Teaching Business Communication is packed with a wealth of new ideas you can use to add value to your course and make it more instructive.

Why You’re Not Using Enough Gestures in Your Presentations

"Author Vanessa Edwards and her team watched thousands of hours of TED Talks and noticed something surprising: The least popular TED Talkers used an average of 272 hand gestures during their 18-minute presentations, while the most popular used an average of 465 hand gestures in the same amount of time. As she noted on her blog, that’s almost double."

"Gesturing properly can add tremendous impact to your speech. After all, your audience is doing more than listening to your words when you’re giving a presentation. They’re looking out for your body language, expressions, tone of voice, and, yes, your hand gestures. But there are also other, less conspicuous reasons why incorporating gestures can make your talk more effective and compelling. Here are a few of them."

Read the full article by Annet Grant (photo, left) at FastComp...

Free Download: A Guide to Building Conversational Presentations

"As presentation design expert Russell Anderson-Williams points out, 'In this busy world of countless communication channels, having the opportunity to interact with people in person should be something we relish, not squander. We should welcome and seek to build in the opportunity for them to interact with us constantly. We should allow them to guide the flow of our presentation based on what their interests are. And we should not be afraid to have ‘conversations’ rather than traditional presentations.'"

Read the full article by Chelsi Nakano (photo, left) . . .

Stop Ending Your Speeches With ‘Any Questions’ and End with This Instead

"If you're planning to wrap up your presentation with a half-hearted call for "any questions?" followed by a "thank you" and a quick exit, then you haven't planned your whole presentation," writes Deborah Grayson Riegel (photo, left) at Inc.com.

"In fact, you're missing out on a critical opportunity to reinforce your key message, offer a final appeal to gate keepers or decision makers, and make yourself and your pitch memorable."

Read the full article . . .
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