Ways to “Hook” your audience

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This post was provoked from my reading this post on “TEDS talk takeaway: 8 ways to Hook your Audience” by Gavin Mahon.

Great hooks, like McGonigal’s provocative opening statement, get audiences on the edge of their seats and give them a sense of what’s coming. They allow you to win a crowd’s attention right away and give you a legitimate chance to have a lasting impact.

Note that these “hooks” are excellent elements around which to build your presentation.

1. Tell a story.

Well, I messed that one up from the start. It should be “with great enthusiasm, tell AN INTERESTING STORY!”

2. Use Video or Graphics.

Some things are best told, and others are best shown. With the possibility of pictures and videos, use them if the subject matter lends itself to that.

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Presentations: Storyboarding: The Process

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I guess I am old as the hills now. Back in the day (around 1977, in Bob Jones University missions classes) we talked about storyboarding for getting our slide presentation together. A few months ago I actually threw away my slide story boarder. Most people don’t even understand what I am talking about. In those days we used to gather 2 inch by 2 inch slides of what we wanted to present, and from that we made a story on a story board. This is a piece of white plastic in a wedge shape stand that has a light bulb under it, and you turned it on, and placed your slides in the rows, and began to arrange them in a story for your presentation. Wow are you old David! I would like a post (“Yea!”) from anybody who remembers or did that in their past!

Today presentations don’t start with existing slides or pictures, but they start with ideas. The flow of ideas is what is essential in a presentation. As you develop your presentation, you add images and concepts and music to the presentation.

So here I go trying to give some tips on storyboarding and using them to design a presentation.

Let me be clear here, a storyboard is an intermediate design step for a presentation. It is a rough, basic idea medium in which you work up ideas and impressions, trying to get specific images and sounds if possible, and from that, you make a presentation in some kind of software that is designed for presentations. The moodboard is not an end in itself, but just a brainstorming tool to help you push, pull, delete, add, create, or try out your ideas to generally see how they look. Keep it that!

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