In honor of this week’s launch of our new online course, Presentation Prep: 10 Steps to Persuasive Storytelling, I’m devoting this post to some of the rookie storytelling mistakes I’ve seen in my 18 years as the President of Public Words Inc.

But first a word about our course. We’ve teamed with an online course development company called Choose Growth, and we’re hoping that you’ll find it fun to do, easy to interact with, and simple to master. With a combination of video, text, infographics, a workbook, assignments, and questions to ponder, the course is designed to help you become a master storyteller in short order.

We’re offering it at $497 until September 1, 2015, when the price will go up to $797 (US), so this summer is a great time to try it out at the introductory price.

End of commercial. Back to storytelling. Specifically, in the form of presentations and speeches. What are the most common mistakes beginners make? Following are five that I see over and over again.

1.In trying for shock value, they deprive their listeners of interest. Rookie storytellers want to shock their audiences. Perhaps it’s the fear of losing their audiences, or perhaps it’s a diet of too many long-form TV shows where the writers feel the need to introduce shocker after shocker in order to keep us watching for hours and hours and hours. Whatever the cause, I see the result all the time – the sudden veer in one direction, or another, without any kind of preparation. Like the TV writer who suddenly reveals that a character has been dead for the entire series, or that it was all a dream or the like.

But what makes a speech – like a story – interesting over its entire length is the tension between fulfillment of expectation and the twist on convention. In other words, you want to signal where you’re headed so that your audience can have the pleasure of anticipating it. Deprive them of that pleasure and they have little reason to hang in there for the long haul with you.

2.In a desire to be authentic, they give us too much information. None of us is as interested in each other’s stories, alas, as we are in our own. So remember the iron rule of detail: if it’s not absolutely necessary for the comprehension of your main message, take it out. We want to have the straight stuff, but lite. We don’t care about the seven different kinds of banana blight – we only care whether or not our fruit will be delivered on time and at a reasonable price.

3.In a desire to interest a wide audience, they fail to go deep.  The paradox inherent in great storytelling is that if you do it right, we’ll listen to you nearly forever – we can’t get enough. When a story is well told, like Netflix’s House of Cards, or HBO’s Game of Thrones, we can’t wait for the next season, we devour it when it comes, and we form fan clubs to get us through the wait until the next series. That’s because those kinds of stories have big enough stakes and deep enough characters. We care about them and their trials and we want to know what happens to them. Indeed, we tell stories beyond the canonical through fan fiction.   We want more so much that we make more.

4.In a fear of self-disclosure, they fail to tell us the most important things.  It’s hard to go deep with a character, because to do so means testing them severely and showing them at their best – and worst. At moments of extreme struggle, failure, and uncertainty. Those are the embarrassing moments and the ones we instinctively shy away from. But those are the ones the rest of us want to hear about. We humans are a bit perverse like that.

5.In a wish to appear successful, they hide their failures.   A special trap of Mistake #4, hiding failure is the signal most disengaging mistake speakers make. They stand up in front of an audience, having been introduced as “the best salesperson in the Western Hemisphere for 3 years in a row!” and then proceed to tell us how amazing they are and how they did it.

But that’s not what we care about. We want to know that they failed, and how they kept going when they did. That is authenticity and the stuff of speechmaking magic.

Don’t make these mistakes in your presentations. Take the course and learn how to avoid them. I made them all as I learned public speaking – so you don’t have to.