12 Ways to Ruin Your Presentation: Part 3

In the previous two articles of this series, we have discoursed the different factors that can contribute to the failure of a presentation. Factors during the preparation and during the actual presentation were discussed in part 1 and part 2 respectively. Part 2 thoroughly explained how some unpredictable challenges, presentation contents, spoken and body languages can make your presentation a total disaster. This last part will talk about the remaining factors stated on Rudolf Strutz’ eBook, “12 Ways to Ruin Your Presentation”. 

Pacing and Prancing

You have a choice whether to pace up or down during the presentation. You can also combine it with a simple prancing, like stepping towards the listeners, then away, going to the left and then right. These few steps can easily enchant your audience and create awkwardness inside the room. Sitting down all throughout the talk is also an option to ruin your presentation.

Pacing and prancing are very common to freethinkers. Readers are just motionless because they rely on their notes.

Direction of View

A common problem to presenters is their fear to look right at the audience. Some are gazing across the people, but not right at them. Some even look at their fingers or their mobile phones constantly. There are also those who concentrate on their computers or on the projector screen. Truly a perfect way to make your presentation awful.

Comparing

Talking about experiences with competitors, may it be about their service, product or the whole company itself, is very common. If there’s no competitor to rant about, comparing different departments with each other is the next option. Either the people present during the presentation or those who are not there are “good” or “bad”.

Babbling

Those little stories or funny anecdotes, they are also common during presentations.

1. A Story

There will always be a story that will suddenly sneak on your mind that you can’t keep yourself from sharing even if it has nothing to do with the content of your presentation.

2. A Joke

Normally, this includes dragging your competitors down and some sexist remarks.

3. Politics, Religion, and Football

Stating your opinion (and explaining why you are not wrong), in either of these three famous topics is also common.

4. Questions

There are times when you will be asked a question after your presentation that you don’t want to answer, then you will ask the audience to answer it to “prove they listened to you.

5. Promises

These are promises of further materials which will never come or an invalid e-mail address to send their questions or feedbacks. Also, a valid one but you will just disregard their emails. Perfect!

At the end of the day, what is written in this series will serve as a reminder – not a tip, nor a trick to improve presentations. Let us all be guided with the don’ts to have an effective presentation. These simple things are most of the times what we neglect, hence, results in simple to dramatic catastrophe before, during and after a presentation.

Also, read part one and two of this blog series:

• 12 Ways to Ruin Your Presentation: Part 1
• 12 Ways to Ruin Your Presentation: Part 2