Heed Grice’s maxims

Herbert Paul Grice was a British philosopher of language.

Use his four maxims as a kind of checklist to keep your presentation on track.

Maxim of relevance: Say things that are relevant to the situation. Make sure that what you say is important when it comes to understanding your point/product/idea. (Think of how annoying it is when what you are expecting from someone is the recipe for spaghetti carbona and what you get is endless pictures and anecdotes of their last trip to Italy.)

Grice’s following maxims are sort of implied by the maxim of relevance:

Maxim of quantity: Be as informative as necessary. For example, don’t go into too much detail, if this is not required to understand what you’re explaining.

Maxim of quality: In simple words: Don’t lie about facts or figures. Your audience expects you to be truthful. (Think of how annoying it can be to listen to certain politicians.) If you’re not sure about something, say so and offer to check and get back to the person asking.

Maxim of manner: Make your contribution easy to understand. Avoid being ambiguous and present your points in an order that makes sense to the audience.

Establish and extend common ground

Common ground is a concept introduced by psycholinguist Herbert H. Clark and cognitive scientist Susan E. Brennan.

Common ground may consist of different kinds of information, e.g. events or objects known to both you and your audience, shared cultural values or shared experiences.

In a broader sense, this simply means that you should be on the same page as your audience.

So bear in mind that you might want to talk about the latest features of your software in a completely different way, depending on whether you’re addressing developers or marketing people.

Keep these tips in mind the next time you need to make a presentation for better results.