Should you use pictures to enhance your presentation?

I'm often asked for help in preparing slides for presentations. My advice is always to make them more VISUAL, that is: use pictures, photos, graphics, tables, charts.

Why?  Because audiences understand more and retain more information received as visual than they do information received as text or as spoken word. Hearing and reading are less effective than SEEING.  The combination of SEEING a photo and HEARING the speaker talk about it has greater impact than for example hearing the speaker say words while reading the same words in, for example, a bullet point.

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Warm Up your Voice Part 1: Breathing

This is part one of the second of my Top Ten Public Speaking Basics

In my experience it is preferable to work with a qualified voice teacher if you want to develop the full potential of your voice.  So the purpose of this article is not to give some "quick-fix" voice exercises to try once on your own to little effect, but rather to offer some guidance on warming up your voice in preparation for your next presentation or speech.

All credit and honour is given to the brilliant voice coach Stewart Pearce whose teaching in his book "The Alchemy of Voice" (Hodder & Stoughton, 2005) has profoundly influenced my teaching in the past few years.