1.5: Preparing for Oral Presentations

Pick the method of preparing for the talk that best suits your comfort level with public speaking and with your topic. However, plan to do ample preparation and rehearsal—some people assume that they can just jump up there and ad lib for so many minutes and be relaxed and informal. It does not often work that way—drawing a mental blank is the more common experience. A well delivered presentation is the result of a lot of work and a lot of practice.

Here are the obvious possibilities for preparation and delivery:

• Write a script, practice it; keep it around for quick-reference during your talk.
• Set up an outline of your talk; practice with it, bring it for reference.
• Set up cue cards, practice with them, and use them during your talk.
• Write a script and read from it.

A good presentation is one that is clear, understandable, well-planned, organized, and on target with your purpose and audience.

It does not matter which method you use to prepare for the talk, but you want to make sure that you know your material. The head-down style of reading your report directly from a script will not work. There is little or no eye contact or interaction with the audience. The delivery tends to be toward a dull, boring monotone that either puts listeners off or is hard to understand. And, most of us cannot stand to have reports read to us!

For many reasons, most people get nervous when they have to give oral presentations. Being well prepared is your best defense against the nerves. The nerves will wear off someday, the more oral presenting you do. In the meantime, breathe deeply and enjoy.

Visuals for Oral Presentations

There are various types of presentation formats you can use:

• Presentation software slides: Projecting images ("slides") using software such as PowerPoint, Keynote, Google Slides, and Prezi, to name a few. One common problem with the construction of these slides is cramming too much information on individual slides.
• Poster board-size charts: Another possibility is to get some poster boards and draw and letter what you want your audience to see. Of course, it's not easy making charts look neat and professional.
• Handouts: You can run off copies of what you want your audience to see and hand them out before or during your talk. This option is even less effective than the first two because you cannot point to what you want your audience to see and because handouts distract the audience’s attention away from you. Still, for certain visual needs, handouts are the only choice. Keep in mind that if you are not well prepared, the handouts become a place for your distracted audience to doodle.
• Objects: If you need to demonstrate certain procedures, you may need to bring in actual physical objects. Rehearse what you are going to do with these objects; sometimes they can take up a lot more time than you expect.
• Zoom, Teams, Google Hangouts (conference style software): We are seeing more and more companies using these software to conduct business meetings. So, people are conducting virtual meetings and presenting. So learning how to use this software to present your presentations is very important.

Take some time to make your visuals look sharp and professional—do your best to ensure that they are legible to the entire audience.

As for the content of your visuals, consider these ideas:

• Drawing or diagram of key objects: If you describe or refer to any objects during your talk, try to get visuals of them, so that you can point to different components or features.
• Tables, charts, graphs: If you discuss statistical data, present it in some form or table, chart, or graph. Many members of your audience may be less comfortable "hearing" such data as opposed to seeing it.
• Outline of your talk, report, or both: If you are at a loss for visuals to use in your oral presentation, or if your presentation is complex, have an outline of it that you can show at various points during your talk.
• Key terms and definitions: A good idea for visuals (especially when you cannot think of any others) is to set up a two-column list of key terms you use during your oral presentation with their definitions in the second column.
• Key concepts or points: Similarly, you can list your key points and show them in visuals. (Outlines, key terms, and main points are all good, legitimate ways of incorporating visuals into oral presentations when you cannot think of any others.)

During your actual oral report, make sure to discuss your visuals, refer to them, guide your audience through the key points in your visuals. It is a big problem just to throw a visual up on the screen and never even refer to it.

As you prepare your visuals, look at resources that will help you. There are many rules for using PowerPoint, Keynote, Google Slides, and Prezi down to the font size and how many words to put on a single slide, but you will have to choose the style that best suits your subject and your presentation style.

You may also have heard about the presentation skills of Steve Jobs. The video that follows is the introduction of the I-Phone...and as you watch, take notes on how Jobs sets up his talk and his visuals. Observe how he connects with the audience...and then see if you can work some of his strategies into your own presentation skills. This is a long video...you don't need to watch it all, but do take enough time to form some good impressions.

Steve Jobs iPhone Presentation