Structure Your Presentation like a Story

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Audiences make judgments very quickly based on first impressions. Psychologists call it the “primacy effect”: given a list of pieces of information, human beings consistently recognise and remember the first items best. The introduction is crucial because it must grasp their attention and establish your credibility, fast. The introduction should develop a relationship with your audience and orient them to your topic. An introduction should take 10 to 15 percent of your speaking time. The intro must settle these five questions:

Are they listening?
Do they want to keep listening to me?
Do they want to know more about this topic?
Do they understand where I’m coming from?
Do they understand where I’m going?

Hook their attention

The first few moments really are crucial to the success of the presentation: even before you speak, in the moment that attention orients to you as you prepare to start. Develop a rapport fast that prepares your audience to listen to you. Plan first actions and sentences very carefully. Command attention from the first words. The first sentence you use, as in a novel, should immediately capture the imagination of your audience. It has to be one of the strongest sentences in your tale. It’s the hook to help you reel in those whose imagination you’re trying to capture. Be imaginative or dramatic, and consider the following approaches to the opening few words:

Suspense
Novelty
Humour
Conflict
Story
Quotation
Startling statement
Provocative question

Establish a link with your audience

Try to create a personal bond, establish yourself as a human being rather than a distant and aloof speaker. Humanise yourself. Create an atmosphere of collaboration and dialogue with the audience: involve them. Generally, project the idea that “I’m doing the talking now, but I’m also here to learn from you as well as instruct”. The aim is to establish your credibility. In the process, to create a bond, you may wish to refer to the occasion or setting, refer to someone present, or use humour.

Motivate your audience towards your topic

All audiences start off thinking: “So what” or “What’s it to me”. You need to show them fast that the topic has a link to their own experiences and is worthy of attention.

It helps at an early stage to establish a context for your presentation, perhaps by fitting it into a familiar framework, or placing it historically. Then give the audience a framework for what you are going to explain, to smooth their understanding as it unfolds. Explicit previews of the content are often useful, especially for complex or technical material – unless it is so complex that later points only make sense after earlier ones have been explained.

The opening should give the audience a preview of what they will be told in the context of why they should care: how will they benefit, what problems will this information solve. Tempt them with brief snapshots of some interesting gems coming up in your presentation. State what your key points are going to be.

The Conclusion

Conclusions carry the power of the “recency effect” – the flipside of the primacy effect is that the information that audiences hear last is also very likely to be remembered. The conclusion also provides logical and psychological closure, and ties all the threads together with a sense of completeness. Just like the introduction, it needs to be planned precisely, almost to the point of memorisation.

Briefly summarise your main points, and make it a rousing call to action (if that is the purpose of the presentation) rather than just petering out. Rehearse the end of the presentation and look the audience directly in the eye when you deliver it.