Great Presentation Skills

Great presentation skills:

This article will give you all the information you will ever need to give a great presentation. A common mistake that most people make is that they focus on the words and technical content, when actually the measure of a good presentation is the audience’s reaction. If your presentation has awoken their interest, guided their understanding of the topic and then incited them to action, then you’ve given a great presentation. The way to achieve this is to prepare, prepare, and prepare again! Nobody ever got worse by practising!

Here are some tips on how to achieve this:

1. Use audio + visual aids; you don’t have to have a great knowledge of PowerPoint, a basic understanding of the programme would do, such as Steve Jobs that recently did a presentation and used a very simple visual presentation for his subject. As long as your visual presentation flows with your talk it will be fine. However some people think that the best visual + audio aids are the ones which are more complicated and this just isn’t true.
2. Be well researched on your subject but pay attention to time and duration. You don’t want to go into the presentation and be talking about your subject, then found that you’ve used all you points and still having 15 minutes left. So you resort to babbling on about your used points and drag it out, which is not acceptable. Equally, you should never over-run or you risk upsetting the host and your fellow speakers.
3. Treat the talk like a conversation; allow the audience to participate and ask questions where appropriate (generally at the end). You can get your audience to participate by asking them to raise their hands if they agree or disagree with your point or if they fall into a certain category, etc.
4. An important thing to remember is that with every action will come a reaction (Action = Reaction).
5. Try to have FUN with your presentation; if you enjoy the presentation, your audience will enjoy the presentation.
6. A beneficial tip to remember “is to know your talent” what I mean by this is find out what your good at in presentations, is it telling a story, etc, try to stick to things you are good at during the presentation which will help you get it correct first time round.
7. You must have confidence. If you don’t have confidence your audience aren’t going to listen.
8. An important thing to keep in mind is how you build your speech, you can’t just jump in with how to sing a song, you NEED to introduce yourself, so here is an example of a speech on “how to sing a song” set up:

Introduction
Learn your lyrics
Get the sound right
Have the timing
End

9. A great way to stop the audience from loosing their interest is too use simple words, try not to use big words as it bores the audience.
10. When you give your presentation try to be as relaxed as possible, because when you are tense and anxious you will say everything really quickly, (HINT: a good way to extend your talk is after a sentence say “BANANA” in your head). It will force you to slow down your speech if you tend to speak quickly or are anxious.
11. A nice thing to add to presentation is body movement e.g. if you say “I want to take 10 minutes of your time” hold up 10 fingers. It makes whatever you are saying much more memorable.
12. You should always try to win over the audience, you can do this by putting your points out in the open and reinforcing them .

This has been Calum, 13, and I’ve just won the public speaking competition at my Grammar School after lots of practise.