t do that. Don’t apologize and don’t make excuses. Some of us will be able see that you’re a little nervous and if we can’t then that’s great, but don’t tell us. Let us believe you are confident, and prepared, and knowledgeable about your topic, and here to share something that will be useful for us. See, that’s what you need to be focusing on. Even if you don’t feel confident and prepared, ACT confident and prepared. You may not be THE biggest expert about your topic in the world but you should be one of the most knowledgeable people on it in this room. Act like it. Finally, your audience is here because we thought you would be able to offer us something beneficial. We’re sitting here patiently with our cell phones in our pockets (ok, well, most of us) waiting for you to share something that you know and we didn’t. It doesn’t have to be earthshattering but it would be nice to leave this room after 10 minutes or thirty minutes or ninety minutes thinking about something we do regularly but in a slightly different way. Now, if we can be truly inspired, well, that’s even better but 99% of the people in this room would settle for “Huh, I never thought about that.” or “If I changed X to Y, I could probably use that next week.” So relax. Trust me, every single person in this room wants you to do well up there. No one is cheering for you to mess up. Think positive. Focus on us, not your notes or your slides. Make eye contact. Smile. Speak with energy and passion but don’t yell at us. You’ll calm down after the first few minutes, everybody does. But that means those first few minutes are key. Look at us when you introduce yourself. Tell us what you plan to share with us today and everything else will fall into place. Sound good? Ok, have a great time up there and enjoy the spotlight.  When I first started teaching university-level English courses in South Korea in 1997, the syllabus was given to me by the department and grading elements included attendance, participation, a midterm exam, and final exam. Later, I was able to design my own courses but I always kept a small percentage of the overall grade for participation. Why did I do that and would I still include participation as part of the course grade if I were to design a new course now? Answers to follow...
Why Did I Include Participation? When I reflect back on my attitudes toward assessment early on in my career, I wanted the grade to include elements of both effort and ability. I am a strong proponent of students feeling like their grades were earned, not given. Thus, the grade would include criteria such as attending the classes, bringing the textbook and a writing instrument, utilizing my office hours, and participation during in-class activities to represent effort-based criteria. Exams, quizzes, writing assignments, group and solo projects, and any other productive output would be used to determine each student’s language ability or aptitude in the skill that is being taught through the second language such as essay writing or how to give a presentation. {I sincerely apologize in advance for the next two paragraphs.} I am not including growth as a factor because it requires accurate pre-testing to determine each student’s level of familiarity with the course’s content as a starting point for the semester. When schools implement pre-course ability testing to attempt to create a level playing field for the students in the course or in the sections across the course, a new can of worms is opened. In theory, the students would now enter the course without having to compete with other students who have vastly different ability levels. The first potential problem is that this could only be achieved if prospective students who show proficiency in what the course aimed to teach are able to test out of the course while others who are not adequately prepared for the course would be required to take a remedial course first and this is not always the case. Another issue is that if course is divided into different sections and the students are grouped by ability level, the course should not be listed in the same way for higher level sections and lower level sections. Otherwise, a student who earns an A in a lower section of Course 101 would appear to be more impressive to a graduate school or potential employer than a student earning a B in a higher section of Course 101. This can lead to students purposely tanking the entrance exam to get into a lower level section in the hopes of getting an easy A. It should also be noted that I am assuming that the department does not have a mandatory grade curve in place. I am against curves because I don’t believe that grades should be based on intra-class competition but on meeting or surpassing the instructor’s expectations for what should be learned and experienced during the semester. I realize that the fear of grade inflation and instructors “giving” too many As in order to garner higher evaluations are reasons given for implementing grade curves but I feel that if the right educators are hired and departments do not put too much weight on student feedback, there is very little to actually fear. So, to get back to answering this section’s question, I included participation factors in my course’s grading criteria because I wanted all of the students in the course to be able to earn an A and I wanted both ability and effort to play a role. Would I Include a Participation Element Again? The simple answer is yes. However, I am assuming that the course in question is not lecture based and would have opportunities for the students to actually develop skills instead of only studying theory. If I was asked to teach a large, theory-based course that had out-of-class readings and then a lecture element, the grading would lean on traditional assessment criteria like multiple choice tests to determine if the students were absorbing the content. This would be appropriate for courses that have a large number of students and little to no productive requirements. In a course like that, I might not even choose to track attendance and use it as a grading criteria. They are university students after all and don’t have to be there. If a student can do the readings and pass the tests by borrowing lecture notes or attending study groups then good for them. How Much of the Grade Should Be Designated for Participation? In the original syllabus that I mentioned at the beginning of the article, 10% was allocated to participation. I kept this over the years and deducted points each time a student was not prepared for class or did not participate at a satisfactory level (following a warning). I believe 10% is reasonable because it constitutes one full letter grade in a traditional 100-point scale. Students who work hard to meet the teacher’s expectations will get full participation points and their final grade will come down to how well they do on the tests and activities in the course. Students whose poor choices result in losing participation points will have a harder time earning a higher grade. Conclusion Grading and assessment are complicated issues and sources of great debate among educators. When I began teaching, I didn’t question the syllabus that was given to me and the students didn’t complain about the grading elements, just the final grade itself. I have changed a lot as an educator but I still see the value of reserving 10% of the grade for participation. Change my mind.  Yesterday was a fun day. I wrote a blog post about writing for language teaching magazines and it got a lot more attention online that my usual posts do. One of the best outcomes was a DM on Twitter asking for some advice on how to deal with impromptu business presentations for a student who is around B1 level and lacking confidence.
I had been planning a post on this for a while but after yesterday's "success" and the nudge from the DM, I thought I'd write a little bit about it here. Passion can easily make up for a lack of accuracy in a second (or third, or fourth) language. I've seen it happen time and time again. That being said, I've also seen a lack of accuracy kill the passion that I know is there but the speaker is afraid to show it. I'll give you three examples. The first one comes from the IELTS exam. If you've never taken the IELTS exam or a prep course for it, it's not like those multiple choice exams or online "talk to a screen" exams that claim to be able to determine a candidate's language ability. For the speaking portion of the IELTS exam you sit in a room with the examiner and basically have a conversation for 11-14 minutes. Some parts of the exam are scripted but the examiner has some flexibility for where they can take the conversation. Scoring is spread across the candidate's lexical resources, grammatical accuracy, pronunciation, and fluency & coherence. Scores for each criteria are 0-9. When you look at the descriptors for each band there is a quite a bit of wiggle room. Sometimes the difference between a six and a seven for one criteria is a "feel thing". This is where attitude/passion/personality/enthusiasm/energy level comes into play. A candidate's attitude won't change their grammar mistakes but it can shape the way we hear them speak. The examiner may feel like the score for vocabulary usage, pronunciation, and fluency could go either way and if we actually enjoyed talking with the candidate we will probably skew up. I know this has happened to me in the past. "Six? Seven? Six? Nah, they were really confident... Seven!" A second example comes from the presentation skills classes I taught in the EFL department of a university in Korea. Listening to ten or more presentations in a row can be tedious. Students who began their presentation with a strong voice and a smile on their face changed the dynamic of the entire room. I would often glance around at the beginning of each presentation to see if the other students were paying attention. If the speaker began with a weak, flat voice, many of the students would put their head down and study their notes for their own presentation. Conversely, a strong voice provoked the others to pay attention. It was almost as if the other students knew they could learn a thing or two from this speaker. When giving post-presentation feedback, I regularly pointed out how impressive the speaker's energy level was and how it helped me give the speaker my full attention. Most of the students nodded in agreement but it wasn't always easy for them to emulate. This leads us to the third example, conference speakers. Like in my class, many speakers at ELT conferences are non-native. Many of them confess that it can be intimidating to give a presentation to their colleagues, especially if there are native speakers attending the talk. I suppose it's human nature to assume you are being judged when giving a conference presentation. I'll confess, in my case you are being judged, just not the way you think. I can't help it. I judge every speaker's presentation skills. I judged Jane Goodall when she came to give a talk about her years in the mountains with the chimpanzees. I judge big name speakers who come to conferences and give the same uninspired talk they gave a week ago in a different city. And I just the language school teacher who is giving their first presentation at a conference and is scared to death. The thing is, I'm not judging their English unless it is so bad that I can't understand what they are talking about, and that almost never happens. So speak with confidence. Believe in your message, believe in your content, and believe in yourself. There's something special about a speaker who seems genuinely happy to be there. They know they have an accent (which is not a bad thing), make occasional grammatical errors, and say the wrong word from time to time but they are there to share something of value and that's what they focus on. You can see the joy on their face and if you look around you will see that joy reflected in the faces of the audience members. So, I'll end with the same advice I gave in my reply to the DM on Twitter. "Accuracy takes time to develop. Sometimes it never develops to where we want it to be, but energy and enthusiasm can make up for that. If she brings passion to the presentation, it can often overcome the inaccuracies. If she appears to lack confidence AND makes a lot of grammatical errors, it wouldn't be surprising for the client to say no. Have her practice timed answers for surprise topics that require her to share her opinions. Praise her for passionate answers. That should help in the short term." |
Tim's ThoughtsHere are some short ideas that probably don't deserve to be published but I felt were worth sharing. Categories
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