Presenting technical information

At Toastmasters Bern, we organize every year a few workshops with external speakers, so that our members get further opportunities for personal development. Themes such as personal branding, improvisation, or voice improvement have been explored in the past. We are delighted to welcome Frédéric Schütz for our next workshop Monday 24th September about ‘Successfully presenting data and statistics in a speech”:

Numbers, percentages and other technical information are an important component of most argumentations, but they are often difficult to communicate during a speech. Following the adage “a picture is worth a thousand words”, many speakers choose to rely on slides containing graphs, charts or other visual displays in order to support their message. This strategy often brings mixed results, in particular because creating and reading charts is not an easy task, and it is very easy to fail to convey the right message.

Frédéric Schütz is a statistician, particularly interested in how we communicate numbers. As a senior scientist at the University of Lausanne and the SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics, he daily applies the concepts of data science, but also teaches them to diverse audiences such as students, researchers and journalists. He regularly acts as both a speaker and a science writer, for example sharing his knowledge writing scientific articles for the newspaper “Le Temps”.