Giving Effective Presentations

STRATEGIES FOR EFFECTIVE DELIVERY

The following suggestions are based on strategies that students bring up time after time when asked what they think makes an effective speaker. If you make a commitment to using and practicing these techniques, you will improve your presentation skills.

Physical Factors

· Remember to smile as you speak and make eye contact with your audience. This doesn’t mean smiling constantly and foolishly like Jethro of the Beverly Hillbillies, but you need to avoid being completely straight lipped as well. Show that you enjoy being with your audience.

· Have a home base where you spend most of your time standing, but make some movements closer to the audience. Move in among your audience members from time to time to build a connection.

· Make sure your body stays loose, that it moves freely. It’s easy to get “stuck” in a tight, rigid position with your arms pulled in too close to your body. This position suggests that you’d rather hide and separate yourself from the audience.

· Emphasize your points with hand and facial gestures at appropriate times. This doesn’t mean waving your hands and arms constantly; these motions quickly lose their effectiveness. Instead, place gestures strategically so that your audience will remember important points.

Effective Verbal Delivery

· Use everyday, conversational language—but avoid slang and clichés.

· Use specific, concrete language that relates to real life, sensory experiences.

· Speak slowly and clearly, with the goal of sending your voice to the back of the audience. Use the air from your diaphragm to project (literally push) your words through the air. It is difficult to do this when you’re speaking too quickly.

· Enunciate carefully. Words are fleeting—even more so when they are slurred or spoken too quickly. Pronounce each sound and syllable.

Making it Stick

· Put the audience’s interests first.

· Kare Anderson, reporting for Presentations Magazine on-line (www. presentations. com), suggests that as adults, we’ve lost the ability to speak in a “picture-making way.” She recommends that you reach your audience by appealing concretely and physically to people’s core life experiences.

· Illustrate with stories, anecdotes, and real life cases.

· Integrate memorable words, phrases, or acronyms to ensure that your ideas stay with the audience.

Organization of the Content

· Rehearse and time your presentation.

· Organize your materials, notes, and visuals. Make sure you have specific points mapped out (perhaps 3-6) and specific examples, stories, or facts to back up each point.

· Book equipment and confirm the details.

· Always have a back-up plan ready. Never go into a situation where you will deliver a PowerPoint presentation without having overheads, poster boards, or handouts as a back up.

Using Visual Aids

· Consider the variety of approaches available to you: overheads, flip-chart pages, PowerPoint, white-board, demonstrations, posters, etc. Any of these techniques can be used to augment your presentation. Don’t assume that PowerPoint is the answer; in fact, PowerPoint is used so commonly that it has become exceedingly unoriginal.

· Remember that you, the presenter, hold the central position—not technology. If you make PowerPoint or some other visual presentation the “star” of the show, you risk losing your audience. They’re looking to connect with a person, not a machine.

· Use simple, large, uncluttered visuals. Avoid text only slides. Provide simple graphs, tables, line drawings, and photos.

· Don’t read off the screen. This probably is more likely to occur if you just have slides with bullets and text; it’s less likely to occur if you’re emphasizing points with charts and pictures.

· Use only a few, well-chosen visual aids—less is more. For a ten-minute presentation, you should use no more than 5 slides.

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