Bringing Your Topic Right to the Audience

I had this great idea a few years back.  I wanted my home schooled children and their friends to talk with working artists about their art, the creative process, and the business of making art.  The students were located in Birmingham, MI and most of the artists had their studios in Detroit but that didn't stop us from bringing the artists right to us.

It worked out even better than I anticipated.  The artists were able to show us slides of their art and we could see the transitions they made as artists over the years.  We could see images of their earliest works, when they were still in high school.  One artist even showed us photos of the art that hung in her childhood home so that we could see what her earliest influences were.

Showing slides on a screen can allow a presenter to focus on particular details.  Sometimes this can allow for a deeper discussion and easier viewing than had we visited the art pieces in person.  A couple of months later, we did take the students on a field trip to one of the Wayne State University student art galleries, but our earlier session with the slides really helped set the stage to appreciate the gallery visit all the more.

A public speaker should always be on the look out for ways to incorporate images in her presentation.  Once I had a student give an informative speech about coffee and it was frustrating, for me at least, to be in the audience and watch her pantomime the process of making coffee as a Starbucks barista.  It would have been much more effective had she showed us an up-close image of the actual equipment or maybe even a short (20 second) clip of the process itself.

Go to the trouble of preparing good quality images to show your audience.  It can really make the topic come alive and help the audience to understand your message.