Focusing presentations
Nynke June 11th, 2006
In Powerful presentations I stepped back. Here I step back even further for a first entry on patterning, pacing, timing, and focusing of presentations.
The Greek spent a lot of time learning effective presentations.
Perhaps we can learn something from these ancients?
Rhetoricians identified fixed patterns based on recurrent rhetorical situations and assumptions about how people are persuaded.
- Corax of Syracuse (wikipedia)
- Aristotle’s generic structure: geeks and greeks
- Cicero’s arguments (wikipedia)
- Quintilian’s “natural order” (wikipedia)
In classical rhetoric, “arrangement” means: dividing and ordering according to the needs and demands of situation and genre. The organization of the content of a good presentation had six parts that could be named, and which I am expanding a bit:
- Introduction.
- Statement of facts, be they measurables or observables.
- Discussion of facts for making possible meanings.
- Proof of facts, the verification and validation ways used.
- Refutation of possible objections and solving or minimally noting foreseen problems.
- Conclusion, convergence, uniting of all the above.
Check out Rick Brenner’s Presenting to Persuade for more …
[…] Patterning, pacing, timing, and focusing. Stepping back on this one: We need to have a look at the big picture of business relationships of the local context and purpose. […]
[…] Leaving Time for Questions and Answers: Keeping “Refutation of possible objections and solving or minimally noting foreseen problems” in (see Focusing Presentations) reduces amounts of disagreeing after converging and decision making. We can tell our audience we make explicit time for questions and answers, and not at the end of the speech as if it will not be included for convergence or in decision making. We are to know ahead how long we wish to spend on this part. […]