Episode 80 – Presentation Skills

Presentation Skills on EM Cases with Eric Letovsky and Rick Penciner.

Whether you’re a first year resident or a veteran of EM, you’ve probably given, or will be giving at least one presentation at some point in your career. On the one hand, presentations can be intimidating, time consuming to prepare for and frightening to perform, but on the other hand, if you’re well-prepared and know the tricks of the trade, they can be fun, educational and hugely rewarding. Giving a memorable and educational talk requires skill. It requires serious thoughtful planning, dedicated practice and creativity. The good news is that these skills can be easily taught.

What we know about giving great talks comes from non-medical fields. We can learn about how to use our voices, eyes and body language effectively during a presentation from stage actors. We can learn how to build great slides from experts in design. We can learn how to use stories to help engage an audience and improve their retention of the material from writers, broadcasters and storytellers. We can learn how to inspire people from professional speech writers, and we can employ strategies to help improve retention of the material from cognitive neuroscientists and educators.

As EM providers, we’re much too busy to read dozens of books on effective presenting, so with the help of two EM physicians and master educators, Dr. Eric Letovsky who has studied the art of public speaking and has been giving presentations for more than 30 years, and Dr. Rick Penciner who has been scouring the world’s literature on this topic for 20 years, we’ll distill down for you the key secrets, tips and tricks, theories and approaches, pearls and pitfalls of presentation skills so that the next time you get up in front of your colleagues to give a talk, you’ll blow their minds...



Written Summary and blog post written by Anton Helman, April 2016

Cite this podcast as: Letovsky, E, Penciner, R, Helman, A. Presentation Skills. Emergency Medicine Cases. April, 2016. https://emergencymedicinecases.com/presentation-skills/. Accessed [date].

 

The three key pedagogical principles in presentation skills

There are three important principles that all speakers must understand in order to deliver a memorable and educational presentation:



* People cannot listen and think at the same time - so you need to pause for 2 or 3 seconds (which seems like a really long time) after saying something important so that listeners can absorb what you said.

* People cannot read and listen at the same time, and their default is reading - so if you have a busy slide that requires a lot of reading, and you talk at the same time as you show the slide, people will naturally tend to read the slide and not listen to what you are saying.

* Less is more - the most common pitfall in giving a medical presentation is attempting to pack too much information into the presentation and thereby overwhelming the audience.



 

There are only two things you need to convey in a presentation



* Your message - aim for a high signal to noise ratio; the signal is your message and everything else is clutter.

* Your personality - if you speak in a conversational manner, your personality will come through which helps the audience naturally pay attention to what you're saying and be engaged in your presentation



 

Preparation presentation skills

5 “W” questions: