It struck me as I was attending my son’s first grade class poetry reading extravaganza last week what a shame it is that people seem to put so little thought or effort into how they actually present their hard work, big thoughts or poetry, for that matter (not that I’m blaming the kids in this situation and not that I’m leading any Toastmasters sessions anytime soon).
I wondered whether this is almost too basic a concept for university and other researchers to be examining, but perhaps there is some R&D potential here (certainly there are startups looking to make PowerPoint and other such presentation programs more useful). Then again, maybe it’s as simple as speakers and event organizers just needing to use a little more common sense and making sure they somehow conduct dry runs in realistic-as-possible settings.
Take the poetry reading, for example. We were in a relatively small room. Each kid got up and read the poem they’d chosen into a handheld microphone. A couple of the girls with star quality (and perhaps stage backgrounds) boomed out their poems and played to the crowd. They didn’t need no stinkin’ mics. Most of the kids, especially the boys, shuffled their feet, locked in on their shoes and mumbled into the microphone words that only they and their classmates will ever know. And this is after the kids had practiced reading the poems aloud at home and in school over and over. I have no idea if the microphone just wasn’t working, the kids hadn’t been schooled on how to use it before the big day or what, but it was that last little detail of making sure the audience could actually understand what the kids were trying to get across that got lost in the shuffle.
The week before I’d seen an open source expert with a lot to say on his subject get thrown off his game at a tech conference in Boston when the Mac containing his slide presentation wouldnt cooperate with the hotel’s A/V system. I’m sure he put plenty of work into those slides, but by the time he was able to expose them to the audience, major disinterest, awkwardness and distraction had already set in. I don’t mean to pick on that poor guy, either, as I’ve seen countless audio and visual snafus and hiccups at conferences every year, and it’s not that I hate sitting through PowerPoint presentations anymore than the next person. I’ll never forget the way one conference honcho popular in venture capital circles would glare at the A/V people every time a slide would get stuck or audio would cut out during his presentations.
And of course, we in the press are as guilty as anyone about working hard to develop and write stories, only to botch the presentation of those stories more often than we should. Earlier this month I foolishly posted a blog item about the Boston Celtics and Los Angeles Lakers with humongous images on it, rather than first reducing the size. Readers let us know about it in not such nice ways.
I have no idea what the answer is to all this. But at least in the case of this blog post, I’m keeping it simple.
BobB, bbrown@nww.com
