Making a Successful Presentation

If you are a career-minded person, your future career is inseparable from learning the art of presentation. Presentation skills are the most important ones for showing you to the best advantage. To make your presentation effective you should concentrate on three major components: presenter-audience-presentation.

Before you give a presentation, think of your image: how you will look and how you will behave in front of the audience. Remember, that people are more impressed with what they see than with what they hear. You will never have the second chance to make the first impression. Think of your audience and carefully assess it; their background, motives, interests. If you give the right thing to the right people you are likely to be successful in public speaking. Your primary goal is to impress the audience, to make them remember your talk.

It goes without saying that your presentation must be prepared beforehand. First of all you have to decide on the structure of your presentation. Making a presentation you should realize that a written text is very different from a spoken word, in other words “essay” or “summary” are not the synonyms to “presentation”. Before you structure the presentation, single out the main points of your talk, it must be clear for you what you are going to speak about, what is the main purpose of your presentation. All effective presentations always consist of three major parts: introduction, the main part or the body of the presentation and conclusion. The presence of these parts in your presentation makes it logically structured and easy to follow.

You should start the presentation with the greeting of the audience, then it’s necessary to introduce yourself and the subject of the talk. After that outline what you are going to talk about: describe the main sections of your presentation. It’s useful to remember that your plan mustn’t contain more than 3 points otherwise your audience may easily lose a track of your talk. It would be better if you set the rules in advance: state clearly if your listeners can interrupt you during the talk or you would prefer to answer their questions in the end.

After the introduction you come to the main part. While delivering the presentation remember to follow the plan you have outlined in the introduction. Tell your audience when you are ready to come to the next point of your presentation. Clarify the most difficult points and try to explain, don’t forget that your audience hears this information for the first time. When you use visuals or give a demonstration, you need to tell the listeners what they are going to see. If you use slides make them easy to follow. Put the title at the top of the slide where your audience expects to find it. Include only important and interesting information. Keeping the number of slides to a minimum ensures that the presentation will not become too long. It also avoids the problem of continually changing slides during the presentation that can be a distraction to your audience. On average, one slide per minute is about right. Combining photos, charts and graphs with the text will add variety and keep your audience interested in the presentation. Avoid having only text on your slides.

The fist key to a successful presentation is to speak in front of your audience. If you stick to your written script or for example speak to a board you’ll obviously lose your audience. On the contrary eye contact and smiling at proper time will help you to keep your listeners interested and motivated.

It’s very important to let your audience know that you’ve finished your talk. The conclusion is the last but not the least part of any presentation. When you prepare your presentation think what you’ll say in the conclusion. There are some possible options: you may either summarize the most important points of your presentation or outline your personal opinion on the problem. Thank the audience for attention and invite questions and opinions from them. But you must always bear in mind the time limit which is usually no more than ten or fifteen minutes. However, if you structure your presentation effectively, you would not believe how much you can say in these ten minutes.

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