Set a theme before drafting your presentation

If you don’t set a theme for your presentation it won’t be focused and your audience won’t receive the message. It’s that simple.

It’s fair to say that without a theme there is no message. Yet, we sit through an endless number of presentations every year that are absolutely theme-less.

The theme is your overarching message. What is the point of your presentation? Successful speeches, PowerPoint presentations, novels and movies have well-developed themes. Some great historic themes include:

• The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald: After years of fantasizing about the beautiful Daisy Buchanan, Jay Gatsby discovers that he is more in love with his memory of her than with the real Daisy. (It’s not hard to imagine a closely related business version of that theme.)
• A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway: During World War I a wounded American volunteer with the Italian army loses his lover, his child, and much of his identity.
• Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare: Two young lovers, separated by their families’ feuding, take their own lives in order to be united in death.

Some business themes might include:

• Why the U.S. economy must change from a consumer-based economy to an investment-based economy.
• How the biotechnology industry is finally about to live up to its huge decades-old promise.
• The key to fixing the U.S. education system.
• How to bring manufacturing jobs back to the United States.

Set your theme first. It’s the theme that informs what to include as your content.

When presenting, you want to state your theme early and deliver that theme several times throughout the presentation to make it stick. For certain, say it at the start of your presentation. If you don’t tell audience members the point, you force them to piece together your information and try to decode the point. That forces them to do the work. Many won’t bother. Others will come to the wrong conclusion.

State your theme again at the close of your presentation. The theme will act as bookends when used at the start and finish, and that helps ensure your audience members don’t walk away without understanding the point of what they just observed.

The theme needs to be simple and easily understood, as well as interesting or meaningful. Otherwise, why shouldn’t I tune out and toil with BlackBerry or dessert?

Set a theme before drafting your presentation. If you don’t your presentation will be unfocused and your audience won’t get the message.

 

Comments

Leave A Comment:

If you are already a member, please log-in to leave comments.
Not a member? Please register.
Have you forgotten your password?