PR Studies

Blessed are the speechmakers

Today's lesson in presentation skills is taken from the Catholic church. It's reported that priests have been advised to limit their sermons to eight minutes, to make them topical, and to avoid reading from scripts.

Today's students need to listen to these lessons. I have just assessed a rather flat presentation in which the team read from typed scripts inevitably resulting in a dull delivery. Yet when I asked a challenging question, the unscripted answer was fresh, interesting and academically sound. They were capable of being interesting, but seemed to think that dullness was expected of them.

The best explanation I've heard for why student presentations are so often so poor is that they only have university lecturers to emulate. Oh dear. 'University lecturer, you have just an hour to speak with deviation, hesitation and lots of repetition on the subject of...'

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Blessed are the speechmakers

Today's lesson in presentation skills is taken from the Catholic church. It's reported that priests have been advised to limit their sermons to eight minutes, to make them topical, and to avoid reading from scripts.

Today's students need to listen to these lessons. I have just assessed a rather flat presentation in which the team read from typed scripts inevitably resulting in a dull delivery. Yet when I asked a challenging question, the unscripted answer was fresh, interesting and academically sound. They were capable of being interesting, but seemed to think that dullness was expected of them.

The best explanation I've heard for why student presentations are so often so poor is that they only have university lecturers to emulate. Oh dear. 'University lecturer, you have just an hour to speak with deviation, hesitation and lots of repetition on the subject of...'