Speaking in the community part 2

Chrisotph Fuchs

4/24/08

I attended the lecture, “The Potential for Trees,” which focused on a company’s role in sustainable forest management, greenhouse gas emissions, and global warming. The strength of the Mr. Anonymous’s speech was the question and answer period. Because Mr. Anonymous was not a very engaging or polished speaker, I found myself feeling alternately bored and confused during his speech. While he could improve in a lot of areas, the two main areas were he could really improve are his stage presence and his use of PowerPoint.

After searching my memory long and hard, I have been able to think of a few things that weren’t horrible. Unfortunately for him, these were all in the question and answer period, by which time my impressions of him had solidified. The first strength was that he was pretty engaging when responding to questions. He clearly was more at ease and looked at the audience, especially the questioner, when he was talking. He also did a commendable job in thanking each person for their question and complementing them on the thoughtfulness of their idea. This was pretty impressive since many of the questions were out of his field and/or were framed in a very obvious anti-lumber corporation manner. Even when one person asked two consecutive questions that were completely unrelated to his talk, he did not get visibly angry or flustered, and still thanked the person for his questions. One final thing that he did well was taking off topic questions which he admitted he was not qualified to answer and reverting back to his central themes during his answer.

Mr. Anonymous’s stage presence was poor. As a member of the audience, I felt disconnected from him as he rarely looked up from his notes, often seeming to read entire paragraphs of unquoted material from the podium. I would say that he read word for word for minutes at a time, from a speech that he had obviously neither written nor likely practiced, except for the fact that the numerous “ums” and “uhs” couldn’t possibly have been written in. When he did refer to a PowerPoint slide, he would turn and almost exclusively talk to the PowerPoint screen. This not only kept him from making eye contact with the audience (aside from an occasional sideways glace), but also caused him to talk away from the microphone, making me strain to hear him. His tone was so dry and monotonous that even the most enthusiastic supporter would have had to stifle yawns. It never varied; he never sped up or slowed down, never emphasized points, and often ended sentences in anticlimactic intonations that left me wondering for a split second what he was going to say next- before I realized that he had finished. In addition, he had a habit of leaning heavily on the edge of the podium while looking up at slides. I thought to myself that the only thing that could possibly break the monotonous atmosphere would be if the podium cracked and toppled over.

The PowerPoint portions of the speech were a disaster, as Mr. Anonymous obviously was not a member of the technology generation. Not only did he accidentally exit the presentation to show all 15 slides at the same time and then remark, “Oops, don’t know what I did wrong there,” followed by a nervous laugh, but he did it twice! Then he was forced to stop his talk and one by one flip through all of his previous slides starting at the beginning until he got back to where he left off. In addition, he also made a series of formatting errors in his PowerPoint. For example some slides had up to ten bullets pop up at the same time, overwhelming me with information. Then he didn’t exactly follow what was on these busy slides, leaving me to wonder where in the slide he was. Another formatting error that appeared several times is that he had multiple slides with one or two pictures, but no title or bulleted points. He would then look up at the pictures and make up stuff about them as he went. There was obviously no structure to it.

One slide in particular captured my scorn. It contained two pictures from Uruguay and was meant to convey that A company was involved in aforestation activities there. The first picture was really dark and only showed one tree. To this picture he remarked, “I took this while I was done there, but you can’t really see anything because it’s pretty dark.” The second picture was of grassland. He pointed with a laser pointer to the horizon and said, “You can barely see it, but there is the outline of a pine forest out there.” Not only could I not see the outline of the pine forest, but 95% of the picture showed open grassland, not exactly conveying the idea that they were planting forests.

Another PowerPoint flaw was that he would rely heavily on the PowerPoint at some points for up to five minutes at a time, and then completely abandon it for five or ten minutes, leaving the last slide up. This was really distracting because it jolted me back and forth. Just as I was getting used to his poor interpretations of the PowerPoint, he would hunch back around the podium and read off, word for word, a long monologue. At times it would take me up to a minute or two to figure out how it related to the last PowerPoint slide.

In his conclusion, Mr. Anonymous made a valiant effort to include at least one tip somebody must have given him along the way – use a simple background slide so as not to distract the audience. This was working pretty well at first, but then the screensaver came on. This may not have been so bad except for the fact it was of sea gulls and other water birds and transitioned from one picture to another every 3 seconds. After letting this screensaver go on for at least a minute, during which most of the audience was completely distracted, he stopped his conclusion to make a joke that it wasn’t even his screen saver, and then waited for someone else to come down and disable it before continuing. By that time, I had completely forgotten what he had been discussing. This and the numerous other mistakes he made during the speech distracted me so much from the content of his speech that I was only able to understand and remember his most basic points. He could definitely benefit from a speaking class and I would recommend that for his company’s sake that he not give any more lectures until he improves.