Structuring your presentation

Once you’ve got your information into your head, you might want to consider a great tool for actually structuring what you say using the Colon Technique. It works for live presentations as well as online ones.

One of the key things to hold in your head as you use the technique is that you need to be very obvious about when you finish one topic and start the next. Don’t forget, what’s obvious to you is not necessarily obvious to your audience.

A helpful analogy is to think about a novel and how it’s structured, physically. When the author changes something significant such as

• time
• location
• protagonists

they start a new chapter. How much harder would it be to read a chapter without chapters? And how do they signal to you, the reader, that you’re starting a new chapter?

They have a blank page, or at least don’t run the new chapter onto the page you’re reading – they start new chapters at the top of a new page. And then they have a chapter title (or at least a number) in a big, obvious way.

Exercise: Think of how you can do that ‘signposting’ in your videos. Be blatant. Subtle stuff often doesn’t work in a video.