2 Styles of Presentation: Notes For You, Notes For Others

 A good presentation affects how people see you. This is especially important outside of the clinical sphere, where others may have a more difficult time seeing your value. One way to demonstrate your value is by giving a presentation that is crisp, clean, well-organized, and audience-appropriate. By contrast, you can reduce the perception of your value with a presentation that is poorly-executed, disorganized, and tailored to the wrong audience.

You may have put together presentations through the course of your training as a healthcare professional. However, compared to people in a business environment, slides made by healthcare professionals often look unpolished, look unsophisticated, and are hard to follow. One thing that healthcare professionals fail to address is what type of presentation they are going to make in this regard: Are your slides supposed to be notes for your audience or notes for yourself?

When presentations are notes for their audience, you should write your presentations in such a way that someone can read the slide and take away all the necessary information. In a sense, with these kinds of presentations, the speaker supplements the slide. You, as the speaker, deliver the content with a little color commentary, but the slide is the focus of the presentation.

In the example below, each major point is accompanied by relevant key details. The audience can read these details on their own and the speaker is there to add additional commentary.

 


By contrast, when the presentations are notes to yourself, you should write your presentation in such a way that it highlights important points you want to anchor on in that part of your talk. These points are mainly reminders to yourself, but also anchoring points for your audience to ground themselves with. In these cases, the presentation supplements the speaker.

In the version of this example below, the text is more scant, only listing out the quality measures without detail. The text on the screen is a reminder to the speaker on what to talk about next. The slides exist to help the speaker, and to a lesser extent to focus the audience on a general point.


To learn more about how you as a health care professional can learn and refine your business writing, please check out my book: A Business Writing Toolkit For Healthcare Professionals

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