Skills of Effective Presentation

When people think of lawyers and public speaking, they mostly imagine trials and other hearings. Only a few know that a lot of public speaking by lawyers takes place outside the courtroom. As Samuel Pillsbury, a law professor at Los Angeles’ Loyola Law School notes: “Lawyers often speak to lay groups about various matters of controversy. They appear before legislatures, city councils, planning commissions, or give talks to civic groups, business executives, or company employees. Lawyers also may need to give media interviews on behalf of clients.” Nowadays in business world there is a common expectation that all lawyers are strong communicators and masters at creating and delivering powerful and effective presentations. Public speaking is viewed by lawyers and their chiefs as a great way to market the law practice, because people perceive a lawyer as an expert on the topic he speaks about. Talking for 15 minutes in front of the right audience could do more for the practice than working for six months in the office.

If you are to speak in public, the first priority is to decide on the structure of your presentation. Your presentation should have a clear beginning, middle and end. An effective way of presenting is to start by indicating the topic of your presentation and the points you are going to make in support of this. Having singled out the major parts, think how you will interconnect them and present them in the logical sequence, so that your audience can easily follow your reasoning. In the middle of the speech make those points and in the conclusion summarize the points you have made and explain how they support your topic. This technique is sometimes characterized as the ‘tell them what you’re going to say, say it and then tell them you’ve said it’ approach. The main benefits of this approach are: (1) clarity, and (2) that it gives the opportunity to make each point at least three times in different ways, so that the audience is likely to remember at least the main points made.

Experts on effective public speaking are sure that any introduction ought to make an impact i.e. you should try to say something immediately that will make the audience want to continue to listen to you (e.g. ‘What I’m going to tell you today will fundamentally change the way this firm treats its clients’). It should contain a preview of what you are going to talk about (e.g. ‘in my talk today I will explain what needs to be done in order to increase the firm’s profits by 100 per cent in the coming year’). In the introduction you should show appreciation and respect to the audience (e.g. ‘I’d like to thank X for inviting me to come here today. I must say I have been very impressed by how friendly and professional everyone here is.’).

The structure of the main part of the presentation is manifested through proper paragraphing, connectives and choice of sentences. The passage from paragraphs is achieved through the use of adequate intonation pattern and pauses. But if you just make a pause trying to show that you are ready for further argumentation or points, you may either lose the attention of the audience or lose the connection between the points. That is why efficient presenters so often use special linguistic means to accentuate the connection between passages such as conjunctions (and, but, because, as), adverbs (firstly, secondly, initially, formerly, finally, etc.), prepositions (according to, before, after) and other language units (“there is a further problem of”, “in closing let me enumerate”, “now coming to the next point”, “thus we have seen that”, etc.). The primary goal of these phrases is to fill the gap between different blocks of thoughts and facilitate logical transition to the next idea.

Effective presentations are characterized by different types of sentences: declarative, interrogative and imperative. Presenters resort to the use of questions-in-the-narrative or rhetorical questions. They change the nature of a usual question and turn it into a stylistic device because it is asked and answered by the same person. These questions serve to activate the audience, because they stimulate a response and entice people to formulate answers – even in their minds. If you manage to get the audience to think about the question you ask, you get their attention. It is also important how you pose a question: pause after you ask it then present the answer with confidence. Questions may be a part of direct speech, which is close to a quotation, because they express an opinion that people may tend to have on a subject. In this case we can address our own thoughts and illustrate the process of reasoning (e.g. Many times I have asked myself: “Can this statistic be relied on? ”).

Another effective way to activate the audience is to address them, either directly or indirectly. Direct address to the audience is what you begin with in the first (e.g. Dear colleagues! ). You may need to address the audience more than once. In the course of your presentation you may need to ask the audience to look at the hand-outs, to draw their attention to some visual aids, or even approach the problem in question at different angle (e.g. Let me evaluate the potential gain of this approach). Another way to address the audience is to make direct references using a pronoun or noun that can attribute to the audience (e.g. Lawyers like ourselves would immediately know the difference).

Using different types of sentences besides narrative, makes your presentation more interactive and helps us activate the audience for better understanding the message and your reasoning.

If you want to make your presentation more emotional and to appeal to your listeners, you may use such lexical means as metaphor and epithet. Originally, the term ‘metaphor’ means transference of meaning from one object to another. A metaphor becomes a stylistic device when the creator of the metaphor finds, in two corresponding objects, some features, which seem to have something in common. If you create an effective metaphor, you help your audience to remember the image for a long time (e.g. Flattery is the infantry of negotiation). Epithet is a very effective means of displaying the speaker’s attitude to the subject, because it is based on the interplay of emotive and logical meanings in an attributive word or phrases. The epithet is always subjective, because every speaker sees things differently, and helps the audience to see things from his standpoint. Some words like powerful (means), prime (significance), countless (negotiations), immense (contribution) demonstrate the attitude of the speaker to this or that concept.

In terms of functional styles, the style of the presentation is a subdivision of publicistic style. The basic goal of it is to exert a deep and lasting influence on the audience, to convince the listeners that the interpretation of the ideas given by the presenter is correct, and to get them to accept the presenter’s point of view. To achieve this goal, the presenter uses both logical argumentation and emotional appeal. These most effective tools find their expression in the language and the structure of the presentation. Coherent and logical syntactical structure with a system of connectives and paragraphing helps to keep the attention of the audience, while the use of words with emotive meaning appeals to the audience and creates the response to the message.

 

USEFUL PHRASES AND VOCABULARY

Introduction

Welcoming the audience

Good morning/afternoon, ladies and gentlemen.

Hello/hi everyone.

First of all, let me thank you all for coming here today.

It’s a pleasure to welcome you today.

I’m happy/delighted that so many of you could make it today.

It’s good to see you all here.

 

Introducing yourself

Let me introduce myself. I’m Maria Wales from…

For those of you who don’t know me, my name is…

Let me just start by introducing myself. My name is…

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