The Introverted Presenter: Ten Steps for Preparing and Delivering Successful Presentations

CHAPTER 9

Primacy and Latency

What the Audience Remembers

I mentioned earlier how stressful standing and speaking can be. If you are inexperienced, this will be even more stressful. There’s a great temptation to sip a little of that free wine that’s being handed around beforehand. You know, just to relax a bit.

Don’t.

Your aim, remember, is to arrive at the podium calm and confident.

We’ve tried to make that happen by working toward the presentation by reading it out loud many times, so you know it. There’s no need to actually try to remember the whole thing word for word. Actors spend years learning how to do that, and you have two advantages over them; you wrote the words, and you can have notes. I recommend having the script and reading every ...