Often you'll be asked to give a presentation to the class, and often this is on topics that might not be your favourite thing in the world. Here we will discuss some good practice on preparing your slides, practicing and presenting them to an audience.
A fantastic guide to preparing a presentation comes in the form of Patrick Winston's How to Speak lecture at MIT, which we direct you to as a supplementary resource (and really, a must watch).
Written by: Jack Naylor
As a first pass, make a plan as to what you want to present, the order you want to present it in and why you want to present certain aspects. This will allow you to put together the slides in a way that is not sequential, but thematic or topical. A presentation does not need to be sequential, but it needs to be clear, logical and engaging. Preparing what you intend to cover thematically beforehand ensures you have a lean set of ideas.
Keep this in mind from the get go: a presentation is not for you. It is not for the marker. It is not for your friends. It is not for your family. It is for the audience, and you need to be flexible to cater to them - whoever they may be. Develop slides in this way - they should cater to the audience. The slides your prepare for residents at a retirement village on machine learning should be very different (more comforting, understanding that this is new technology) than what you would give to a class of Year 9 students at your local high school (quick to grab attention, fast paced).
A presentation is not a report, and so your slides should ideally be there to support your spoken content rather than being your spoken content. For this reason, your slides should be very minimalistic. You can have dot points, but full sentences (unless they are quotes) are unnecessary. Why you may ask? Well, if someone is reading a slide, they are not listening to your presentation. "But how will I know what to say?" - there are two answers: know your presentation well enough that you fill in the blanks, or use speakers notes to jog your memory. The best presenters often have presentations which contain no words at all on their slides - for some coursework presentations this may not be the optimal approach, some words may be useful.
A presentation is a visual media: you should use as many figures, pictures and visualisations as you can. They are much more engaging, and allow the seeing part of your brain to work at the same time as the understanding part of your brain (which allows the audience to continue listening). These should be well sized on your material and be referred to as you speak. You should move to point to things and direct the audiences attention to exactly what in your slides they should be paying attention to and understanding. Slides like these should have you almost give a guided tour to why they're there, what they are showing and how it relates to the rest of the presentation. As you are preparing your slides, you should keep this in mind - it is part of the why you want to present it.
Slides should not be jam packed full of content, but they should contain distinct ideas. This does not mean you should have 100's of slides for each idea you have, you should prepare each slide with an overarching idea which you deal with sub-ideas on. Try to spend at least 50s to 1min on each slide. This gives the audience enough time to ingest the slide, comprehend the idea with your material and then be ready to move to the next one.
Less is more. Keep that in your mind. It's the best rule of thumb when preparing your slides, you can fill in the gaps with your speech. If there is anything you do not refer to in your presentation it should not be on your slides. Remove it: it helps neither your or the audience.
The second best rule of thumb is put together a presentation that you would enjoy sitting through. If you are going to be bored out of your mind if you had to sit through these slides: your audience is unlikely to be any more impressed. This also relates to the content: consider who and at what level of expertise you will be presenting to. Are they familiar with some of this material already? Do I need to recap some basics? Is my diagram or visualisation actually going to help them or confuse them more? Is what I'm presenting going to be understood by everyone in the room? If you leave even one person behind you have not done your job as a presenter.
A presentation is actually somewhat of a performance: think of what you want to emphasise, how you might move around the room and what effect you want to have on the audience as you put your slides together.
Depending on how confident you are with improvisation (and how much time there is until your presentation) your practice may take several forms.
For those very experienced and confident in public speaking, your practice is likely going to look like you thinking through the script in your head as you put the slides together. Before you present, you may flick through the slide deck 3-4 times tweaking content, but not actually present it to anyone. This is a level of comfort that very few people can actually function with and can present well from, and even if you are comfortable this is an ill-advised preparation method.
For those less experienced, your practice probably looks like you giving the presentation to yourself, reading off a script word for word. This is also an ill-advised method - it does nothing to emulate the real presentation.
The best way to learn a presentation is to do it. Do it more than once. Do it until you can anticipate what comes next. Do it so you can place your brain on auto-pilot with the content and focus on how it is received in the room. Do it so the presentation is second nature.
There is a danger here: you don't want to learn the presentation in one way, and you don't want to learn it without an audience. Each time you present it should be different: place emphasis on different elements and ideas, explain things in slightly different ways, talk in different styles and tones, play with your presentation style - move around more, move around less, be more focussed on the audience, be more engaged in the content. This will allow you to find out what works and what doesn't - it will allow you to iterate the presentation in your mind, and come to one presentation that can achieve different outcomes (for different audiences). It develops a toolbox which allows you to select, based on your audience feedback, elements to better suit the audience.
You should practice with people. Invite a friend round, give the presentation to them, ask them for their thoughts. Ask them to yell "ding" if you have umms and ahhs as you are speaking. Get them to yell out a new style to present in: "give this in the style of an Army Major", "... as a Shakespearean actor!", "... as a High Court judge!", "... like you've had a terrible day and everything has gone wrong!". This may seem silly, but it separates the content from the presentation and allows you to better understand the effect on the audience. Try new gestures, and body language through this as well - get comfortable with what does and does not suit your content and presentation style. Ask them to watch your eye contact and how you address the room. Are you balanced or do you have a habit to linger in parts of the presentation?
In the early stages - these may seem very daunting. Another good approach is to record yourself as you are presenting, and experimenting with new ways of phrasing, gestures, pitch, volume etc. Are you clear in your explanation and diction? This lets you gain instant feedback on how you present - and answers the all important question: is this a presentation you would enjoy to listen to?
Perhaps the most important part of this practice is not actually getting the content correct, but ensuring you know where to breathe. Without breath, your body goes into a survival mode - which sends you off the rails during the presentation, making you falter, sending you off the rails further. This can be a viscious cycle. You want to make sure you work out how best to breathe during this time. Breathing exercises as warm up to these practices (and the final presentation) is therefore critical. If you find yourself running out of breathe, make a note on the slides or your transcript of where to breathe 3-4 words before the point of breathlessness. Practice to make these natural pauses.
Part of your practice should involve you getting an idea of what the room layout will be. Go to the room early as part of your final practice, look at how much space you have, where the lectern is, the projector etc. How is the audience seated; is it a tiered lecture theatre or a flat seminar room? Can you see the whole audience or will you need to pivot? This will enable you to flag internally how you might change your style to better suit the room.
Now is where all the above pays off. You know the presentation, you've got a good set of tools to rely on and an idea for how you'll execute the presentation.
Enter the room, ensure your slides work (mouse, clicker etc), sound is working if available, smile at the room and work out where the audience is seated and prepare your workspace. This last point relates to what your set-up at the lectern or desk is like - is your water conveniently placed for where you want to present, are your notes visible, accessible and laid out in order, are there any hazards (cables, stools etc.) to be aware of, is there a timekeeper to watch and are they visible or do you need to have your phone on a stopwatch next to the computer, check the lighting - is there a spotlight pointing into your eyes at certain points. You can take as much time (being reasonable of course and respectful of schedule) as you need to make the environment work for you as a presenter. Smile if you make eye contact with the audience during this time and focus on making the area comfortable.
Take a final sip of water if needed, a nice big breath and begin. During your introduction, gauge the audience interest and engagement. If they've just sat through a 2 hour seminar on the dangers of dust on printed circuit boards and dust mitigation techniques, you may find that you need to warm the audience up - quicken the pace, use a warmer voice and be more jovial in your presentation. If they've just come back from lunch and are restless, you might need to settle them in and set the tone of the presentation: if it is serious, talk slower, be deliberate in your presentation, if not you may still need to change your presentation to engage them in your content.
Your job whilst you are presenting is to constantly use feedback from the audience to change how you are presenting in that moment. If half the room seems to have got the content and the other half are lost, explain something again, differently, in a different tone of voice, if the whole room looks like they'd prefer to be outside, use your delivery to bring them back into the room. Think almost of a captain steering a cruise ship through the presentation, adapting to conditions, avoiding storms, making stops to collect supplies and drop off cargo along the way - it should be fluid, seamless and to the passengers (your audience) appear entirely natural and planned the whole way, even if you a changing the wheel at the helm constantly desperately avoiding a storm.
Pauses are your friend (the cruise ship stops). Never apologise for them. As you change ideas, a pause indicates to the audience the end of a thought and they will wait for the next one. Take a brief sip of water, change where you are standing in the room, reset yourself and importantly breathe. You can also use this to effect your audience in certain ways, assert control in the room. Presenters who have complete control of the room should be able to stand there saying nothing at all, being comfortable and confident in the silence without it seeming unnatural - the audience may not be comfortable but you are the captain, if you wish to stop, then stop. You will soon regain complete control of the room. There have been cases in history where a presenter has stood for minutes, the audience in complete silence, adrenaline coarsing through their bodies for anything to break the silence. It is unlikely you will need to do this for effect in any presentation you ever give - but note the power a pause may have.
If you stuff up, continue. Regain your thoughts, do not feel obliged to apologise and continue. Regain your own comfort and remember, you are in control.
End strongly. No matter how you thought the presentation went, phrase the ending in a way which opens the audience to want to ask questions and reiterates the main point of why you stood up to speak today. I personally think you should not thank the audience at the end (I usually do this at the beginning) but you should end in an appreciative manner. This is a matter of style. You should not end the presentation abruptly, you should end it deliberately (think a cruise ship running aground vs. pulling into a dock slowly and being moored deliberately).
Take questions as you see fit - give concise, well considered answers that respect the audience member. If you do not know - you can admit this, you don't know everything - but your preparation of content should leave these to totally left field questions. Be aware of time, and direct people to where they can ask more questions if time expires.