Better Oral Presentation – Top Grade Professors

Writing and Practicing an Oral Presentation

oral presentation

Part of your education at university is to develop good speaking and presentation skills, which will be useful in both your academic and professional life.

You may be required to develop and deliver an oral presentation by yourself or with other students, and to answer questions from the audience about your presentation. To do this successfully you need to plan before you start developing your presentation.

To get a good mark for an oral presentation, you need to put a great deal of thought and effort into planning the presentation and designing the visual aids, as well as practicing the presentation until you are fluent.

Oral presentations include those that are designed to inform, to inspire, to persuade or to pitch a product or service.

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Packaging the Oral Presentation

Planning your oral presentation

Many assignments comprise a written and an oral component. Oral presentations differ significantly from written assessment tasks and thus require a different approach. You cannot simply copy text from your essay or report onto slides and regard that as your presentation.

An oral presentation is more than just reading a paper or set of slides to an audience. How you deliver your presentation is at least as important in effectively communicating your message as what you say. Use these guidelines to learn simple tools that help you prepare and present an effective presentation, and design PowerPoint slides that support and enhance your tal

Purpose of the assignment/oral presentation

Your lecturer will have set the assignment with one or more particular educational purposes in mind, apart from assessing your knowledge of the topic. For example:

to develop or assess your critical thinking or analytical abilities
to improve or assess your information research skills
to practice or assess your verbal communication skills.

If your presentation is being assessed, read the assessment criteria carefully. Keep these in mind when selecting your content and planning how to present it.

Presentation objectives

The topic of your presentation will usually be explained in the assignment instructions. However, you also need to be clear about the objective (what you want the oral presentation to achieve), which will affect the way you present it. Common objectives are:

to inform or educate the audience on a topic
to convince the audience that your point of view is valid
to assure the audience of your knowledge or expertise
to persuade the audience to take a particular action.

Most presentations involve a combination of these.

If your purpose statement for the oral presentation includes phrases such as: persuade the audience to…; convince the audience that…; inspire the audience to…, you are probably on the right track. If your purpose statement includes a phrase such as: to inform the audience about…, you might want to consider whether there is a further purpose; why do they need to be informed?

Know your audience

As well as your own purpose in presenting, you need consider your audience’s purpose in listening. Who are they? Why are they there? The content, scope and style of your oral presentation will be affected by your audience’s characteristics and needs, as well as your overall purpose.

Consider the following:

Audience characteristics	Audience needs
Expert or non-expert? Your peer group (First-year students, postgraduates, academic staff)? General public or a community group? A client in the industry (as part of a mock pitch)?	What do they already know about your topic? What do they need to know? What do they want to know? What do they not need to know?

Developing your presentation

Structuring

Like stories, essays and reports, formal presentations are structured. They have a beginning (introduction), a middle (body), and an end (conclusion).

These three sections should flow logically from each other. This needs extra care in a group presentation. These should be clearly linked.

If group members have prepared their sections independently, the group should do the fine-tuning together, making sure that:

there is no overlapping or repeated content
the various sections are of similar depth and breadth
visuals are used in a consistent way
there is an overall cohesion to the presentation.

Beginning

Your introduction should capture the attention of your audience and ‘hook’ them into your topic. You could start with an image, an anecdote, or a problem that will not only introduce your topic but also engage your audience’s interest.

Some useful opening phrases include:

“Imagine that…”
“This is the story of…”
“Have you ever wondered what would happen if…”

Avoid “Today I’m going to talk about…”. This is a dull and unlikely to engage your listeners.

Once you have your audience’s attention:

State the main focus of your talk
Briefly explain the structure

Body of the presentation

The body of the presentation develops the topic by expanding the plan in a logical sequence. Because listeners’ attention can fluctuate it is important to regularly remind the audience where you are within the structure.

You should also verbally mark transitions, key points, examples, etc. Some useful phrases include:

Linking between sections

Underlining key points:

“It’s important to remember that…”
“This is important/significant because…”

Looking at visuals:

“Now let’s look at…”
“This image shows…”

Ending

The conclusion should be clearly linked to the introduction, showing how it has addressed the issue. Mention the implications of the conclusions you have drawn and suggest a way forward if appropriate.

End on a strong note and aim to leave a lasting impression on your audience. Indicate clearly to your listeners that you are concluding. Some useful phrases to signal that you are concluding include:

“To sum up…’ / ‘In summary”
“In conclusion…”
“To recap the main points…”
“So where does this leave us?”
“We have raised the following questions:…”
“Our study has shown that…”
“Thank you for listening. Are there any questions?”

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Visual Aids

Visual aids stimulate interest and make it easier for the audience to understand your presentation. Visual aids can include models, prototypes, posters, video clips and images.

Do not confuse your software slides with your presentation. The presentation is what you do and say. Slides, when used, should support or illustrate what you say.

They can help the audience :

understand abstract concepts
visualise structures or processes which are hard to explain with words alone (charts/diagrams)
compare information (tables, graphs).

Slides should be concise, simple and relevant, and complement (not repeat) what you say. Text should be used sparingly.

oral presentation

Designing presentation slides

There is an art to designing effective presentation slides. Consider the following design features.

Contrast

Use simple, contrasting background and text colors such as black on white, or white on dark blue. Elaborate designs and color schemes can overwhelm the content. Which of the following two slides is more effective?

Font

Choose a clear font and make headings approximately 36 points in size and text at least 16 points.

Layout

Don’t try to include too much information on a slide. If there is too much content the audience will not be able to take it all in.

Animation and sound effects

Use animation and sound effects sparingly and only when they contribute to the point you want to make.

Choice of graphics

Choose the right type of graphics for your purpose. For example, bar graphs can be used to compare, line graphs to show changes over time and pie charts to show percentage of total.

Bullet points

There is an art to writing bullet points. They should:

convey precise meaning as concisely as possible
be written in the same grammatical form.

Don’t have so many slides that you have to race through them. Generally, one slide per minute is about right, but of course you can vary how long you spend on each.