Just like you might dread long and boring meetings, so do your colleagues or employees. Therefore, it is in everyone’s best interest to brush up on your presentation skills and make sure you capture their attention for the required time.
The second thing you should have in mind when designing a presentation is the fact that very few will actually read the leaflets that have been handed out as a support of the visual presentation. Thus, everything that you say must contain some part of the information you are supposed to share with the people that are present.
The presentation skills required to make everything run smoothly are the following ones:
- Brevity is your friend: keep things as short as possible. The preference, nowadays, is to use keywords that remain ingrained in your listeners’ brains. This will help them locate that piece of information much easier when they need it. If you use projected slides as your medium of presentation, the slides should not be full of writing. It is usually easier for someone to read and remember three lines of large writing on a slide than a twenty lines of small writing.
- Diagrams and numbers: you should explain your diagrams. Lots of people say that the reason why they dislike attending presentations is the fact that the author shows diagrams and assumes that everyone understands them. In some specialized fields, that assumption proves to be correct. However, if you are showing a presentation with a nautical theme to kids in high school, you might want to reconsider the decision of moving quickly through different diagrams and numbers. They might not know what those things represent.
- Rehearse your speech: now, you do not want to appear like you have learned this by heart. That just makes you look scared of the entire meeting. What you do want to look like is prepared. Try to keep calm, no matter how nervous you might be. Rehearsing your speech will give you the assurance you need. After all, what you say is just as important as what you show. Usually, if the theme of the presentation is very dull, it is the words that you say that save the day and the meeting