Presentation Tips
Know the needs of your audience and match your contents to their needs. Know your material thoroughly. Put what you have to say in a logical sequence. Ensure your speech will be captivating to your audience as well as worth their time and attention. Practice and rehearse your speech at home or where you can be at ease and comfortable, in front of a mirror, your family, friends or colleagues. Use a tape-recorder and listen to yourself. Videotape your presentation and analyze it. Know what your strong and weak points are. Emphasize your strong points during your presentation.
When you are presenting in front of an audience, you are performing as an actor is on stage. How you are being perceived is very important. Dress appropriately for the occasion. Be solemn if your topic is serious. Present the desired image to your audience. Look pleasant, enthusiastic, confident, proud, but not arrogant. Remain calm. Appear relaxed, even if you feel nervous. Speak slowly, enunciate clearly, and show appropriate emotion and feeling relating to your topic. Establish rapport with your audience. Speak to the person farthest away from you to ensure your voice is loud enough to project to the back of the room. Vary the tone of your voice and dramatize if necessary. If a microphone is available, adjust and adapt your voice accordingly.
Body language is important. Standing, walking or moving about with appropriate hand gesture or facial expression is preferred to sitting down or standing still with head down and reading from a prepared speech. Use audio-visual aids or props for enhancement if appropriate and necessary. Master the use of presentation software such as PowerPoint well before your presentation. Do not over-dazzle your audience with excessive use of animation, sound clips, or gaudy colors which are inappropriate for your topic. Do not torture your audience by putting a lengthy document in tiny print on an overhead and reading it out to them.
Speak with conviction as if you really believe in what you are saying. Persuade your audience effectively. The material you present orally should have the same ingredients as that which are required for a written research paper, i.e. a logical progression from INTRODUCTION (Thesis statement) to BODY (strong supporting arguments, accurate and up-to-date information) to CONCLUSION (re-state thesis, summary, and logical conclusion).
Do not read from notes for any extended length of time although it is quite acceptable to glance at your notes infrequently. Speak loudly and clearly. Sound confident. Do not mumble. If you made an error, correct it, and continue. No need to make excuses or apologize profusely.
Maintain sincere eye contact with your audience. Use the 3-second method, e.g. look straight into the eyes of a person in the audience for 3 seconds at a time. Have direct eye contact with a number of people in the audience, and every now and then glance at the whole audience while speaking. Use your eye contact to make everyone in your audience feel involved.
Speak to your audience, listen to their questions, respond to their reactions, adjust and adapt. If what you have prepared is obviously not getting across to your audience, change your strategy mid-stream if you are well prepared to do so. Remember that communication is the key to a successful presentation. If you are short of time, know what can be safely left out. If you have extra time, know what could be effectively added. Always be prepared for the unexpected.
Pause. Allow yourself and your audience a little time to reflect and think. Don't race through your presentation and leave your audience, as well as yourself, feeling out of breath.
Add humor whenever appropriate and possible. Keep audience interested throughout your entire presentation. Remember that an interesting speech makes time fly, but a boring speech is always too long to endure even if the presentation time is the same.
When using audio-visual aids to enhance your presentation, be sure all necessary equipment is set up and in good working order prior to the presentation. If possible, have an emergency backup system readily available. Check out the location ahead of time to ensure seating arrangements for audience, whiteboard, blackboard, lighting, location of projection screen, sound system, etc. are suitable for your presentation.
Have handouts ready and give them out at the appropriate time. Tell audience ahead of time that you will be giving out an outline of your presentation so that they will not waste time taking unnecessary notes during your presentation.
Know when to STOP talking. Use a timer or the microwave oven clock to time your presentation when preparing it at home. Just as you don't use unnecessary words in your written paper, you don't bore your audience with repetitious or unnecessary words in your oral presentation. To end your presentation, summarize your main points in the same way as you normally do in the CONCLUSION of a written paper. Remember, however, that there is a difference between spoken words appropriate for the ear and formally written words intended for reading. Terminate your presentation with an interesting remark or an appropriate punch line. Leave your listeners with a positive impression and a sense of completion. Do not belabor your closing remarks. Thank your audience and sit down.
Have the written portion of your assignment or report ready for your instructor if required.
1. Show your passion
If I had only one tip to give, it would be to be passionate about your topic and let that enthusiasm come out. Yes, you need great content. Yes, you need professional, well designed visuals. But it is all for naught if you do not have a deep, heartfelt belief in your topic. The biggest item that separates mediocre presenters from world class ones is the ability to connect with an audience in an honest and exciting way. Don't hold back. Be confident. And let your passion for your topic come out for all to see. Also, don’t be afraid to get personal, show your human side!
2. Start strong
You've heard it before: First impressions are powerful. Believe it. The first 2-3 minutes of the presentation are the most important. The audience wants to like you and they will give you a few minutes at the beginning to engage them -- don't miss the opportunity. Most presenters fail here because they ramble on too long about superfluous background information or their personal/professional history, etc.
3. Keep it short
Humans have short attention spans when it comes to passively sitting and listening to a speaker. Audience attention is greatest at the opening and then again when you say something like "In conclusion...." This is just the human condition, especially so for the busy (often tired) knowledge worker of today. So, if you have 30 minutes for your talk, finish in 25 minutes. It is better to have the audience wanting more (of you) than to feel that they have had more than enough. Professional entertainers know this very well.
4. Move away from the podium
Get closer to your audience by moving away from or in front of the podium. The podium is a barrier between you and the audience, but the goal of our presentation is to connect with the audience. Removing physical barriers between you and the audience will help you build rapport and make a connection
5. Make good eye contact
Try looking at individuals rather than scanning the group. Since you are using a computer, you never need to look at the screen behind you — just glance down at the computer screen briefly. One sure way to lose an audience is to turn your back on them. And while you're maintaining great eye contact, don't forget to smile as well. Unless your topic is very grim, a smile can be a very powerful thing.
6. At all times: courteous, gracious, & professional
When audience members ask questions or give comments, you should be gracious and thank them for their input. Even if someone is being difficult, you must keep to the high ground and at all times be a gentleman or lady and courteously deal with such individuals. The true professional can always remain cool and in control. Remember, it is your reputation, so always remain gracious even with the most challenging of audiences.
Presentation Tips
This collection of tips was transcribed from a seminar given in Seattle by Edward Tufte. He attributes these tips to another author (but I can't remember who it was).
§ Show up early, and something good is bound to happen. You may have a chance to head off some technical or ergonomic problem. Also, whereas at the end of a talk people are eager to rush off and avoid traffic, at the beginning they filter in slowly. It's a great time to introduce yourself.
§ Have a strong opening. Tufte offers a few ideas for structuring your opening:
§ Never apologize. If you're worried the presentation won't go well, keep it to yourself and give it your best shot. Besides, people are usually too preoccupied with their own problems to notice yours.
§ Open by addressing the following three questions: What's the problem? Who cares? What's your solution? As an alternate but more sophisticated technique, Tufte offers the following anecdote. a high-school mathematics teacher was giving a lecture to an intimidating audience: a group of college math professors. Early in the presentation, the teacher made a mathematical error. The professors immediately noticed and corrected the problem. And for the rest of the lecture, they were leaning forward, paying attention to every word, looking for more errors!
§ PGP: with every subtopic, move from the Particular to the General and back to the Particular. Even though the purpose of a subtopic is to convey the general information, bracing it with particulars is a good way to draw attention and promote retention.
§ Not so much a tip as a law: Give everyone at least one piece of paper. A piece of paper is a record, an artifact from your presentation. People can use that artifact to help recall the details of the presentation, or better yet to tell others about it.
§ Know your audience. This is of course a general piece of advice for public speaking, but Tufte adds his own twist: know your audience by what they read. Knowing what they read tells you what styles of information presentation they are most familiar and comfortable with. Adapting your presentation to those styles will leave fewer barriers to the direct communication of your material.
§ Rethink the overhead. Tufte spent a lot of time explaining why the overhead projector is the worst thing in the world. There's a lot of truth to what he said. Bulleted lists are almost always useless. Slides with bulleted lists are often interchangeable between talks.
§ The audience is sacred. Respect them. Don't condescend by "dumbing down" your lecture. Show them respect by saying what you believe and what you know to be the whole story.
§ Humour is good, but be careful with it. Humour in a presentation works best when it actually drives the presentation forward. If you find you're using canned jokes that don't depend on the context of the presentation, eliminate them.
Also, be very careful about jokes that put down a class of people. If you're going to alienate your audience, do it on the merits of your content.
§ Avoid masculine (or even feminine!) pronouns as universals. It can be a nuisance to half the audience. As universals, use the plural "they". The Oxford English Dictionary has allowed "they" as a gender neutral singular pronoun for years.
§ Take care with questions. Many people judge the quality of your talk not by the twenty minutes of presentation, but on the thirty seconds you spend answering their question. Be sure to allow long pauses for questions. Ten seconds may seem like a long pause when you're at the front of the room, but it flows naturally from the audience's point of view.
§ Let people know you believe your material. Speak with conviction. Believing your subject matter is one of the best ways to speak more effectively!
§ Finish early, and something good is almost bound to happen. If nothing else, people will be able to leave early, and suddenly they'll have an extra couple of minutes to do things they didn't think they'd get to. People will really like you if you do that.
§ Practice. Practice over and over and over. If you can, record your presentation. Play it back and watch yourself. You'll discover a thousand horrible, horrible things you never knew about yourself. Now watch it again without the sound. Why are your hands flying around like that? Now listen to it without the picture. Get rid of those ums! Now watch it at twice the normal speed. This emphasizes low-frequency cycles in your gestures.
§ The two most dehydrating things you can do in modern civilization are live presentations and air travel. In both, the way to stay sharp is to drink lots of water. Take care of your body, especially your voice. If possible, avoid alcohol too.
Presentation Tips
General
· ALWAYS HAVE A BACKUP PLAN!! We do everything in our power to make sure that problems do not arise, but sometimes things go wrong. Try to have an "alternate no AV" lecture planned, if the system should go down.
· Check out the room ahead of time. Before your first lecture, check out the room, and make sure it has everything you need. This will avoid unwanted surprises the first day of class.
· Practice. If you have a complex presentation planned with several different multimedia, go to the room ahead of time and practice your presentation. We would be happy to meet you at the room and assist with any preparations or extra instructions.
· Experiment and try new things. These rooms often have capabilities other than what most people use them for. Something as simple as playing a CD while students enter and exit often adds to the class. We would be happy to assist you in experimenting.