|
As a veteran medical professional and a well respected expert in his field, Dr. Atiq Durrani has been asked to give dozens, maybe hundreds, of presentations in his career. The 45-year-old spinal surgeon is known as a pioneer in the field of minimally invasive surgeries, employing techniques that have advanced many spinal treatments to be outpatient procedures. In addition, Dr. Atiq Durrani is the founder of CAST (the Center for Advanced Spine Technologies) and MISI (the Minimally Invasive Spine Institute). Dr. Atiq Durrani has delivered presentations at the APSS National Symposium in Chicago and the SMISS Annual Meeting in Miami, to name just a couple recent examples. Here he presents some tips for making your next presentation pop. - Know your audience. This is the most basic presentational error, and it should be repeated almost as a mantra, according to Dr. Atiq Durrani. A presentation does not exist in a vacuum, after all; it is a conversation. A great presentation is one that is tailored to the audience hearing it, says Dr. Atiq Durrani. If the audience is a group of experienced medical professionals, the tone of the presentation and the verbiage employed will be markedly different than that for a room full of pre-med undergraduates. Realizing and accepting this is harder than many people would like to admit, says Dr. Atiq Durrani. Particularly when one is at the highest levels of one’s field, one can too easily get lost in jargon and field-specific language, and lose the attention and comprehension of the audience. - Organize your thoughts. Many presentations come off as a scattering of one person’s ideas, says Dr. Atiq Durrani. Find a theme to organize your presentation around, and deliver your points in a cogent, thoroughly mapped manner. Use guiding words like “first, next, meanwhile…” Think of yourself as a tour guide, advises Dr. Atiq Durrani, guiding your audience through the jungle of your presentation in an informational and entertaining manner. - Give a presentation, not a PowerPoint. Dr. Atiq Durrani believes strongly that the ubiquitous slideshow creation tool is used too often as a crutch and not as a prop. A PowerPoint slideshow should serve to enhance a presentation by providing summary points, salient information, synthesizing main ideas, and providing illustrative detail. Too many people have the tendency to construct a PowerPoint as a rigid outline and let the slides guide their speech, says Dr. Atiq Durrani. This results in a presentation that amounts to a glorified reading of note cards, and quickly loses the interest of all involved. http://www.pallimed.org/2010/02/how-to-give-great-medical-presentation.html
http://www.mlanet.org/publications/tool_kit/presentation.html
Related Articles -
Dr. Atiq Durrani, great presentation, Atiq Durrani,
|
