I have inserted the introductory words from Part 1 into Part 2 for the benefit of anyone who has not previously read Part 1.

When you are fortunate enough to be asked to make a presentation of any kind, always consider it a command performance. Seize the opportunity to show off your talents (but not in an arrogant way).

Throughout my career, I encountered many people who treated their presentations as a necessary but unwelcome job responsibility. It was as if they considered their presentations to be annoyances that interfered with their “real” work. And like a trip to the dentist, they were glad when it was completed, and the pain subsided.

I held the opposite view. I have always believed that presentations provide you with an opportunity to showcase your knowledge and expertise; to lead, guide, and inform others; and to contribute to an organization’s success.

For that reason, I always put a lot of thought and effort into my presentations—whether they were short presentations to a small group of employees or more in-depth presentations to a much larger group. Larger groups were often employees of a large division or department, a large “town hall” type meeting, or a presentation addressed to thousands of the company’s agents. As my career advanced, I also had numerous opportunities to speak at industry meetings and eventually was honored to deliver a few college commencement addresses.

I gave the same level of attention to my preparation for each presentation, no matter what the audience or venue. In this blog, I provide you with some useful tips on your own preparation.

Storytelling Is a Key to Effective Presentations

Think about the most compelling presentation you’ve ever heard. Whether it was a life lesson your grandfather taught you as a kid, a pep talk from a coach in high school or college, or a TED Talk you heard on YouTube, chances are, the key ingredient was storytelling. When you tell a story to make a point, it will be much more interesting than if you simply present facts and data. Plus, your audience is much more likely to remember your key point if you tell a story. Stories enhance message retention.

Kindra Hall makes this point in her book Stories That Stick: How Storytelling Can Captivate Customers, Influence Audiences, and Transform Your Business. Hall explains why stories are so effective for presenting ideas, findings, or recommendations: “Decision makers are inundated with data, and they’re much more likely to remember a story than a graph on a slide.”

The author of a 2019 Forbes article who relayed some of Hall’s strategies wrote, “Being able to influence an audience of one or one hundred is universally vital in today’s competitive professional marketplace, and storytelling can be such an effective technique to build those critical influence skills.”

How to Construct Your Presentation

In this section, I outline for you the process I almost always followed to construct a presentation and then prepare to deliver the speech. You might decide there are some steps you don’t need to take once you become proficient at giving presentations, or when you find yourself repeating a presentation many times to similar audiences. This might be the case for politicians running for office or for professors teaching a course multiple times. But for many of us, each presentation and each audience often has unique characteristics.

Here are the steps I typically followed

1. Know your audience.
2. Know your subject matter; if you don’t, then do the necessary research.
3. Identify the four or five key points you want the audience to remember.
4. Construct an outline of the flow of your presentation. Often, mine looked something like this:
   A. Thank the audience for their attendance and for inviting you to speak.
   B. Start with humor. Getting a laugh from the audience up-front is a great way to calm your own nerves.
   C. Tell the audience what you plan to cover and what you think they will benefit most from hearing. It’s OK to even tell them briefly what your conclusions will be.
   D. In the main body of your presentation, elaborate on the four or five key points and why they are important.
   E. If appropriate, give the audience a call to action.
   F. Make closing remarks, reiterating the key points, conclusions, and their importance to the audience and the company.
5. Once you have an outline, write out your speech. For me, this was an extremely important step. However, let me be clear—I want to emphatically advise you never to simply read a speech, unless for some reason you are forced to use a teleprompter.
6. To rehearse, read the written speech out loud, just as if you were delivering it live. When you do this, you will find yourself making many changes to key words and points of emphasis.
7. Repeat step 7 again after making modifications, and time yourself. You will probably make even more modifications in this step.
8. Transform the written speech into bullet points. Initially, these might be quite long. Boldface or underline the key words in each bullet point.
9. Now try delivering the speech from the bullet points without reading. Do this two or three times.
10. Shorten the bullet points again and practice the talk out loud two or three more times. Each time you rehearse a delivery, if you are like me, you will further shorten the written bullet points.

By following the above process, I often gave thirty-minute (or longer) presentations using only an outline of key topics and key words on a single 4-inch by 6-inch index card. In fact, many times, the card was only a failsafe backup, and I didn’t really need to glance at it.

Rehearsing your talk using this process will help you create an excellent flow to your talk, enhance your spontaneity, and reinforce your command of the subject matter.

A Final Word: Texting and Social Media

Now that texting and social media are preferred communication venues, especially for younger people, everyday language has become truncated and filled with acronyms. It could be easy for people who didn’t grow up in a texting and social-media environment to fear that this abbreviated form of language might ruin kids’ communication skills forever.

That isn’t necessarily true, though. In a study of ten- to thirteen-year-olds, researchers found that most kids who used “textisms” still used proper grammar where it counts—in schoolwork. They found that kids knew it was OK to abbreviate words and use slang in text messages to friends but that they needed to use proper spelling and grammar in the real world.

Today, for the first time in history, we have five generations working side by side in organizations worldwide. The key to communicating effectively across generational lines—and with individuals—is to be aware of each person’s preferred communication style.

Some older people might consider text-speak to be inappropriate for business presentations, and some younger people might not resonate well with presentations they consider too formal and stodgy. So it’s important to achieve a balance. If you are re-entering the workplace and had traditional training in public speaking, that could give you a head start and an advantage in terms of getting over stage fright and speaking persuasively with confidence. However, it’s possible that your manager and some of your co-workers might be younger than you, in which case it will be helpful to understand—or at least not reject—their preferred style of communication.

In late 2019, one report noted that 38 percent of Americans worked for a boss who was younger than them.

Excellent presentation skills are essential in the workplace, whether you are returning to the workplace after an absence or are working in your first job out of college. And proper English, complete with punctuation and capitalization, will never go out of style!