The core assumption of my presentation courses is that you already have the skills necessary to present in your palate of conversational skills. The eye contact, facial expressions, body language, stories, examples, analogies and conviction that you use when speaking to a group of friends can be used to just as good effect when making a presentation. It really is that simple. However, most people find the task of giving a presentation very daunting, and it is interesting to reflect on some of the reasons why it is difficult to turn a conversation into presentation. I will look at four.

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.