An easy way to keep the logic of public speaking

Today I want to tell you about one simple but effective tool that helps me prepare for public speaking. I perform a lot and often since my school days, and, according to others, sometimes I do it well. I am very often asked about how to properly prepare for a speech. The answer to this question is a topic for many books, not just articles, and I will not answer it entirely here, but I will talk about a very specific technique.

Public speaking narrative

If you've ever listened to long talks, you've noticed that sometimes the speaker gets lost in structure and the whole presentation feels awkward. This greatly spoils the overall impression of the speech. When preparing for any long (10 minutes or more) appearance in public with a report, it is important not to forget about the general structure and keep the logic of the presentation.

How do we usually prepare our performance? Open PowerPoint or Keynote and start riveting content slide by slide. However, by the tenth slide, the understanding gradually comes that “Something I'm fucking doing the wrong thing,” and you have to go back to the previous slides, redo them, or sometimes even start from scratch.

In order not to lose the thread and at an early stage to ensure consistency, structuredness and comprehensibility for your future speech, there is one cool tool that I often use - this is the drawing up of the outline, or the narrative of the speech.

Its essence is very simple: before you start making slides, you write in a few sentences the entire “storyline” of what you want to tell.

How it works

To make it clearer, I'll tell you with an example.

As a mentor on the course "Digital Product Manager" at Netology, I help students with the preparation of diplomas and their defense. In the weeks leading up to Day X, most often the student has a very rough idea of what his presentation will look like. Further, creating content step by step, the student receives the first draft of the future presentation. As a rule, what is obtained at this stage is poorly structured, inconsistent, with incorrectly placed accents.

To help the student, and at the same time to better understand what he wanted to say, I ask him to prepare a narrative of the story he plans to tell. Let's say the essence of the thesis is to develop a product strategy for a mobile application. In his project, the student deeply explores the current state of the product, communicates with users, conducts usability tests, digs into analytics, builds hypotheses and implements them. This is many tens of hours of meticulous work.

The challenge is to fit the entire story into a 20-minute talk, without missing out on the most important details.

An example of a narrative for such a work by one of my students looked like this:

Thus, the narrative of the speech is the general logic of the report described in several sentences. Spending 10 minutes shaping the story will save yourself time preparing the entire presentation and provide a better impression with the audience, as a coherent presentation will always be perceived better.

To write a narrative correctly, ask yourself the question: "If I were asked to explain the essence of the work done in 20 seconds, what would I say?"

Often, the writing of a narrative takes place in several attempts: the first version is born at the earliest stage of preparation and then gradually corrected as new information arrives. This is completely normal.

As an alternative to preparing the narrative, you can immediately create a skeleton of the presentation. This is what I always do. The point is to create as many slides as you want in PowerPoint or Keynote that have nothing but headings. This way, as you prepare the slides, you will always have the general structure in front of your eyes, which will facilitate the process itself.

Such a simple but effective tool.