Events should almost always involves 2-way communication.
I had the great pleasure of doing my first ever author event with the AS English Literature and Language students at Uxbridge College. The thing that made this the perfect way to get started was that the College provided a brilliant, detailed brief.
I ended up not following the ‘script’ of my pointpower presentation, but I knew it was there: I had a plan in reserve that would please the College if I stumbled while trying to let the session run more organically.
Having a good backup plan meant that I could approach the session with confidence: I knew what the College wanted to get from the session, and that I had done solid preparation to ensure I could deliver. Which is not to say that there were no nerves on the day – of course there were – but they were manageable nerves: nerves I could channel into being energetic and excited about writing.
There’s a delicate balance to be struck between having a plan and turning up to deliver a scripted session verbatim and beat-for-beat.
Prepare – of course you need to prepare – but don’t let this lock you into thinking ‘This Is What I Am Going To Do, No Deviations Allowed’.
That way lies one of the greatest sin in teaching, lecturing and public speaking: preparing something in writing and then reading it aloud exactly as written. Read poetry or prose if you’re going to make the act of reading meaningful – i.e. performative – but don’t just read.
Not only will you spend most of the session sounding stilted (and usually pompous), but you’ll have little time to look – to physically look – at the people who’ve come to see you. Eye contact – or at least the illusion of it if you’re speaking in a huge hall or arena – is important to an audience. That’s the whole point of doing things live and face-to-face rather than just posting an essay on the web or publishing it in a magazine or pre-taping a speech and putting it on youTube.
Events should be about giving people something they can only experience when you’re face-to-face and in real time. If you don’t do this, then you have failed your audience.
In events you should always respond to the audience. And by respond I don’t mean that if you’re scheduled to give a speech you have to take questions instead… But if you’re reading something you’ve prepared in advance word for word, it’s hard to respond to enthusiasm, to boredom, to curiosity. It’s hard to tailor and cut and chop and change.
So prepare. Make notes, script bits of your talk that are about complicated things, but don’t script whole passage to be read aloud. Instead, if you have a plan of what you’ll speak about, but you then just talk several magical things will happen.
Even if the audience doesn’t answer back verbally because it’s not that type of event, you will still be communicating rather than just presenting: it’ll stop being one way communication. Communication is not just what you say… it’s so much more.
If you talk, instead of reading aloud, the audience will take away the experience of watching and listening as you construct your understanding of the things you’re talking about: it becomes a form of conversation in that it becomes an act of creating a shared understanding of a topic. Which is not to say that you and the entire audience will be in agreement, just that the audience will see how you’ve reached your perspective. And this is far more convincing that a polished written speech that only delivers the conclusion of this process.
Conversation is a process: a script is a static, written object. Which would you rather go to see live?
So plan. Prepare to within an inch of your life. But don’t prepare to stand up and simply read at your audience. Prepare to the point where you can be flexible. Where you can respond to what the audience, as a specific group of individuals, want from you. Talk to them.
Alexia Casale 