MediaSpace Wiki

Bus Prof Comm Fall2015 Sn11

Sex, Lies, and Visual Aids

• Advantages of Visual aids
  • Clarity
  • Making information more interesting.
  • Providing a memory aid
  • Supporting evidence (NOT proof)
  • Enhanced credibility.
  • Improving persuasiveness.
  • Combating stage fright.

• Disadvantages of visual aids
  • Distracting your audience
    • Visual aids should be relevant
  • Making yourself lazy
    • Visual Aids should not an an outline
  • Making your audience lazy
    • Support your claims; don't recapitulate them
  • Recovering when things go wrong
    • Visual aids are the biggest risk in a speech
    • Don't overdo them
    • Make sure they work in advance
    • Always have a back up plan

• Types of visual aid
  1. Objects
     • Can clarify a speaker's ideas and give them dramatic impact.
     • Many objects are simply unusable: too large, too small, unavailable, etc.
  2. Models
     • An excellent alternative to objects.
     • Allow scaling objects up or down to work in your speech
  3. Tables

Enable Compact Comparisons	Verbs	Nouns
Noun Phrase	Allow	you
Verb Phrase	to organize	things

1. Photographs
   • portray reality.

• Must be big enough for audience to see them.
• Multimedia programs make enlargement easy
1. Drawings
   • Diagrams, sketches, maps, etc
   • Can be designed for the speech to illustrate the speakerís points precisely.

From http://foulger.info/davis/research/unifiedModelOfCommunication.htm

1. Graphs can clarify and simplify statistics
   • Line graphs illustrate statistical trends.
   • Pie graphs demonstrate distribution patterns.
   • Bar graphs show comparisons between two or more items.

From http://evolutionarymedia.com/mediumAsProcess/ibmpc.htm

1. Charts
   • Useful for summarizing large blocks of information
   • Can present more categories than can be shown on a bar graph.
   • Can summarize the steps of a process.
   • Can summarize information the audience may want to write down.

From http://www.foulger.info/davis/oswego/yourWeek.htm

1. Video
   • Difficult to match detail, vividness, and immediacy
   • Must be edited skillfully and integrated smoothly into the speech.
   • Always practice with the playback equipment ahead of time
2. Transparencies
   • Can display photographs, drawings, graphs, and charts
   • Inexpensive, easy to produce, and provide a strong visual image.
   • Writing must be large enough to be seen clearly from the back of the room.
   • Be sure to rehearse with overhead projector
3. Multimedia presentations
   • combine charts, graphs, photographs, and video
   • can be highly effective.
   • Preparation intensive
   • Computer malfunction are a risk
4. Our bodies
   • When we demonstrate how to do something.
   • Practice coordinating actions with speech.

• Presentation Software (Powerpoint, Keynote, Freelance, etc)
  • Most professional speakers use presentation software when giving a speech
  • Microsoft's Powerpoint is used by about the same percentage that use the Windows operating system
  • Other systems work as well or better
    • Keynote (Apple)
    • Impress (Libre Office)
    • Slides (Google Docs)
    • and others
  • I do not, in general, recommend Powerpoint
    • but it is hard to avoid
    • Whatever you do, never run someone else's Powerpoint on your machine without doing a virus check first
  • But it may be what came with your computer or what your company supplies.
    • There are excellent books on how to take maximum advantage of Powerpoint
    • Powerpoint for Dummies is pretty good
• Pluses and minuses in using Presentation Software
  • Integrates most visual aids into a single presentation
    • Text, photographs, charts, graphs, sound, and video
    • Best to focus on the first four
  • Using Presentation Software well requires advance planning
    • If presentation facilities don't work, you'll have to have a backup plan

• Basic capabilities of most presentation software
  • Presentations are often organized with a "slide" or "page" metaphor
    • Breaks presentation up into discrete units
    • A presentation contains all the slides for a given speech.
  • Most slides contain some kind of text.
    • Other elements complement the text
  • Practice is important when you use presentation software
  • Tools in the software
    • Create presentation
      • Allows selection of a presentation template
    • Create page
      • Allows selection of a page style that enables various content types
    • Edit (and create) page objects
      • text
      • charts
      • clip art
      • pictures
      • diagrams