The first thing I wondered was what was on the slides? I put this question to the groom’s sister who had brought the example to my attention. She had also helped to put the presentation together and she sent the PowerPoint file on to me. Of course, the presentation was mainly pictures, and pictures, in fairness, is what PowerPoint does well.

There were 25 photographs in all, spread over 22 slides. In all but a few cases, there was a single picture per slide, which is a design principle not often heeded in business presentations. Frequently slides are more like posters than slides, with several thumbnail pictures competing for space with bullet points, titles, company logos and coloured templates. Not so in this wedding presentation, which was mainly large pictures on clear backgrounds.

So what about the bullet-points? You can’t have PowerPoint slides without bullet points, can you? I decided to count the number of words used throughout the presentation (interestingly there is no word-count tool in PowerPoint, despite the verbiage often present), and there were 77 words in total. If you do the sums, this works out at an average of 3.5 words per slide.

To put this into context, I examined five random presentations that I happened to have on my hard-drive, including one of my own from some years back. The average word-per-slide counts for these presentations came out at 20, 21, 25, 39 and 62. These figures are all a lot higher than 3.5.

Of course, that’s not to say that words have no place in presentations, but where possible, I’ve adopted the principle that the presenters should take care of the verbal, and the slides should take care of the visual, and by ‘visual’ I mean pictures, graphs, diagrams and animations, not words.

Indeed, there is a further point that should be remembered regarding the punctuation of verbals and visuals. You should never show a slide until you need to, and you should remove it when you are done with it. Most people have PowerPoint projecting onto a large screen for the entire duration of their presentations.

There is a PowerPoint-first attitude in mnay presentations, but it is preferable to introduce slides only when necessary, to compliment what you are saying. Apparently this is how it was done in the wedding speech which was a series of stories, with the pictures in most cases acting as the punchlines. Obviously in most business presentations precise (comic) timing of this sort is not important, but it does illustrate the as-and-when-you-need-them principle when using visual aids.

Length is another important factor in a presentation, and again, there were lessons to be drawn from the wedding speech. Accurate figures are available here (the groom’s sister was among many taking bets) and after a sincere 5 minute preamble, the PowerPoint part of the speech lasted for about twenty minutes.

It may be pop-psychology, but it is generally accepted that people’s attention wanders after about fifteen or twenty minutes (lecturers take note). Again, the wedding presentation was, it seems, spot on.

Of course one of the main reasons why the wedding presentation probably went down so well was due to the way it played on a well known format with a novel twist. This is the staple of nearly all TV comedy sketch shows: set up a familiar, everyday scenario (a date, a job interview, a church service), portray it in minute detail, and then subvert it with something absurd at the last moment.

The wedding-speech-as-business-presentation conceit is funny partly because most people expect business presentations to be dull. This highlights an interesting paradox. As a chance to hear useful insights from, and ask questions of, an expert in something in which you require knowledge, presentations should be riveting. However, tell the average punter to expect an afternoon of presentations, and you’ll probably receive a response along the lines of: ‘Do I have to stay for all of them?’

Obviously most presentations aren’t going to be like wedding speeches, but if one lesson is to be taken from this example, then it is to look at presentations that work, observe the features that make them work, and then try to make them work for you. Even something as oft-maligned as PowerPoint can be used to great effect.

The only reason for lectures or tutorials is so that the attendees can learn. If they do learn, the activity has been a success. Simple. But surely implicit in these pay-scales is the belief that you learn 2.75 times as much from attending a lecture, as you would from attending a tutorial.

You’d have to contest this straight away. Tutorials tend to be both active and interactive, whereas lectures tend to be didactic (an academic term for one-sided). By most modern educational ideologies, this would give tutorials the edge.

Usually, however, lecturers lecture and post-graduate students give the tutorials. If tutorials are an important part of the educational process, why are they contracted out in this way, and why with such poor remuneration? But more interesting than the questions about tutorials are the questions about lectures, and the people who give them.

The term "lecturer" is bizarre, is it not. It presupposes the means by which you will try to educate your students regardless of what you are trying to teach them. In effect colleges are saying: ‘We want you to teach these people, but we want you to do it by means of lectures.’ And lecturers tend to think in this way; courses are often described in terms of how many lecture-slots they run for.

Also, within these lecture periods, lecturers tend to take a very active role and most shun the idea of allowing student activity. The argument runs that if you give over time for group-exercises or discussions, then you will fail to cover all of your material. But what on earth does the term "cover" mean?

When a lecturer says that he has "covered" something, all that he is really saying is that he has said something out loud in the company of the students. Whether the students have actually learnt anything is incidental. It reminds me of the question: ‘If a tree falls in the woods, does anyone hear it?’ Similarly, ‘If a topic is "covered" in the woods, is it actually covered?’

To most people the term "lecture" has a negative connotation. If someone said, ‘You’re teaching me things,’ it would sound positive and grateful, but if the same person said, ‘You’re lecturing me,’ it would not. To the statement I once read in a presentation skills book, ‘A presentation shouldn’t be like a lecture,’ I would add, ‘Neither should a lecture.’

The ethos in third level institutions is changing. Lecturers (I feel funny using the term now) are required to write down the "learning outcomes" for the students of everything they teach. This shifts the emphasis from what the lecturer does to what the students do. But lecturers are still being given, and in more or less the same way. It has been accepted that there are now learning outcomes to meet, but most academics are still lecturing their way towards these goals.

The real problem with lectures is that there is no feedback loop. Good, bad or appalling, courses are studied, exams are sat, and students graduate. And asking students what they think of it all, which some departments now do, is not the answer. Not only are these surveys often poorly conceived, but students learning new concepts aren’t really in a position to make a broad assessment of the way they should have been taught. It is not as simple as complaining about bad service in a restaurant.

As I have said many times already, a decent study of the process of higher level communication needs to be carried out. The average lecturer, and the average presenter have a very poor understanding of what the audience will remember and learn from what they say, and how to tailor their material accordingly. Perhaps this study could be conceived as a sort of "cost-benefit analysis", to work out exactly what an auditorium of students get for their €85.90.

Many people make this mistake, particularly academics, and it reflects a mind that wants to be exact at all times. The title of a presentation, however, is not the place to be splitting hairs. The title should be more of a label than a title. It sets the talk apart from other talks, but doesn't become subsumed in discriminating detail. But labels can hazardous too, particularly in an area as poorly understood as presentations.

Every single word carries baggage, which can prejudice an audience from the off. When choosing a title for my book, for example, I asked as many people as I could for their comments on a list of possibilities. The word 'technical' was rejected straight away. When I speak of a 'technical presentation', I'm referring to any talk with complex domain-specific knowledge, but the word 'technical', it seems, just makes people think of jet engines, Meccano, and silicon chips.

The word 'podium' was also unpopular. To presenters, it suggested fear; to audiences, starched boredom. In fact even the term 'presentation' gives off mixed messages. It is suggestive of a show, or a performance, and reinforces the (wrong) idea that in a presentation you project your words into the auditorium, like someone tossing breadcrumbs to ducks.

When giving courses, I find that the word 'analogy' is one that grates. In a recent conversation with my dad, he said that he didn’t care for analogies. Despite this, he made frequent references to examples of presentations that he had seen at work, and such comparisons are a pure form of analogical reasoning. We use analogies all the time, and because of this, we only notice the more flamboyant, and oftentimes annoying examples of the sort: "This company is a car; the employees are the fuel; the product is the right wheel arch…" etc.

Another word that people react strongly to is, 'story'. When I encourage individuals to use stories in presentations, I often receive responses like, "Ah, I wouldn’t be much of a story teller." But we are all story-tellers; we think, imagine, converse, remember, and even dream in stories. Because stories are such a part of how we make sense of the world, we don't notice them, and the word 'story' has come to mean the more pronounced examples of the art, the cleverly spun yarns and anecdotes that are beyond the ordinary.

Of course if you're worried about the unfortunate connotations that words might have, you can always make up your own ones. But, apart from the risk of alienating people with terms like 'solutionise' and 'webonar' (web-based-seminar…yes?), there is more poetry in the average word than you might imagine. Recently my niece, who lives in England, baffled me, during a conversation about her school, by telling me about a subject called 'resistant materials'. This title, as it turned out, refers to what you and I would know as 'metalwork & woodwork'. The modern term, by comparison, lacks something.

English is a fantastic language, as are all languages, and good words aren't made but rather evolve over time, with only the strong ones surviving. There are many to choose from when titling your talk, but be aware that they may come to mean different things to different people. You should explain the important words clearly before you start, but even this might not be enough because like wood and metal, the average person's connotation of a word, is a resistant material.

1. Unbroken Conversations – When conversing, you don’t often speak non-stop for twenty or thirty minutes. Conversations are interactive and iterative, each participant quizzing and directing the other to build meaning. A presentation on the other hand is a single stream from the presenter to the audience. This poses the first major difficulty to the presenter.

The best way to combat the one-sidedness of presentations, is not to make them one-sided. Allow people to ask questions, and even invite them to do so at intervals during the talk, but make sure to factor in the time necessary to do this.

In many cases, the audience may not readily engage in this way, but you can pose rhetorical questions at different stages: ‘You may be wondering…’ ‘One thing you might ask…’ ‘Why would we want to do this…’ and so on. Allowing the audience to feel that they are part of the event, even if they are not actually speaking, is a key component of a good presentation.

Another way you can make the audience feel involved is with eye contact. A presenter who looks at people in the audience is so much more engaging than one who does not. It’s the difference between someone who is ‘connecting’ and someone who is ‘droning on.’ As presenter, it will make you communicate in a more natural way, and will help the audience feel that you are speaking to them, and not talking at them.

Above all else, try to avoid very lengthy presentations in the first place. Listening is hard work, and there is only so much that people can remember. If you allow an audience to become active, they are far more likely to learn than if they are passive, so you should try to use the audience collaboratively in fulfilling your communication goals, whenever possible.

2. Visual Aids – You may be thinking that this is one area where a presentation deviates from a conversation, and usually it is, unless you happen to carry diagrams and charts around with you, like a carpet salesman with a suitcase full of samples. However, if you analyse what happens in a conversation, it provides much guidance on how you should use visual material in a presentation.

When you show someone a photograph or a picture, they will ask questions like, ‘What should I be looking at here?’ or, ‘Which bit is important?’ In other words, they will ask you to explain the reason for the picture, and then to direct them to the feature of interest, if it’s not apparent. And they will do something else. They will take the picture out of your hand, and peer closely at it.

This focusing is very important, because in a presentation, you have to do the focusing for the audience. The sharp region in the human field of vision is very small, and when we look at something, we move this focus-point around the scene in rapid jerky movements, fixing on one discrete detail at a time.

However, many presentation slides are designed like posters, where a thumbnail picture shares the screen with titles, bullet-points, company logos, and even other thumbnail pictures. If you wish to show a picture, then show that picture and that picture alone. Don’t subsume it among other items. The audience cannot take the slide out of your hands and have a closer look.

If the picture or graph is itself quite cluttered, and there is no easy way for you to de-clutter it, then you must direct the audience to where you wish them to look. And pointers – particularly the bumble-bee-like flitting laser pointers – are not the best way to do this. The visual highlighting should be clear and included in the image, and this kind of shading, greying-out, zooming-in, circling, and highlighting of features is one thing at which PowerPoint is extremely adept.

3. Forgetting What it’s Like Not to Know – This was the subject of an earlier article, and is another instance where conversations succeed and presentations fail. There is always a gap in knowledge between the presenter and the audience – it’s this gap that necessitates the presentation in the first place – and presenters often lose sight of this.

A large part of any learning process is involved with linking new concepts to what is already known. Teachers teaching multiplication to young children, for example, will explain it as the repeated addition of numbers. Five multiplied by four is five added four times. The concept of division is then explained, not as repeated subtraction, but rather as reverse multiplication. The point is, anyone reading this article will know instinctively what multiplication and division are, and will not have to think of them as analogous to anything simpler. Once you have ‘got it,’ you quickly forget about the props (multiple addition, reverse multiplication) that you used when you were getting it in the first place.

Presenters use tangible analogies and examples far too infrequently. To them, the material is simple and clear, and there is no reason to approach explaining it in any other way. But think again about what happens in a conversation. People will frequently ask: ‘Is this the same as..?’ or ‘Is this like when..?’ proffering their own examples and analogies to help construct meaning. They may even bluntly say, ‘Can you give me an example of that?’

In a conversation, the explainer will also usually be more generous with another key communication tool: stories. I once sat through over 60 student presentations during which a mere 7 anecdotes were used. And yet, in one-to-one discourse, stories are the information packaging tool of choice: ‘We had difficulties with..’, ‘Yes that reminds me of a time..’, ‘So instead, we decided..’ and so on. If you have any doubt about this, observe the conversation during your next lunch-break. Stories are used so often, we scarcely notice them.

Demonstrations too (the fourth communication tool mentioned on this website) will also find their way more easily into a conversation than a presentation. If a colleague is explaining something to you, and that something has a tangible form, he or she will quite likely say, ‘Here, let me show you.’ However, demonstrations rarely find their way into presentations, and although it can be due to practical constraints, it is quite often simply that presenter doesn’t think past the 2-D world of the slide presentation.

In the case of all four – demonstrations, anecdotes, examples and analogies – it is not that presenters cannot use these tools, but rather that they simply don’t bother.

4. What is Actually Remembered – This last shortcoming of presentations is actually also a shortcoming of conversations. Simply put, people tend to overestimate how many of their ideas have been understood and remembered. True of conversations; true also of presentations.

By way of experiment, I recently asked a friend to tell me what I do in my job. In his reply, he mentioned the courses that I give as well as the teaching that I do (he couldn’t name the subjects) and mumbled something about a European research project. I have, indeed, worked on a European research project, but this finished up nearly five years ago.

Ask any friend about something you told them. Pick a specific example from a conversation that you had, even recently. This is a fascinating exercise and quite an eye-opener. People always think they have been understood because of the way conversations work. The style of good listener is to nod, agree, and to generally help the other person to make sense. But this can fool the speaker into believing that everything that they have said has been understood exactly as they have meant it to be.

This is even more true in a presentation, where there are many listeners each with different pre-conceptions and background experiences. The solution to this problem should be obvious: know your audience as well as you can, take your time, and if possible, allow them to ask questions.

The conversational skill-set is the only one that you need to draw on when presenting, but you can’t afford to discard any of its components. When a colleague taps you on the shoulder and asks you a question, the style that you use when you turn around to answer them (assuming that you know the answer) is the style that you should use when making your next presentation.