Introduction, Body, and Conclusion
There are many ways to mess up a speech or presentation. I’m tempted to paraphrase Leo Tolstoy and say “Every bad talk is bad in its own way.” But the bad presentations I’ve observed over the years–and there have been way too many of them–lead me to the conclusion that the overwhelming majority of bad talks are bad in a similar way: they lack a clear structure.
Whether you’re giving a speech or making a presentation (go here to read about the differences), the most important thing you need to do is structure it.
Yes, you need a good idea to begin with. You need supporting evidence and examples and illustrations and definitions and stories. And you need–if your primary intent is to convey information–visual aids and handouts. But most of all you need a structure that holds it all together.
What is the structure–your main idea–you’re building? What are its basic parts? How do they fit together?
(One of the problems with PowerPoint is that it doesn’t require you to develop a structure for your presentation. It lets you pull up a blank slide, fill it in with content, and repeat the process until you run out of things to say. It doesn’t require you to create a structure for your presentation, to build a logical argument, or to explain how the material on one slide is necessarily connected to the content on the next slide. It’s not, I’ll admit, PowerPoint’s fault if you don’t provide a structure; it’s your fault. But PowerPoint makes not creating a structure way too easy.)
The easiest and most fundamental way to structure any talk is to break it into three main sections:
- Introduction
To gain the audience’s attention and interest, to introduce your topic, and to provide an overview of what you’re going to talk about (your main idea) - Body
To work through the 3 to 5 (preferably 3) main points of your talk that develop your main idea - Conclusion
To sum up your main idea and to provide a reason or impetus for the audience to do something with it
People aren’t good listeners, so it’s your job to make it easy for them to follow you. Always keep them oriented. If you’ve got three points to make, tell them you have three points. And tell them which point you’re currently talking about (”My second point is…”). You may feel that you’re being repetitive–you are–but I promise you your audience won’t notice. They’ll just appreciate being able to follow you.
Using this fundamental introduction-body-conclusion structure is relatively easy. But I can’t believe how many seemingly experienced presenters fail to do so.
Where your creativity can come into play is in the body of the talk and how you structure it. That’s the subject of a future post.
Comments? Disagreements? Additions?
September 25th, 2009 at 7:30 pm
[...] Last week I wrote about the classic way of structuring a speech, using an introduction, body, and conclusion. [...]