Your Audience Already Has a Preferred Way of Reading

Let me ask you if you’ve had a long hard week at work to you come home pour yourself a beverage of choice put your feet up.

Turn your large flat screen TV on in your dad or your living room 10 15 20 feet away and then pull up a news Web site and start reading the sports page about your favorite team on a large TV screen 15 20 30 feet away.

Is that how you like to read chances are no.

You already have a system of reading that’s worked well for you your whole life.

It’s called holding a book a newspaper or a laptop or an iPad or a computer screen.

About 12 to 18 inches away.

That’s how you like to read.

It’s worked well for you your whole life.

You could read on a screen 15 20 30 feet away.

But that’s not how you like to read.

So that’s the problem with so many PowerPoint presentations.

We’re trying to artificially force people into doing something that isn’t how they like to do it.

People like to read the way they like to read.

And that’s why I get a kick out of people telling me all the time.

Well T.J. and our corporate culture we have a system where our logo is here and we have five bullet points we have the central thesis written on every slot and I always have to politely tell people I don’t care about your corporate culture.

I care about the culture of every individual in your audience of how they’ve experienced life and reading and learning information there until or their entire life their entire life and they want to read something.

It’s a textbook.

It’s a book.

It’s a computer screen where they get to control it.

Let me ask you if you really want to read something that’s important to you.

It’s interesting to you it’s important.

Do you ask family members or friends or colleagues to come in stand next to you talk to you while you’re reading and turn the pages while you’re reading is that how you like to read.

Chances are now that would be incredibly annoying.

That’s not how you like to read when you want to read something you’re like most people you try to make it quiet or you at least put earplugs in so you can tune out other people talking.

You have that page or that screen in front of you.

You read at the speed you want to read.

You’re not arbitrarily reading in a speed someone else wants you to read.

You turn the page or scroll down only when you’ve finished and you want that’s how you like to read.

Well guess what.

If you’re standing up delivering a PowerPoint presentation and you’re putting up a slide with a bunch of text and talking to people and changing the slide you’re going completely contrary to how everyone in your audience has tried to read their entire life.

So what’s the result.

The result for most people is you know what they’re going to hand out the deck later this person is just going through the.

Let me just check my e-mail.

There’s got to be more interesting news alerts on my RSS feed.

That’s the reasoning that’s going on in your audiences mind.

So that’s why you’ve got to respect the medium and not ask people to do a lot of reading when you’re presenting.

Now there is an exception especially if it’s a relatively small group.

If you are doing some kind of a training or you really want to re-emphasize certain points you can do what I do.

So if I’m giving a public speaking workshop and I’ve just finished a segment on PowerPoint for example I will then give a handout that covers the key concepts on PowerPoint.

I stop talking.

I take everything off the screen and I look at everyone reading the piece of paper.

I don’t stop talking again until people do this that tells me they finished reading.

That’s how people like to read.

So we all wish we could force people to do all sorts of things our way and not their way but effective speakers take people as they are.

They don’t try to force them to read in ways they don’t want to read.