There are at least five important issues you must consider when making presentations. Each is discussed below and can be accessed by clicking on the listing or by scrolling down the page. Finally, a checklist for the preparation of slides and overheads is included:
[See related information in education and training content and presentations.]
Formulate
a strategy for the specific audience and occasion.
Develop your goals and objectives in relationship
to the audience and situation. Identify your purpose.
Are you trying to motivate, inform, persuade, demonstrate,
or teach? Use language and structures appropriate
for your purposes (e.g., when trying to inform, provide
information; when trying to motivate or persuade,
use motivational language and convincing arguments).
Tailor your message to your specific audience. Use
language, concepts and images that your audience can
relate to.
Develop a
clear structure.
This step translates your broad strategy into specific content.
The first task is to grab your audience. Get their attention.
The second task is to give them a reason to listen. Many speakers assume that since they want to talk, the audience wants to listen. This is frequently not the case. You must tell people why they should listen, what they should expect to get from listening and how what you have to say will benefit them. Work from the assumption that others do not have any reason to listen to you. Working from this assumption, one recognises the need to spend considerable time and effort in providing others with information that could increase their interest and their motivation to listen.
Give them a road map to follow. Now that you have peoples' attention and you have persuaded them to listen to you, you have to let them know what to expect. Provide an overview of the structure of your presentation. It is important to give people an outline of your plans so they can follow along. Providing structure for people helps them to retain the information as well.
Continually check to see if people are following your progress and if they are understanding you. It is much easier, but totally ineffective, to assume that everyone is listening and that everything is fully understood. Leave time for questions. Do not expect people to be able to understand something after they have heard it only once. To help people follow your progress, use transitions or signposts to signal your progress along the path you have lead them to believe you will be following.
Summarise and conclude on a high note. Two important psychological concepts are always at work in communication: primacy and recency. People tend to remember better the first (primacy) and last (recency) things they read or hear in messages. It is easy to understand why the most important parts of any presentation are the first and last impressions it creates.
Support
your ideas
Support your ideas with examples, illustrations and other material adapted to your
audience. This will reinforce your ideas. Use visual aids as support.
Although visual aids can be excellent supports if used
properly, they can actually detract from your message and presentation if use improperly.
A poor example of text presentation on overhead transparencies or slides follow, along
with a better option. For a typical introduction to a presentation:
AGENDA (Poor example)
|
AGENDA
(Better example)
|
In the text on the left, there are two major problems that are avoided easily.
The alternative on the right is better as it uses a larger type font and can be seen more easily. The points made are short, grammatically consistent and easily taken in at a glance.
An important point to remember about presenting a slide like this, is that you should read all five points through once, before going back up to the first point to further elaborate. If you do not do this, what can happen is that as you read the first point and then proceed to discuss it, many people will be reading down the rest of the list and they will not be listening to what you have to say. We like to know what is coming and find it easier to listen if we have a conceptual framework up-front. Therefore, direct people's attention quickly down the list once, then bring them back up to your first point for discussion.
When displaying a table of numbers, remember, if it will take people more than about 30 seconds to absorb the information, you probably have too much there. Do not require your audience to translate several acronyms along with a complex array of conceptual and statistical information in a short period of time. You may be able to do it, as you are probably familiar with the information and the table. The audience is not. Simplify tables and graphs. Try making complex slides into three or four separate overheads. Be sure not to use acronyms.
When showing a graph, be sure the graphed lines are not packed too closely together. Try to simplify the graph and make your point clear. Although with data simplification we will loose some information, if your slide is too complex in the first place, no one will get much of the information anyway. It is a trade-off.
Practice,
practice, practice
The presentation process is as important as the content. Under some circumstances, it may
be more important that the content! Prepare your notes. The mark of effective presenters
is the appearance of effortlessness. Hours of preparation and practice preceded the actual
performance, however.
To rehearse, go through the speech several times, phrasing ideas with different words each time. If the occasion is formal and demands precise wording, prepare and memorise a word-for-word presentation. Either way, practice your presentation. The more you can rehearse, the better. Rehearse your presentation under simulated conditions in a similar room, with listeners who can give you suggestions for improvement. Also use mental rehearsal. Run through the presentation and the scene in your mind several times a day.
Be sure to check the timing of the presentation. Few things put an audience off more than someone going over the time limits. Be aware of the physical space and your body movement when presenting. Every time you are giving a presentation, you are on stage. It is a performance.
Responses
to questions and challenges.
You must prepare thoroughly in order to handle
questions well. Answering questions and responding
to objections is an important part of the process
as this is the way you interact with your listeners.
From their questions, you can learn what your audience
is thinking and how they are responding to your ideas.
If you are challenged, respond to objections in an
orderly manner applying the following four steps:
Finally, check that you have actually answered the question that was asked. If your response did not, then you have another chance and the person thinks that you really took their question seriously. If your response was adequate, it is a good way to close the interaction and move on.
Checklist
for Preparers of Slides and Overheads
The following is adapted from an article by William K. Esties (1993), Professor Emeritus
at Harvard University:
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Reference
Some of the material in this section has been modified
from: Carlopio, J., Andrewartha, G. and Armstrong,
H. (1997). Developing Management Skills in Australia.
Based on Developing Management Skills by Whetton,
D. A. and Cameron, K. S., Sydney: Addison, Wesley,
Longman.