The best public speakers sound as though they are speaking extemporaneously, off the cuff, as the ideas present themselves. They sound spontaneous because they have carefully crafted their message in advance and practiced, and practiced, and practiced, and practiced. The worst speakers write out a speech in advance and then read it. Or they memorize and recite it. You should only ever memorize and recite if you haven't got the time, or the inclination, to develop the subject matter micro-expertise it takes to deliver a really good presentation.
Given enough time, the best approach is to craft the message in advance, turn that message into an outline with headings and sub-headings and then practice giving the talk from heading to heading, without worrying about the exact wording -- get the facts right, certainly, but don't sweat the expression. If you practice over and over again, sometimes out loud, sometimes in your head, in the shower, while you get dressed, while driving to work or waiting for the train, while you're exercising, making dinner, seriously, over and over again, the outline will be tattooed on your memory and the words will arrive on the spot.
In order to get your outline together, identify who will be in the audience, what their needs are, what their expectations are, and think hard about how what you have to say can make their lives easier or better. "What's in it for them?" Do some research, call some of the people who might be attending or exchange some email. Prime the pump.
Once you know what's in it for them, identify the situation in which you will be giving the presentation, time of day (and the frame of mind people tend to have at that time of day), kind of room, number of seats, the kind of presentation equipment you will have. You need to know the room type and size and the number of people in the audience because you can't give the same speech to 3 people as you can to 100. The more people, the broader your brush strokes need to be. If you have only a select few, you can go deep; you can speak more quickly and use more complicated sentences, and you can invite questions and generate interaction. You can cover more ground with a small group as well. The size of the room will also let you figure out how to design your slides, again, big pictures for the big space, details for the smaller space.
Craft your message for the specific people (or at least the roles they play in the organization) who will be present. If the presentation is being recorded, keep in mind that some people will be receiving it in a different context and may need more context and organizing information than those present upon original delivery. Strike a balance. If the presentation isn't being recorded, stay in the present moment.
There's an old adage that you should start with a joke. Humor is dangerous.
There are two kinds of humor, contextual and set. Set humor consists of jokes and anecdotes that you deliver from memory. Some people are good at telling jokes and stories. They have a good sense of timing and they can feel the temperature of a room, metaphorically speaking. Some people are terrible at jokes, lousy timing, tone-deaf selection of topics. There are few jokes that don't disparage some individual or group and any member of the disparaged will not be amused. Generally speaking, an anecdote from personal experience that presents you in a positive light without making you sound like a braggart or a self-promoter and that is not entirely unrelated but still a bit of a distance from the topic of your speech will work well. If nothing else, consider a few light-hearted observations about the shared experience of being there that day, the weather, the traffic, the coming holiday, whatever is widely relevant.
Contextual humor is "getting off a good one" based on what was just said or what just happened. Contextual humor is also a dangerous skill with a huge risk/reward ratio. Beware the impulse to score. Getting of a good one usually means making someone else pay for it and there are only a very few, adversarial, situations where making someone wince will be worth while. Self-effacing humor is almost always better, but you don't want to appear under-confident or unsure of yourself. The best approach is friendly and responsive but not too humorous. No one looks more foolish than someone trying to appear clever.
Never go for a laugh if the topic is painful or you need to appear entirely dignified and reserved. Better to bore than to alienate your audience.
The size of the room, the number of people in the audience, the number of different kinds of audience members, the nature of the topic, and your reputation as a speaker all play a part in how you should go about delivering your talk. Below are some basic, fairly universal, parameters.
Slides are expected, although they often don't help and sometimes get in the way. People have an awful tendency to focus on their slides and ignore their audience, sometimes literally turning their back on their audience to look at their slides.
People often prepare their talk by opening PowerPoint and making slides. This is mostly a bad idea. Don't open PowerPoint till you know exactly what you want to say, unless you want to use it as an outliner, each key word on one blank slide, sort view to get the order right. Once you have the outline right, then and only then start making actual slides.
The purpose of a slide is to visualize (and therefore simplify) complexity, to make something more memorable, to help people take notes.
You need to know your slides well enough that you can scroll through them with your back turned to them. If you are standing at a podium with your computer in front of you, the current and next slide are visible to you, but their presence can be distracting. You don't want to read them. Each one should be at most a prompt for what you need to say. Ideally, you should be able to click through them without seeing them at all. Focus on your audience.
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