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Three Presentation Fails That Make Audiences Cringe

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Fright night doesn’t just occur on Halloween. On any given day, speakers deliver PowerPoint presentations that make audiences cringe. In most cases, no one ever tells the speaker just how badly they failed at engaging their audience.

The good news is that the most common presentation fails are easy to fix once you’re aware of them.

1. Reading from slides.

The average PowerPoint slides has 40 words. That’s the average. Many slides have even more text. I’ve seen slides with 100 words in tiny 12-point font.

There are three problems with adding too much text to slides.

First, text-heavy slides are essentially documents masquerading as PowerPoint decks. Two, the more text you add, the smaller the font you have to use to squeeze it in. That means no one can read it, especially in virtual meetings where people watch on a small computer or mobile screen. Three, text-heavy slides force speakers to turn their back to the audience (or break eye contact with webcams) as they read directly from slides.

Eye contact is crucial to engaging an audience, in person or virtual. The best speakers rarely read from slides except for short quotes. If you watch TED Talks, you’ll see some of the best speakers in the world delivering most of their content directly to the audience, not the slides. And that’s because most of the slides contain images, graphics, animations, and videos.

A few words on slides is acceptable—and necessary in most cases. But when your slides look like documents, you’ll quickly lose your audience’s attention.

2. Failing to perform a tech check.

Many speakers arrive at the last minute without checking their computer, connection, microphone, etc. If you spend weeks preparing for a mission critical presentation, it would be a shame to lose your audience if the slides don’t display on the projector or you can’t access a video because you didn’t realize the room’s Wi-Fi connection was unreliable.

The simple way to avoid this fail is to get to the room early or, even better, to conduct a tech check before the day of the presentation arrives to give yourself time to fix any issues. When I’m invited to deliver keynote presentations, I schedule my trip to arrive the day before the event, so I can test the equipment in the actual auditorium or space where the event will take place.

Virtual meetings bring their own complications. Every platform has subtle differences: Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Cisco WebEx, etc. For example, if you have videos in your presentation, some platforms have a box that reads, ‘optimize for video.’ If you fail to check the box, your remote audience might not hear the audio. Figure out tech issues way ahead of time.

3). Winging it.

Please don’t tell your audience that you just started thinking about your talk the night before. I’ve seen it happen, and I can still remember the awkward glances among people in the audience.

You’re not fooling anyone. Your audience will know if you ‘wing it’ and fail to prepare for a presentation. But, again, there’s a simple fix—practice a lot.

Great speakers look effortless because they put a lot of effort into making it great. Schedule rehearsals days or even weeks ahead of your presentation. Add them to your calendar so you don’t forget or skip this crucial step. Practice out loud from the beginning of the presentation to the end. You might even consider recording your presentation and watching it back. By putting yourself on video, you’ll spot delivery issues that you can easily fix.

If you’re like most professionals, you put a lot of time and commitment into preparing your slides for mission-critical pitches and presentations. Avoid these three common presentation fails so your audience keeps their eyes on you—and not on the exit.

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