Easy Eloquence: Presentation Tips for People Who Hate Public Speaking - But Love the Applause [Paperback]

this is a GREAT book for anyone who needs to know how to do that most difficult of all things.... stand up in public and talk. Oh sure, there's lots of other stuff about, but this book makes it not only EASY, but ENCOURAGES you at the same time. You get a very real impression that the author has BEEN there and DONE that, and owns lots of t-shirts to prove it. Try it out. You'll never fear of getting up and speaking AGAIN.... then again, as she says, if you ain't nervous, there's something wrong with you too !

This book is superb. Easy Eloquence provides practical suggestions to ensure not only that your presentation is well-prepared and well-received, but also that you enjoy the process of writing and delivering it.

Easy Eloquence is not just for the uninitiated public speaker. As an attorney who has given numerous speeches and conducted international workshops, I learned a methodology from Easy Eloquence that makes preparation and delivery of speeches effortless.

You may hear applause from the audience, but the biggest applause is what you'll give yourself after applying the lessons of Easy Eloquence.

Last night I sat through a woeful presentation by the two deputy head teachers at my daughter's school. This morning I donated a copy of this book to the school library. It is one of the few presentation skills books I've seen that really provides a clear guide to delivering a successful presentation. By which I mean a presentation where the speaker is not only competent on stage but where what he or she says really gets through to the audience.

I've lost count of the number of presentations I've sat through where the audience has had to work out what the point of it all is. Sometimes I've had the impression this is deliberate part of some managers' "mushroom strategy" but usually it is just incompetence. As an aside, the book is also good on understanding and working with the internal organizational politics behind what you are being required to say - ie making sure that you know what it is you need your audience to know and why.

This book starts with the need for what the author calls a SOCO - a Single Overriding Communication Objective. Pretty much every management book I've ever read tries to coin a new acronym and they usually annoy me - at least this one makes sense so I'll forgive the author. She points out that everything in your presentation needs to be focused on getting that message across, everything you say must support that single overriding communication objective, and your audience must leave clearly understanding what it is you need them to know. Now, that might sound blindingly obvious but how many times have you left a presentation and forgotten what it was all about within hours?

Having established what message you are trying to get across the book then provides a very useful framework for structuring your presentation. In involves a 4x3 matrix on to which you paste post it notes with the key elements of each stage of your presentation. At first I thought this was just a gimmick but having used it two or three times I'm really impressed with how brilliant but simple it is. First off it forces you to be very clear in your thinking - if you can't fit it on a post it note then by the time you've waffled around it for ten minutes your audience will have no idea what you were trying to get across. Secondly, the way the matrix is structured you are also forced to focus on the beginning and ending you your speech. After all, these are the bits we know that people pay most attention to but because they are relatively short I've often forgotten to pay sufficient, by which I mean disproportionate, attention to them.

The style is easy to read and it is packed with loads of practical advice but the thing that sets this book apart from other presentation skills books I've read is the way that it gives the reader such a simple but powerful way of building great content for their presentation. There are plenty of books on how to speak and how to stand - that is all in this book - but being forced to concentrate on why you are making the presentation, what you want to get across and how you are going to do so should ensure that, even if you don't end up moving crowds like Obama or Churchill, your audience will remember what you said.