Are you the kind of presenter who meanders through your talk, running over your time limit and stopping at every tangent? Whether due to nervousness, inexperience, or a chatty nature, there are plenty of reasons why you might find it difficult to get to the point of your speech.
How about other presenters in your company or on your team? You may know that they struggle to deliver a clear message, but aren’t sure how to edit down their message to make it better.
There are three actions required to cut through the fluff of any presentation or message. You might think of them as speciality editing tactics, where the end goal is to make your main point much more powerful. Before you start to whittle down your existing content, pull together all of your existing materials. Open up your PowerPoint presentation, gather up your notes, and make sure you have all of the necessary assets to begin. Then, grab a red pen or a handy machete, and let’s get down to business!
Slice Jargon
We’ve written articles before about the power of simplifying your message it order to appear more credible and convincing. The same holds true when you want to cut through the fluff known as “jargon,” and/or industry-specific terminology that may be unfamiliar to your audience or confusing. For example, phrases like “paradigm shift” or “synergize” are fancy ways of saying something that needs to be clear, not pretentious. Go through your current content and ask yourself: “could a 5th grader understand this?” If not, it needs to be cut.
Trim Tangents
Sometimes the things you believe are relevant to your core presentation are about as useful as a second nose. You can spot slides that hide tangents because you feel like you “have” to include them, like a team slide placed right in the middle of a poignant call to action, or a company overview slide when you are trying to discover your audience’s pain points. If a slide or a section of the presentation doesn’t fit within the logical flow of your talk, it’s unnecessary. Either delete it or simply move it to an appendix so that you can feel comfortable that it exists without ruining your overall vision.
Dig to the Core
Hidden beneath the excess, all presentations have a primary purpose. Discover yours by grabbing a pen and writing the goal takeaway of your talk in one sentence. The breadth of your message’s scope isn’t what matters (i.e., saying “I want to help everyone in the world get better sleep with my brand of mattress), what is important is that you have enough clarity to know what this core vision is. That one sentence may take a little bit of digging, but it’s in there. If you need a little more inspiration, do some Googling to find other brand’s overall value propositions. The very best will be clean, to the point, and emotionally poignant. What’s the value proposition of your presentation?
If you want to find more ways to edit out the unnecessary and clean up your message to perfection, check out these related articles!
Presentation Writing From the Ground Up
