Presentation skills: Speechwriting and Storytelling

“99% presentations suck!”, — said Apple former evangelist Guy Kawasaki in 2005. Up to now the situation hasn’t improved yet. Why?
Most public speaking courses focus on “how” instead of “what & why”. How to stand, walk and talk during delivery with little attention paid to “what” — the quality of storytelling itself. Thereby a usual result is a looking slightly confident speaker with mesmerizing voice delivering an obscure mess of facts, figures and claims.

In this course we take a more systematic approach, focusing on the content. How to structure your ideas, facts and data into a logical convincing story using a narrative structure. This course covers fundamentals of scriptwriting, packing, argumentation and language.

This course is not about how to fabricate a catching tale, but rather how to structure your ideas, facts and data into an interesting story you are going to tell during your presentation.

• Part 1: Setting the goals
• This week is about setting proper goals for a presentation. Most people don’t set any proper goals when preparing for a presentation. That’s an error we are going to fix this week.
  
• Part 2: Sustaining interest
• This week is about the storytelling and how to apply it to your presentation content. What a story is in a nutshell. Why stories are the best form of conveying information. How to create a conflict. How to sustain interest of the audience during your middle part of the presentation.
  
• Part 3: Providing evidence
• This week is about evidence. If you have no evidence supporting your Problem and Solution — that means you have nothing to talk about. We are going to talk about stories as arguments and how to make engaging arguments using statistics (numbers are not boring!) and logical reasoning. Using a proper valid evidence gives you confidence and makes your script convincing.
• Part 4: The middle
• This week is about organizing the middle part of your presentation. Too often it becomes too complex, too long, too unstructured. So we are going to talk about appropriate number of sub-parts in your middle part , ways of organizing your data using LATCH method, using metaphors and analogies to make your messages vivid and easy to grasp for the audience.
• Part 4: The middle: Lesson Choices
• Part 5: The language of the presentation
• This week is about language you speak or write slides with. Concrete vs abstract words. Common everyday words vs jargon. Active voice vs passive voice. Short sentences vs long sentences. One mistake often made — to speak as you write. Such approach leads to vague, long and unclear messages. We are going to fix this.
• Part 6: The beginning and the end
• This week has two topics: 1. how to start your presentation (Introduction part), how to gain trust and remove confusion in the beginning and 2. A detailed summary of all the things we mentioned in the previous weeks.