NPSC Blog

Writing speeches would have to be one of the hardest jobs that the public sector communicator faces - or, maybe that should read, writing speeches well…

It’s hard because, especially when you are writing for your Minister or Chief Executive, you often do not have the sort of access to that individual that affords the luxury of an in-depth conversation where you sound them out about the ideas they would like to canvass and the stories they use. So there is no real personal connection, which means that imparting some sort of humanizing quality into the speech becomes a real lottery.

David Slack, in his excellent session at comms@06, made the very good point that bloodless speeches (particularly in the public sector) tend to be a reformulation of policy papers, leavened with some ‘interesting’ facts and delivered in the house memo style: not an enjoyable experience for the audience (or indeed, judging from the pained expressions on most speaker’s faces, for the unfortunate presenter).

This predicament tends to be compounded by the fact that many of the people who request speeches from us also request accompanying PowerPoint slides. This, to me, is pretty much the death rattle for most speeches. Once you are entrusting your content to a medium that is positively hostile to it, you are lost. As David said:

PowerPoint routinely disrupts, dominates and trivializes content… (they) too often resemble a school play - very loud, very slow, and very simple.

Now I am not going to bore you with a tirade against PowerPoint (but if you are interested in the philosophy behind this view, I recommend you read Edward R Tufte’s essay on the subject), rather I would like to suggest a few ways that you can make Powerpoint a more effective tool, if you are required to use it.

First up, follow Guy Kawasaki’s 10/20/30 rule of PowerPoint: namely, 10 slides, 20 minutes and nothing smaller than 30pt font. You can use this rule of thumb to cull most of the crap that the policy people will send across - and believe me, the audience will appreciate it.

Next, never, ever, use clip art. I can’t remember how many arguments I have had with people when I have stripped their presentations clean of this junk. Almost every single one of them has said: ‘but I want to make the presentation a little more fun.’ They seem to be operating under the delusion that clip art will make them look like fun, interesting or happy people… Yeah, that is what the accountants would think.

Clip art looks cheap and it makes you look, at best, creatively retarded. Just don’t do it.

One of the other points that David made is relevant here (and I know he meant ‘advantage’ in a nice way):

The idea of a presentation should be to take advantage of the people gathered there, not to bore them.

Use the slides to force people to focus on what you are saying, not what is on the wall behind you. You could use a simple image, or a screenshot, that gives people a sense of what you are about to say - that primes them to listen more intently. I am a big fan of the completely blank slide for this reason. When it comes up people immediately focus all their attention on the speaker, as there are no longer any other visual cues to distract them.

In the second or two it takes them to process what has happened, their attention will be absolutely riveted to you. A surreal or bizarre image will have the same effect (although you would want to be a little careful around your choice of image here).

Similarly, if you have to include bullet points to, say, list the initiatives of an organisation, only use 3 bullets per slide (irrespective of the number of intiatives), and a maximum of 6 words per bullet. Use them as a prompt, a tease, not a complete list. The audience will read whatever you put up, and while they are doing that they probably won’t be listening all that intently (this may say more about my attention span than it does about your audience - but it is better to err on the side of caution).

Put everything else in the notes - if they are that interested in your content, they can read about it at their leisure. And if you don’t bore them to death with 45 slides in 40 minutes, they might just do that.
Finally, under no circumstances use those animated transitions. They are not cool. They are not even fun. They are just plain annoying. While your bullet points are flying in from the left of the screen, your audience’s attention is departing with the same speed in the opposite direction.