10 Presentation Habits My College Students – And You – Must UN-Learn
College students come into my classroom not only with a flurry of fears and insecurities, but also with baggage in the form of bad presentation habits they have developed over the years.
My students’ bad habits didn’t happen overnight. These habits develop through years and years of watching terrible presentations. While most of us can recognize a terrible presentation, we don’t yet have the tools to make our own presentations great.
In a class called Professional Communication and Presentation, I teach my students how to break their bad habits. These lessons apply to all presenters: teachers, conference presenters, business executives… anyone who has a speech to deliver. Read on to see how you can un-learn these habits, too!
1. Turning the lights off during presentations.
The first presentation day in my classroom can be scary. Students are expected to weave together the material they’ve learned in an engaging, dynamic way, and those public speaking fears often rear their ugly heads at the last second. Students will sometimes ask right before they start speaking, “Can I turn off the lights?” This question is often couched in some kind of excuse like, “I really worked hard on my slides, and I want my audience to be able to see them.” My answer is always, “The lights stay on.”
“If your audience can’t see you, you won’t be able to connect with them…”
Students learn this bad habit by watching their professors lecture with the lights out. And why wouldn’t they want to do this themselves? Students feel much more comfortable with the lights off because the audience is looking at the slideshow instead of looking at them presenting.
How to Un-Learn this Habit…
Turning the lights off during presentations is a bad habit that must be broken. The focus should always be on you as a presenter. If your audience can’t see you, you won’t be able to connect with them, and you certainly won’t be able to effectively engage them. Audiences who can’t see you are also less likely to participate and answer questions, and more likely to sit back and disengage as they would in a dark movie theater. And while slides are important, your slideshow’s job is to support your message as a presenter… not to be center stage.
2. Relying too heavily on one leg of the presentation stool.
Jim Endicott sees presentation as a three-legged stool comprised of the following:
- speech content/message;
- delivery; and
- visual presentation.
Since there are three legs to Endicott’s presentation stool metaphor, my students are plagued by three bad habits.
- Sometimes, students will put too much focus on content, while ignoring their delivery and visual presentation.
- Other times, students will spend so much time on their visual presentation that content and delivery fall by the wayside.
- For a few charismatic folks, delivery is the primary focus, and they don’t develop content or a slideshow because they rely on their wits instead of a message.
“Focus on learning the importance of all three legs of the presentation stool, and work on developing a strong presentation that stands equally on all three legs.”
All three legs must work together successfully in order for a speech to resonate with audiences. If a student relies too heavily on one of these legs, their speeches fail to connect. In my class, we learn to focus on all three, and we constantly develop and improve all areas.
How to Un-Learn this Habit…
You may be a delivery superstar, but relying solely on your dazzling personality to get you through a presentation will make your audience believe you are an unprepared, disorganized mess. And you can be the most informed person in the world about a particular subject, but if you write out your entire script on your slideshow in bulletpoint format, your audience is going to sleep through your speech. Focus on learning the importance of all three legs of the presentation stool, and work on developing a strong presentation that stands equally on all three legs.
3. Believing an informative topic will inevitably bore the audience.
Informative speeches are often difficult for my students because they forget the importance of creating engaging speech content. For example, for one presentation, my students are tasked to watch a TED Talk, and then analyze that talk in 5 minutes by answering 5 questions. This is often the worst batch of presentations because students forget that informative speeches don’t have to be boring!
“Use storytelling, but… make certain all of your stories relate to the central focus of your speech.”
We work on storytelling the class before the TED presentations. As Nancy Duarte tells us, information should always be layered with story, just like layers of a cake. Students often forget that story is important and stick to matter-of-fact reporting of information. Benjamin Zander’s On music and passion and Sir Ken Robinson’s Schools kill creativity are two of my favorite TED speeches because both presenters repeatedly weave story into their talks. By traditional standards, 18 minute talks about classical music and public education would be considered boring, but watch both to see how storytelling works.
How to Un-Learn this Habit…
The most important way to improve your next informative speech is to realize that a good presenter can talk about a ham sandwich and make audiences interested. To improve informative topics, follow Duarte’s advice. Use storytelling, but, like Zander and Robinson, make certain all of your stories relate to the central focus of your speech. You can also incorporate audience participation and interaction into your presentation. It’s also important that you select an amazing topic that you are energetic and fired up to speak about, as your passion will shine through.
4. Choosing bad topics.
Bad Habit #3 leads directly into the fourth thing my students must un-learn. Students often select “bad” topics. Examples of bad topics include tired, overdone subjects such as capital punishment, abortion, fast food, violence in the media, gun rights, etc. These tend to be bad topics because we’ve been hearing the exact same arguments (for or against) for 20 years, and the presenter rarely offers anything new to the audience. Thus, the message is boring. Another example of a bad topic would be a topic the student isn’t personally invested in or connected to. Passion in delivery can only come through when there is a true connection between the student and the topic.
A student last month ran her persuasive topic by me two weeks before presentation day. She wanted to discuss the importance of water. I immediately yawned, but pressed her to find out why she was interested in this topic and how she planned to make it engaging for her audience. Because of her passion for the topic, and because she weaved in storytelling, the stale topic came alive on presentation day. She didn’t rely on clichés and instead put personal, authentic experiences into her speech. Her presentation was one of the best on speech day because she refined her topic from “the importance of clean water” to “how a water purification plant could help Haiti recover from the earthquake and become a first-world nation.”
How to Un-Learn this Habit…
Sometimes, we can’t help it. We’re assigned a topic to talk about, and we have to make it work. But if you think you have a bad topic before you start developing a presentation, your audience is in trouble. If you’re standing in front of a crowd with slumped shoulders and defeated nonverbal communication, your audience will mirror back that negative attitude. Don’t choose a bad topic, and don’t let a bad topic defeat you! Instead, use storytelling… and sprinkle in a little humor.
A Pew Research Center study revealed that Daily Show and Colbert Report viewers are the most informed and have the highest knowledge of both national and international affairs. Nothing can be as dry and boring as the news! Remember that humor helps audiences retain information, and funny stories are a great way for people to retain the information you’re communicating with them.
5. Writing and then reading a script.
Delivery should be as natural as possible. Why, then, do my students write out an entire script and read that script for their presentation? Consider why TED Commandment #9 exists: “Thou shalt not read thy speech.” Ironically, last month, a student wrote a script and read it from start to finish for his TED analysis speech. This student explained to us that one great thing his TED presenter did was follow TED Commandment #9. My jaw actually dropped when the student read the following lines: “My TED presenter didn’t read his speech, and Commandment #9 is a really important lesson to learn. When you read your speech, you bore your audience.”
“Reading a script from start to finish makes an audience feel cheated.”
This lesson is important for more than just my students. I am confronted with presenters reading a script even in professional venues. For example, in February of 2012, I was excited to attend a PechaKucha night in my hometown. Unfortunately, I was let down when one third of the presenters looked down at a script and read their presentations from start to finish.
How to Un-Learn this Habit…
Remember that overly slick, forced, or artificial presenters fall flat for audiences. Reading a script from start to finish makes an audience feel cheated. The best way to plan for a speech is to use an outline. Your outline will include main points to keep you on track, but this outline will allow you to speak naturally and from the heart. Still nervous that you might forget something? Practice! The only way to remember your information is to practice your speech until you know it well.
Keep reading for the next five habits…
Read onward to discover habits six through ten in the conclusion.
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Great advice Alex. Something else that could be added about “Turning Off The Lights” as it could also encourage a bit of nodding off to happen.
Great post. It has been many years since I taught, but the bad topic point really brought back the memories! My beef was more with persuasive speeches than informative speeches. I had to outright ban speeches on smoking being bad for you and drunk driving is wrong. Most people know this as fact, but that’s not why they do a behavior. As you mentioned the arguments were ALWAYS the same. If I had two of those speeches on the same day, it was sleepy time for my class!
Great advice sir, all the points mentioned are notable and memorable and helpful to become a good and successful Presenter.Thanks a lot.
First of all, i am a student in CST 100-02 at the Annandale Campus of Northern Virginia Community College.
After reading the first half of this article I would have to agree 100% with the 5th habit… I to have seen many presentations fall short for audiences because the presenter simply read from a script. Just sitting there and reading your speech does a lot of things to kill the level of engagement in your audience, if you are reading verbatim from a script you lack eye contact, or at least consistent eye contact, and the audience will feel like they do not matter and you could be reading the speech to the wall for all you care. This also limits you to the podium, because if you are legitimately reading straight from a script, you have to have it right there all the time in order to keep reading, and if you stay in just one spot, you lose the opportunity to further engage the audience through utilizing three dimensional space, the more active and energetic you are, the more engaged the audience will be, the more they will care about what you have to say.
I feel that if you practice a speech enough and know the material and topic well enough, you should be able to, no problem, use the speech as a guide line and simply elaborate on your topic in a direction that is similar to what you had written.
as long as you know what you are talking about, effective presentation should be no problem.
thanks for the great article,
William Zach Roberts
Student at NVCC.
Good post; it is all valuable information. All the habits are good to know and use during a speech.
This is a great article!.I agree that the best way to plan for a speech is to use an outline. I believe it’s very helpful. I’m a student in CST 100-02 at the Annandale Campus of Northern Virginia Community College.
Hi, I am a student at the Annandale Campus of Northern Virginia Community College. Public Speaking CST 100-02
I agree practice, practice and more practice is the key for delivering a good speech. As more you practice your speech, the more confident you get and as long as you follow certain “rules” like avoid the habits above, you will become a good public speaker.
I am a student in CST 100-02 at the Annandale Campus of Northern Virginia Community College. I agree about all you said and you mentioned good points. In #3 I liked when you said try to tell a story but not boring and related to the topic. Actually, this is easier for me to tell a story in my speech as an example or a quick experience of myself. When my speech is all written sentences, I feel like I have to remember all those words like an essay and sometimes I may even forget the order, but giving myself some time to focus and talk about my story a little bit gives me a space to wrap everything nicely.
Im a student CST 100-02 at the Annandale Campus of Northern Virginia Community College. I thought this article perfectly points out the classic no no’s in presentation. I have seen many examples of #2 in this article where people relied on only one thing which was either visual presentations or facts and statistics. some presenters even showed a video from a website that basically did the whole presentation for her. Others only read off their outlines but didn’t support it with examples and stories.
I am a Student at CST 100-02. I think number five is the topic habit that I need to break. When I know I have a presentation, I will make notecards or even write every little thing that I want to say. Recently in class, we had a vocare speech and we had to present what was our professional and career goal. I wrote down I wanted to say, as I got to the front I quickly looked over the notes and made a mental outline. Don’t get me wrong I had to look a couple of times but I think if I was more confident in myself I wouldn’t have to look at my notes or outlines.
I am a student in CST 100-02 at the Annandale Campus of Northern Virginia Community College. I did a Vocare speech just last Tuesday and I was scared out of my mind, I was wishing i could read my speech instead but now i see what number 5 is talking about. How can a person connect if there reading (probally in monotone) the whole time. Not good!!
Hi! I am one of CST 100-02 students at NOVA Annandale campus.
It is kind of hard to break those habits especial bad habit no.4. So many times that I have too large or common topic that becomes so boring. Thank you,this article is very helpful and absolutely gives me better ideas for my next presentations.
Hi my name is Jake Ruefer and I am a student in CST 100-02 at the Annandale Campus of Northern Virginia Community College. This is a great list of different struggles that everyone deals with but I would say I struggle most with #3. When I am assigned a speech that does not excite me very much it is very easy to let that dictate my speech. I need to add interesting facts and stories to my speech to help it become more interesting and engaging.
I also like how throughout these ten habits you remind students to remain natural and true to themselves and their natural persona. That is is always helpful to remember.
Thanks for the list!
I enjoyed reading these tips. I personally think that using a story relevant to the topic can always help keep the audience interested and the speech memorable!
I also think that use of ouline for speech is very helpful, since it helps the speaker to keep eye contact with the audience while backing up the presentation incase he/she forgot any part of the speech.
Student in CST 100-02 at the Annandale Campus of Northern Virginia Community College
My name is Linda and I am a student at CST 100-02 at the Annandale Campus of Northern Virginia Community College.
I agree with everything this article said and I especially agree with bad habit number 3. I have chosen many bad topics in my life to do a speech on. I always thought since I know a lot about the topic the speech would be good but in the end I was wrong.
great tips as a student at northern va community college and in cst 100-02 at the annandale campus i must say these tips will help as my guide to improve public speaking
Student in CST 100-02 at the Annandale Campus of Northern Virginia Community College. I think that the 8 point is very important, many people give apology to there audience but it is not good to do because gives a negative and different impression.
I am a student form Northern Virginia Community College CST 100-036N. This is a great article which not only describes bad habits during speech presentation but also inform us about how to avoid those bad habits. I really like #2 because I was not aware of that a complete presentation consists of three important parts. I usually focus on content during presentation leaving aside delivery of speech and visual presentation. This is an eye-opener to me. #1 is also a great point because all the presentations that I have seen so far in other classes are presented in dark.
I am a student in CST 100-36 at the Annandale Campus of Northern Virginia Community College.
I found tip #5 to be the most interesting and unexpected. Thinking that the more time you spend refining your speech would undoubtedly make it better but that may not be the case if you go about it the wrong way. A speech or presentation is not the same as an essay and need life in it, improvisation may be the best thing to make a speech have that electricity.
Good evening. I am a student in CST 100-36 at the Annandale Campus of Northern Virginia Community College.
#5 Reading from a Script
Ironically, I delivered my latest speech from a written copy in order to avoid #9 (Believing a good speaker never says ‘um’). I think I did rather well, but if I did it was because of my writing, not my presentation. Looking back, note cards with bullets would have suited the type of speech I was giving better than written copy. Even so, I was careful to not dwell on the text and remembered to look up and engage my audience. As if to bring my mistake full circle, as I result of looking up and engaging, I was slightly lost when I looked back down to see the next paragraph. Water over the bridge, under the dam, however it goes, I now know a little of how to improve my presentation next time. Thanks for this article, it was great!
CST 100
I believe this article hit on a lot of key points that are critical to any presentation or speech.
Also i meant to sayy its CST 100- 36
Hi im a student in CST-100 at Nova in Annandale.
I agree with the author a lot of the skills are brought with us to college classes. We are tought in writing to have a intro, three middles, and an end and thats how we give speeches. When we should outline and that would help us present it better. Also if we have a bad topic that dosnt intrest us how can we present it to others?
Hi! I’m a student in CST 100-36 at the Annandale Campus of Northern Virginia Community College. I like this post a lot. Practicing will get you better and will get you far. Also, you will never get better at something at your first try. You got to keep doing and learn from your mistake. Practices what will make you perfect and following these step from this article will help you do that. It will be hard at first but perfection takes time.
I agree with point number 2. I always work really hard on one part but don’t do much on the other. That’s where I fail when it comes to presentations. Having all those 3 points will make your presentation better and will get you far. Depending on one isn’t the way to go. I learned that the hard way. I just need to learn and keep practicing to make me a better speaker and this article will help me do so.
My name is Baha’a Bassil and I am a student of CST 100-36 at the Annandale Campus of Northern Virginia Community College. Reading this article I was shocked to see the habits that I can compare to. I never had trouble with speeches if I prepared for it. Though it is true you can never wing a speech. You will look at the crowds reactions as you are speaking and if one person reacts differently it will throw you off. I am speaking from experience, it will get you to think maybe your speech is not interesting enough for people to hear and then you start saying the words “um, uh, so…” which happened to me recently. You have to give the people something they’ve never seen. #5 is absolutely right, the audience feels cheated, it is so plain reading from a script rather than saying it from your mind while your hands are moving and that leads to the audience feeling what you are saying and if your speech is good enough it will lead to them feeling what you feel.
Hi, I am a student in CST 100-36 at the Annandale Campus of Northern Virginia Community College. My favorite point in the article was number 2: relying too heavily on one leg of the presentation stool. I think it is important to keep in mind the balance of the content, delivery, and visual aids to convey a lasting message. You can have a great presentation prepared, but if the factors listed above are not in harmony, the purpose of your speech will be lost. Thank you for the tips. These are very helpful.
Hello, I’m a student of NOVA CST100-36N class. As I read this first half of this article, I think this article is very helpful to all students. I agree with the habit #2, which is Relying too heavily on one leg of the presentation stool. I also believe that presenter has to focus on three contents evenly. we have to make sure we balance out the contents to make our presentation better. thank you for your helpful article.
Hi, I’m Thao from CST 100-36 at the Annandale Campus of Northern Virginia Community College. Among all those ten bad presentation habits that the college students usually make, I personally agree with the #5 habit. Writing and then reading a script in front of the audience is absolutely not a good choice when anyone wants to deliver a speech or a presentation. The most important thing, according to me, is the eye contact with the audience. Interacting with the audience via gestures, eye contact, as well as a sufficient tone when presenting a project or a speech would make a presentation be more lively and interesting.
Thank you for those good tips.
Hi, I’m a student in CST 100-36 I like what was said in #3 about telling a story to grab the audiences attention so they don’t get easily bored.
My name is Darian Newsome and I am a student in CST 100-036 at the NOVA Annandale campus. While reading this article I must admit that I am guilty of many of these bad habits. Any presentation that I have given has always made me extremely nervous about actually speaking, so I would just beef up my PowerPoint so that no one would hear my voice shaking. In my opinion I believe that #2 is the most important because without a balance of visuals, confidence, and information a speech can turn quite ugly. I also believe that #9 is also something that I have had problems with in the past. Normally I will make a conscious effort to not say “um” whenever I am presenting, however whenever I do catch myself saying it I get distracted from my speech and in the long run it costs me a lot of points. Overall I think these habits are extremely true and that a lot of people have them. Luckily this article was made to show us all how not to present and I will try to remember all of them.
Hi I am from NOVA CST100-36N. I completely agree with #5. “Writing and then reading a script.
Delivery should be as natural as possible. When you read your speech, you bore your audience.”
It is really hard to give a speech, especially if you get nervous before. If you get nervous, it is easy to forget what you’re going to say. I find it best to write down what I’m going to say, and try not to read too much from it. Sometimes I like to highlight the statements that I want to make sure I say for sure, that way even if I am trying to do it by memory, I’ll still remember a few important facts.
Hi! When I give presentations, the people who assess me tell me that I’m too casual..but when I ask my classmates about it, they say its good that I am casual, since they feel I’m talking to them and I don’t send them to sleep…Are presentations supposed to be a formal thing?How do I get serious?
Btw..the topic I gave the seminar on was purely technical…
Hello, I am a student form Northern Virginia Community College CST 100-036N. I think the #5 habit happens very often for presenters. Because of the nervous and the stress, many people cannot avoid that habit. Also, they try to avoid making eye-contact with the audience, and all they want is finish their speeches as soon as possible by read their speeches quickly. Well, that is bad since making eye contact since the goal is deliver our speeches efficiently to the audience not to ourselves.
CST 100-36 at the Annandale Campus of Northern Virginia Community College
I always prefer the light to be off so that way I dont see the audience that much and don’t get nervous. Well, now, I know it is not good, so I’m got to unlearn this asap.
I am a student at NOVA’s annandale campus for CST 100
Professor Tirpak is my professor, and he knows me (I forget the section, so this’ll have to do).
Number 4 is a problem I’m worried about having, because I like choosing topics that interest me, not thinking much about whether my audience will relate at all. Once I choose my topic, I figure out how I can make it relate, but the topic itself stays distant. It hasn’t happened yet, but that’s what I’m worried about happening.
Through all my years in school and teaching I have never seen someone turn off the lights. That to me just seems very weird or maybe I just never noticed it. Either way I agree with Joesph that this would definitely encourage some nodding off.
Great post Alex!