In this episode, we continue our master class about presentation skills. This is week 2 of a two-part series on how to design a talk to inform your audience. Here, I cover how to design an entire presentation. Last week, we covered how many bullet points should you create for your presentation. The answer by the way is that it depends on the type of speech. So this episode is very important if you want to understand how great presenters create great speeches.

To Be More Concise, Limit Your Content to Just the Absolute  Most-Important Points.

So, unless you can hone your talk into just a few points, your audience will have a tough time retaining your information.  It’s okay to give additional information, but the more information outside of the scope of the main points, the more diluted your entire message will be. 

 So How Many Points are Ideal in a Presentation?

 Well, it depends on the purpose of the presentation. I suggest between a single bullet point (rare but effective in certain speeches) up to a max of about five bullet points.

 When you want to design a presentation, picture the structure like a put-together storage cabinet unit. (Picture one of those stand-alone units with double doors and adjustable shelves on the inside.) The cabinet itself is the presentation. The shelves inside the unit represent the main items (or bullet points) that you’ll cover. The interesting things that you will put on the shelves are what we call “impact items.” These are presentation enhancers that use to reinforce each bullet point (we will cover these in the next chapter.)

 These put-together storage cabinets come with several adjustable shelves. Technically you could cram a lot of shelves into the cabinet. However, every time you add a new shelf, the storage space per shelf gets smaller. The problem that a lot of presenters make is that they think that people buy a cabinet to look at the shelves. “If I have a lot of bullet points, then my presentation is going to be better.” That is like saying, “The more shelves that I have, the better the cabinet. Who cares if I can’t actually store anything in it.”

 The “Presentation Cabinet” that we teach in Fearless Presentations ® is called “The Three-Point Talk.” It is a flexible structure that can easily be adjusted based on the purpose of the presentation. In the class, we focus on designing a presentation around three important points (bullets.) The reason why is that three points provide the most balance between solid content and entertainment. If you have too many bullet points, your presentation will be boring and hard to deliver. On the other hand, if you design presentations with too few points, the content will seem fluffy (vague.)

To access the show notes, go to the Online Presentation Guide

https://www.fearlesspresentations.com/audio-guide/