Member Article

It's just plain rude!

With Simon Raybould at Curved Vision Theatre

It’s always risky to provide examples of bad practice, for fear of alienating people – or worse, of them not seeing what’s wrong! However, I’ve just sat through a half-hour presentation which really, really let down the presenter and the company she was representing.

What’s wrong with it? Well, the only reason I sat through it was to review it, because while the speaker’s voice lets her down (she’s boring and there are an irritating number of “errs” and “umms”) it’s her slides that really kill things.

They’re over-crowded, with up to 13 bullet-points on a slide. Some of them even get partially hidden by the company logo she has on every slide!

Add to that a lack of spell-checking (how can you spell “Google” wrongly?!) and having to skip over some because of running out of time and, well… I’d like to think that no one I’ve trained would ever be so disrespectful to his or her audience.

Because that’s what it is. To make a presentation like this, you’re effectively saying that you are so much more important than the audience that you can’t be bothered to rehearse, to read through your slides, to check them and so on. Imagine how someone in business is going to respond if you make a pitch-presentation for business which tells them so clearly what you think of them…

Yes, I know this one is a bit controversial but sometimes you’ve just got to take the risk! As always you can contact me to talk these over via sme@curved-vision.co.uk.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Ruth Mitchell .