Presentation Tips

Communication skills are of immeasurable importance in any sort of professional environment. There are a number of tips from the “Creating Passionate Users” blogposts and the Garrreynolds.com website that I thought were of particular importance.

As a student I have witnessed a number of presentations by other students, teachers, coworkers and the most important aspect of a good delivery in my opinion is incorporating humor and energy into the presentation. As Kathy Sierra puts it, “Be energetic. Be enthusiastic. Dare I say... be passionate. 
You don't have to behave as someone you're not, but if you CARE about the topic and the audience (and if you don't, why are you there?), make sure that it shows. Energy and enthusiasm is infectious.” If a presenter is not enthusiastic about his/her topic then there is no way to generate interest or enthusiasm towards the topic in the audience and the presentation was not useful. If you, as a presenter, took the time to organize and prepare a presentation about a specific topic, you must have some sort of enthusiasm about it, so make sure that shows through. I think humor is also essential to a successful presentation because it keeps the audience engaged and also shows your audience your enthusiasm in an indirect way. For example, avid golfers appreciate golf jokes while scientists appreciate science jokes, because they are interested in the subject matter and can appreciate a joke regarding the subject. The same goes for a presentation. If the presenter can incorporate humor into the presentation it not only maintains audience attention but also indirectly shows the audience that the presenter really does care about the topic.

Garrreynolds.com gave some helpful hints regarding preparing for a presentation that I would like to use to prepare my own presentation. On this website the author suggests keeping it simple and asking yourself (the presenter) what three things you want your audience to remember after listening to your presentation? Be it three words or phrases you want the audience to retain after you finish speaking. This is an excellent planning strategy because it forces the presenter to boil the presentation down to only a few words and makes the purpose of the presentation extremely clear. The Garrreynolds.com website also gave some good presentation tips that I would like to keep in mind when making my presentation; one of them being: Have a visual theme but don’t use PowerPoint templates. Although it might be tempting to use a PowerPoint template in a presentation, most likely the audience has seen that template before. The author suggests being original and creating something that your audience will not recognize. In my opinion, this could help the members of the audience remember your presentation better.