Part 5: A Fail-Safe Structure for Your Ideas
An effective structure is driven not by logic but by listener psychology, especially people’s natural attention curve.
In the previous Newsletter (September/October 2004 issue), you saw how to develop strong, audience-focused material. Now you must mold your points into a well-structured talk. Fortunately, this is not something that demands a lot of complex decisions. That is because there is basically only one structure that works well:

• A four-part introduction
• A simple body containing only a few key points backed up in varied ways
• A brief summary

In a technical presentation to technical peers, there might be some excuse for deviating from this structure, because everybody (you hope!) is in a working mood and will give your points full attention no matter how garbled your organization. But even there, the discussion will show much greater quality if you guide it with an effective structure.
Let’s consider this structure in more detail, beginning with the introduction.

Creating Shared Commitment
We mentioned an important difference between presentations to technical peers and those to non-technical audiences: When you talk to peers, you can often count on an atmosphere of common challenge or shared commitment, even before you open your mouth. With non-technical audiences, you have to create this shared commitment. That is the job of your introduction.
A good introduction achieves this goal in four parts. Think of it as a commitment-creating RAMP leading up to your body:
R = Rapport Establish a friendly, positive, problem-solving connection with the audience through a brief greeting.
A = Attention Involve the audience in an attention-getter that spells out a problem, benefit, or challenge that matters to them. This attention-getter must relate directly to your main message. For instance, if you are proposing a piece of equipment, the attention-getter might be a severe problem that it would solve.
M = Message Preview your main message in the briefest possible form.
P = Plan Spell out the “contract” for your talk: the main sections of the presentation and the manner in which you propose to handle questions (throughout, intermittently, or at the end).
The whole introduction should take no more than two minutes; otherwise, the audience will begin to assume that you have moved into the body and that they have missed the transition.
Notice how much this optimal introduction differs from the typical lame preamble, such as the following:

This morning I’d like to update you on our quality improvement initiative. [What about it?] First, I’ll review our objectives. Then, I’ll discuss progress [What about it?] over the last six months.

This is basically just a plan, in no way designed to generate commitment. Perhaps even worse are long-winded introductions that ramble on pleasantly but without point, putting listeners to sleep before the speaker even gets to the body.

Answers to Common Questions
People often ask us questions about the kind to introduction we suggest. We’ll address two of them here.
Question 1: “Why must the introduction contain a message preview rather than just an announcement of the topic? Don’t I lose suspense by giving away my conclusion at the beginning?”
Answer: The audience’s natural attention is highest at the beginning of your talk. To make sure everybody hears your message clearly, you must take advantage of that. Also, stating your conclusion up front puts the audience in a position to evaluate your arguments as they come along. Otherwise, they’ll have to guess all the time what you’re driving at as you are building your “suspense story.”
Question 2: “Can’t I omit the attention getter? Doesn’t it smack too much of salesmanship for a technical presentation?”
Answer: There is nothing wrong with salesmanship, provided it is honest. The attention-getter is needed to spell out why your main message should matter to the audience. Just two or three sentences may be enough to focus the audience so they can receive your message and get ready to evaluate it.
Now let’s look more closely at the body and the summary.

A Body That Engages and Persuades
The bulk of your persuasive work is done in the body, where you present your evidence and arguments in detail. Unfortunately, the body is also where audiences commonly get confused, bored, and overwhelmed by numerical detail. To help you sow persuasion rather than confusion, remember three maxims:

• Less is better than more. Limit your key points to three, or at most five. And instead of telling a lot of detail about each, start with a message summary – the most important thing the audience should know about that point. Then back up with only as much information as is needed to drive that message home in a persuasive way.
  
• Variety is better than monotony. Don’t give your listeners a chance to nod off; keep them on edge with change. Most presentations are unbearably monotonous; they consist of many general statements followed by equally general sub-points, all presented with the aid of endless bullet charts. Make your talk different: Switch between tell and show, general statement and specific example or anecdote, and lecture and interaction.
  
• Strong examples are more persuasive and memorable than piles of numbers. Take advantage of that. Have the numbers ready as backup for the question period but don’t make them the flesh of your talk! A clear, simple chart will show the trend of the data and give notice that your evidence is solid; then make the data come alive with an example that is meaningful to your non-technical audience.

Perhaps the hardest thing for technical presenters to learn is intelligent simplification. There is always the temptation to lift the audience up to your level of specialty knowledge. Resist the urge! Instead, internalize the magic words, “To put it very simply….” Once you say those words to yourself, you’ll be amazed how easy it is to reduce complex concepts to simple ones. Combine this with the idea of explaining things through examples rather than tedious details, and the audience will have an easy time following you.
For instance, instead of discussing hardware and software details of PC-based video conferencing, you might say:
Basically, the system consists of a digital camera, a special card you plug into the laptop computer, and software that works with the camera and the computer to capture images and sound for inexpensive videoconferencing over the Internet. If you and a person in Europe or Asia had this setup in your offices, you could hold a two-hour video conference for the cost of a local call. During that conference you could share documents, write comments to each other as well as talk, and transmit digital movies of procedures, production facilities, etc.

A Summary That Incites to Action
By the time you reach the end of the body, the audience may have lost the main message among all the detailed arguments. That is why you need a summary.
State your message as strongly as possible and add an upbeat invitation to action if it is at all appropriate.
It’s a grave mistake to skip the summary in favor of yet another detailed point in the body. Keep the body lean, varied, and focused on persuasive examples – and cut details in the body instead of skipping the summary.
On the other hand, don’t turn the summary into a five-minute lecture that has the audience squirming in their seats. When you say “In summary,” the clock is ticking for a one-minute countdown!
This is the last in our Tools of the Trade series. Good luck with your presentations. Do contact us at perccom@aol.com.

Cheryl and Peter Reimold have been teaching communication skills to engineers, scientist, and business people for 20 years. Their latest book, The Short Road to Great Presentations (Wiley 2003), is available in bookstores and from Amazon.com. Their consulting firm, PERC Communications (+1 914 725 1024, perccom@aol.com ), offers businesses consulting and writing services as well customized in-house courses on writing, presentation skills, and on-the-job communication skills. Visit their Web site at http://www.allaboutcommunication.com.

The article in the Career Section “Tools” is gratefully reprinted with permission from the authors as well as with permission from the IEEE Professional Communication Society Newsletter editor Rudy Joenk. The article is reprinted from the Nov/Dec 2004 issue, Volume 48, Number 6, pages 5-7.