Step Up to the Mic.

To All Presenters:

It has been some time since I posted on presentation skills. Oddly, many of the presentations I have been privy to in recent time have not been terrible. Not all rose to performance level, which should be the goal, but all-in-all they have not left me praying for a flock of rabid magpies to descend upon the presenter either.

I do, however, have a lesson to share.

Presenters, please know - simply holding a microphone in your hand does not actually make it work - in fact, the act of turning it on does not make it actually work. To achieve microphone success you must accomplish the aforemention steps and then hold it near, and point it at, your mouth.

Amazing amount of failures occuring around those last points.

For hand-held mics - waving it around a la Harry Potter, using it as a pointer or holding it waaay down by your side renders it all but useless.

For microphones attached to lecturns (which as a performer you shouldn't be using, but I digress) - pointing the microphone mid-chest is not accoustically helpful.

For the clip-on/wireless mics - please, actually clip it on. Otherwise, I promise you are either going to hold it so close to your mouth that you sound like Zeus commanding from on high, or you will be so far from your mouth as to render the tool useless. Worse yet, you will likely vacilate between these two points thus irritating the audience to a degree so extreme as to not be measuerable with modern technology.
Not awesome.

Here's how to fix it.

For handhelds - put your fist against your mouth like your blowing into it. The space your fist takes up is equal to the distance the microphone should be from your mouth at all times. Microphones have varying levels of sensitivity, so consider this more a guideline than a rule.

For lecturns - look down at the microphone and adjust so that you're staring into it like it were a tube. Then look up at your audience, the microphone is now pointed at your mouth.

For clip-on / wireless - stack one fist on top of the other and attach to the bottom of your chin while looking forward. The bottom of your bottom fist is where the mic should get pinned. And be sure this site is free of obstructions which will brush against the mic and disturb your audience.

Simple guides, yours to use.

THE POINT: Your message is meaningless if no one can hear it.