Guest Post: Anirudh Bhargava

Anirudh is one of Chris' Summer 2011 Professional Speaking students at Carnegie Mellon. Here he writes about real-world presentations and entertaining your audience.

John, an undergrad student in computer science school decided to prepare a 50-slide presentation, fill it up with as much content as he could to impress his audience, and show how much research he had done. On the day of presentation he slogged through his presentation, could not complete the presentation in the given time, and worst of all, a few people left the room in middle of presentation. What went wrong?

The most important thing people forget now and then is that the presentation is mainly about the people who came to listen to the presentation and not about the presenter. That’s right: Know your Audience! If you think about it, the audience just looks for benefits from the presentation. So, it is better to focus the presentation around the people by talking about features that make them feel like this is time worth spending. As stated by Chris Labash, renowned professor at Carnegie Mellon University, remember three simple P’s to build a striking presentation -

Prepare for your presentation well. To begin with, know your objective of the presentation. If possible, define why, who, how, when and where. This will help you define your point of view, and then you may complete your research on the topic. Make sure you document the final point of your research, the benefits from the study, and the other supporting facts or experience.

Produce – Start building your presentation. If you are using PowerPoint, make sure you use as few meaningful slides as possible. Think of it this way: you are delivering the idea to the people in 30 seconds per slide. However, this time could vary depending on your content. To make your presentation more interesting, you can add some supporting facts you gathered while preparing or any personal experience. Finally, conclude the presentation with action for your audience. This will help the audience to understand motive of your presentation.

Present with energy and enthusiasm. Show your passion towards the subject and let the audience feel the importance of it. There are several styles of presenting information – Educate, Entertain, or Explain. Depending on the type of your audience, you want to pick appropriate style. You may use handouts, whiteboard, or any audio or video aids to help you present your work. Your focus must be to engage the people, and so you must have proper eye contact with your audience. Avoid common errors such as reading the presentation or looking anywhere else but the audience. Finally, relax, smile and have fun!

Now, you are all set for an excellent presentation. Good Luck!