I haven’t thought about what makes a presentation good or bad until I read the blog posts by Seth Godin’s blog post Really Bad Powerpoint and Guy Kawasaki’s The 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint. After reading these and other blog posts and articles I started to realize that I have participated at many bad presentations. This is really sad that so many people make speeches, perform presentations or teach lessons and don’t have a clue about some simple but very important principles of public speaking. I think that the biggest presentation killer is reading the text displayed on the screen to the audience.

Yesterday I saw an awful example of a really bad presentation. I was attending at a PMP trainig course (yes, I still don’t have this certificate but I intend to have it soon) and the trainer showed us examples of Project management plan and Project scope statement documents. Unfortunately, they were real-life documents and had a lot of text inside. The first document was 20 pages long and the second one was 40 pages long and the lecturer read all the documents from the screen – page by page, word by word explaining every single paragraph, every single word! It took 50 minutes and at the end we all felt squeezed.

It was a good idea to show us real-life examples. The audience needed some example of how to structure these documents and what is the minimum information required to put there. But it was completely unnecessary to read them all and to explain all the details in there related to those particular projects that their company had done because it wasn’t on the topic of the lecture, it wasn’t of all participants’ interest and because it was boring.

Some may ask: why didn’t we interrupt him and ask him to stop? I don’t know. Maybe because we were too heterogeneous group – people from different business areas and with different knowledge and experience. Probably, for some of the participants the lecture was not so boring as it was for me. And maybe because it’s rude to interrupt the lecturer although since we’ve paid so much money for that course maybe we have the right to do it and to ask for more interesting and valuable content.