One of Edward Tufte’s presentation tips is “Never apologize.”
Never apologize. If you’re worried the presentation won’t go well, keep it to yourself and give it your best shot. Besides, people are usually too preoccupied with their own problems to notice yours.
True that. Presenting, like performing, relies a lot on confidence (or at least the illusion of confidence). If you get up and begin with an apology, you’ve already undermined your own credibility and dug yourself a big hole.
Plus, apologizing before a presentation is insulting to the audience. If you get up on stage in front of people, you’ve got to believe that what you’re offering them, even if not perfectly honed, is worthwhile. If you don’t think so, why should they?
The power of the pause
There’s also a Tufte tip that says, “Be sure to allow long pauses for questions.” I think the intended meaning here is take your time while waiting for questions. But I’d like to add a related thought: It’s alright to pause before answering a question too.
When someone fires a question at you, there’s an instinctual feeling that you’ve got to respond instantly, especially if you’re billed as an “expert.” You want to show that you’ve got an instant answer.
If you have a response on the tip of your tongue, that’s great. But sometimes it can be a good idea to pause and think about the question, what your response is, and how you want to phrase it. I’m not talking a half-hour lull or anything. Just a few seconds to collect your thoughts in your brain before they come out your mouth.
Unlike opening with an apology, a brief pause doesn’t come across as weak or flabby. It makes you seem like you care about your answer. It shows respect for the question, the questioner, and the audience. And it makes them want to listen.
In this age of instant information, there’s something strangely satisfying about someone who takes a moment to formulate an answer in order to deliver a coherent, thought-out response.
DHH
on 15 Dec 06A few specific, common excuses that should be left out: How tired you are, how drunk you were last night, how little time you spent on the presentation. All three excuses are exceedingly common. Especially at tech conferences. They almost appear in bragging form. Pretty annoying.
If you must, just utter these excuses to yourself. So you can feel better about delivering a mediocre performance :)
Ken B.
on 15 Dec 06I was taking a class with a clown from Ringling Brothers circus and he couldn’t emphasize enough the importance of the pause. With improv and clowning the pause gives weight to what just happened (ie. the reaction to the water in the face). If you go back and watch Charlie Chaplin or any of the other greats you will see them take those pauses.
When giving a speech, pausing for a moment after making a statement allows that statement to stand out, like white space in design. For the speaker it also gives them a chance to slow down, enunciate their words properly and to remember to take care of the audience rather than just trying to power through the speech.
Darren
on 15 Dec 06Having pauses when presenting is very important, but it is easy to forget when you are the only one speaking in front of hundreds of people.
I’ve given a number of presentations and I always keep in the back of my head the thought that, when you are up there, you tend to be rather hyper-aware (unless you are 100% at ease in speaking in front of large crowds, which few of us are). This makes any pause seem much longer than it really is, so the tendency is to make quick pauses and speed up anything said after this. In the end, and I know this from experience, a clear ten minute presentation turns into a marathon five minute jumble of words. If you think your pause is too long, you are probably taking about the right amount of time. If you think you are speaking too slowly, you are probably at a good pace.
Chris Morris
on 15 Dec 06And please no more, “That’s a great question…” before answering. Most of the time, the accompanying look on the face is, “Oh crap, how the hell am I going to answer that?!?”
M. Seldon
on 15 Dec 06A few specific, common excuses that should be left out: How tired you are, [...] Especially at tech conferences. They almost appear in bragging form. Pretty annoying. That is so true. I’ve always wondered why presenters like to brag about such things. It has nothing to do with the presentation or its subject… Great post!
Bill P
on 15 Dec 06Another thing to avoid is poor time management.
“HOW much time do I have left?” “Oh, I’m only on point one.” “I need to speed this up.” “Can you give me 10 more minutes – the next speaker won’t mind.”
The only thing less professional than using your time poorly is telling the world how you’re using your time poorly. It’s all about courtesy and preparation.
People who do this also tend to eat into another speakers’ time. The person speaking at the end of the day ends up giving half of his presentation to a grumpy audience that hasn’t had enough breaks.
In Toastmasters, when you go 1 minute over your time limit, people start clapping and don’t stop until you quit speaking and sit down. it definitely teaches you to keep your presentation moving.
Eugene Loj
on 15 Dec 06The suggestion of taking a pause is an excellent idea.
If you apologize you diminish your creditability instantly. When you present have your “ducks in a row” and no excuses!
One exception is if you honestly don’t know the answer to a question. This happens to some pretty good presenters. You can gain a huge amount of respect by acknowledging
“I don’t have an answer to your question, but I’ll look into it and promptly get back to you. Please see me after the presentation.”
Make sure you get their email address or telephone after your presentation and follow up. People in the room will take notice.
Another great place to make a mini-pause is if you “um” during a presentation. There are plenty of people who “um” during their presentation. This drives an audience buggy.
You can quickly correct yourself by simply pausing and then continuing. Take a breath or do something else that stops the “um” from coming out. I coached someone on this simple technique and their presentation became instantly better.
Eddie
on 15 Dec 06I actually discovered this while doing miltary rifle drill performances… I was a commander and as such I would notice constantly every poorly timed action, every fall back manuever, whenever someone didn’t have time to make it to the mark etc etc…
To me, it appeared absolutely dreadful.. but in these events, it’s much less obvious when someone messes up because they don’t (like you mentioned) stop to apoligize… they just recover and keep on going.
I’d talk with the viewers afterwards and they never noticed anything at all.
I carried that over to when I’m on the stage briefing or talking to folks… just keep on keeping on.
That said- I don’t mind apologizing up front as long as it’s something appropriate to apologize for. I don’t want to waste someone’s time so I’ll say “This is a general overview, I can get more technical with someone after the meeting if your interested…” or something to that extent which I sort of view as an apology of sorts.
Eddie
on 15 Dec 06...I feel I should have specified that it was ROTC students I was drilling. I guess that makes it clear why they would have been so awful :)
Jeroen Mulder
on 15 Dec 06It is one of the most valuable lessons relates to presenting I have learned in university. Meta communication, such as apolegies, is nothing but noise to the listener. It doesn’t add anything to the subject at hand and often tells more about the presenter in a negative way.
It’s understandable that you want to communicate some stuff up front. If you’re going to discuss a subject rather globally, then introduce it as part of your presentation’s goal. Surely you thought well about that decision, so there’s nothing to apolegize for.
Dr. Peter
on 15 Dec 06Pauses are also so much better than Um’s and Uh’s. Even if you really don’t know what to say next, the difference is like night and day for the audience.
One of the biggest lessons we learned in a teaching class I took in grad. school was not to get hung up on what specific word you were going to say next (especially a problem if you try to memorize your entire talk). The audience doesn’t know what you were going to say originally, so they won’t notice or care if it changes.
Jemaleddin
on 15 Dec 06A few years ago I was given a presentation by an old Marine who started by pointing out that because he was presenting last, they were running out of time: “So, I’ll give you the mini-skirt presentation: long enough to cover the topic, but short enough to keep your interest.”
Genius.
Justin Reese
on 15 Dec 06Absolutely. My favorite university professor used this tactic to validate even ignorant questions. When a student would ask something everyone else knew, or offer an incorrect “correction”, the professor would cock his head, hold his chin, consider the comment deeply for a few moments, and then begin nodding and explaining as if he had just now come to the proper conclusion.
It communicated “what you just said may be wrong, but it was worthy of my consideration” and created an atmosphere in which students were encouraged to participate. Cool guy.
Mark Gallagher
on 16 Dec 06Agree with this, but sometimes you can include an apology when using self-deprecating humor.
Self-deprecating humor can really enhance public speaking but can only be done if you are very confident and have a style where it seems natural to your personality.
In the middle of a presentation, I may say “now let’s talk about web usability testing…... This part of my presentation is really boring, so it’s a good time to daydream or get some coffee.”
Regarding the Q&A, If I don’t have a good answer I will exagerate the point by pausing and then saying “I was trying to make up an answer to that…. that might fool you, but I’m not that clever. I have no idea. Anybody in the audience an expert on this one ?”
Mike Mockus
on 17 Dec 06One of Edward Tufte’s tips is to practice, and the best way I’ve found to practice, is to join a local Toastmasters club (10,000 clubs in 90 countries). For the past four years I’ve presented at the same two conferences, every year, and that was the extent of my public speaking. I always did well, but I knew some practice in between would help, so about a year ago I joined a Toastmasters club. The club meets every two weeks for 90 minutes. While there I’m exposed to some great public speakers, peer evaluations, and even if I choose to be a total slacker and only give a couple prepared speeches a year in my club, I’ve still increased my experience by 200% per year. It’s also dirt cheap. Practicing public speaking – all upside.
vincent
on 18 Dec 06About the power of the pause, before answering a question. A teacher of mine gave this extra tip on that one:
If you don’t know the answer immediatly, give yourself more time by asking ‘Are you asking me if…. ’ or ‘I did not understand the question’ or ‘Is your question about….’, which is actually rephrasing the question. Or by literally saying: ‘that’s an interesting question, let me think here for a minute’
It just wraps the pause a bit in a neat package.
Tim
on 19 Dec 06I had a great drama teacher in high school who used to count the number of times you said “um” in a presentation. She taught us to just pause and gather our thoughts instead. It’s one of the best presentation tips I’ve received in over 10 years of corporate training. That and not reading out the slide – oh God how I hate that!
Mark
on 22 Dec 06Let’s do pauses in words, Saying and stopping again, That it was better given in heads, Значенье the aforesaid of a word.
Mark
on 22 Dec 06Let’s do pauses in words, Saying and stopping again, That it was better given in heads, Значенье the aforesaid of a word.
This discussion is closed.