Jinguang is one of Chris' Spring 2012 Professional Speaking students at Carnegie Mellon. Here he writes about presentations.
Definition of Presentation:
Presentation is the
practice of showing and explaining the content of a topic to an audience or
learner. Presentations come in nearly as many forms as there are life
situations. In the business world, there are sales presentations, informational
and motivational presentations, first encounters, interviews, briefings, status
reports, image-building, and of course, the inevitable training sessions.1
From the definition of
presentation, we know that there are two main parts in a presentation, person
who makes this presentation and audience. The purpose of presentation is to let
audience understand what you talk about and persuade them to agree with your
opinion. In order to make a perfect presentation, well preparation is the most
important thing.
How to prepare for presentation?
Just as I said before, a
good presentation must consider audience so we should do research about the
content we will represent and people who will listen to our presentation.
1. Content.
The
first thing is to confirm the goal of our presentation. Only when we understand
the purpose of presentation, can we collect related information to support our
opinion. In real world, the purpose of each presentation is different so we
should customize our content. For example, if we make a presentation for
business purpose, we should make our content professional. Graphs, figures ans
statistics present strong persuasion for business people because they care
about how the project can increase profits for the company, what’s the break even,
what’s the revenue and what’s the opportunity cost of this project. For these
concerns, numbers are much more direct and efficiency for them rather than
verbal words. However, if we make the same presentation for customers or people
not in this field, the content is totally different. For those people, we
cannot use professional terminologies and statistics because they don’t have
related background. For these cases, we should make complex content easier and
make some stories for audience. If audience are attracted by our stories, they
will focus on what we say.
2. Style
As we
know, audience cannot absorb everything from the presentation so our
presentation style should be diverse and novel to attract attention of audience.
For example, if we want to introduce the background of the presentation, we can
use a related video. Professor Labash once used videos to show some mistakes in
a job interview. It’s so impressive so all classmates focus on that video and
get a lot of information about how to take a job interview. Besides,
interaction also plays an important role in our presentation. We can organize
some small games to attract attention of audience.
3. Appearance
It also
depends on who are audience. For some professional audience, we must wear
professional. For audience who are teenagers, we can dress causal to reduce the
gap.
4. Other
Preparation.
Before
the formal presentation, we should come to the presentation place to check all
facilities we will use work. Does the projector work? Is there enough room for
audience? Is there white board to make notes? If facilities don’t match our
requirements, we should change another place or ask staff to make some changes.
Conclusion
Preparation is the
priority of any presentation. Good preparation will increase our confidence and
attract audience’s attention. In addition, give the mock presentation to your
friends before the normal presentation. Let your friends give you some
suggestions which can help you find which part is not good enough.
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