How to prepare an effective presentation (Guest Blog)

Unlike assignments and projects, preparing a presentation can turn out to be an overwhelming task. It is because presentations not only require an adequate prior research for good content acquisition but also demand several other essential elements. As a matter of fact, the presentation is a direct source for conveying acquired knowledge for understanding of the audience; therefore, it is much important to prepare it carefully in order to increase its affectivity. Here are some helpful tips for preparation of an effective presentation:

Recognize your Audience

There is a deep link between a presentation and its audience because unlike assignments, presentations are always prepared for a particular group of listeners and viewers. For example, being a professional employee, you prepare a product demonstration for clients, whereas being a professor; you compose an educational speech for students. Therefore, to prepare an effective presentation, it’s much necessary to recognize your audience. This recognition will help you to deliver useful information to the listeners. Moreover, by understanding the viewers, you’ll be able to conduct the presentation in a most appropriate manner to increase the overall affectivity.

Pick a suitable Topic

The affectivity of a presentation always depends on the selection of its topic. Therefore, always pick a suitable topic that goes well with the event on which a presentation is meant to be delivered. For instance, you’re required to conduct a presentation on the Independence Day, so you should choose topics like Nation’s sacrifices, Day of Freedom or A Revolutionary day. Selecting a presentation related topics completely irrelevant to the basic theme will turn out to be utterly useless. Moreover, your topics should be quite appealing to maintain the curiosity level of the audience from the very beginning.

Create a proper outline and collect relative content

Once you’re done with your topic selection, now comes the most crucial part of creating an outline. A basic rough draft usually includes an introduction, main body, and conclusion. But, for an increased effectiveness, you need to create a proper vision for your presentation and include all the essential sub-topics for better understanding. Conduct a thorough prior research and collect all the relative data but, never include all of it in your presentation. This is why a proper outline is required so you only add the necessary information and exclude the additional material. Keep in mind that extra information breaks the flow of presentation and shatter the focus of listeners.

Organize and divide material

After preparing an outline and collecting all the relative content, now you have to organize it properly. An organized material brings continuity in the presentation and increases its overall efficacy. You have to bring together your final material and divide it properly among the total number of slides. To bring stability in your whole presentation, divide the material in a way that every slide comes with new information and support the data presented in previous slides. A fair distribution of data should be done to make each slide equally important. If you’ll put more data in some slides and lesser in the others, the overall impression of your presentation will suffer.

Final finishing of slides

Once you have organized the material and divided it properly among all the slides, now the final finishing begins. To develop the feature of attraction in your presentation, the final formatting is quite important. You need to select an appropriate font size and style, colors, and slide effects to make your data look more appealing and catchy. You can also set the timings of every slide so that you don’t have to change it every now and then. Moreover, always select decent effects for slide change because overdoing will destroy the overall impression.

Use more illustrations 

The most important thing about presentations is to use as many illustrations as you can. According to do my assignment member presentations are not for reading but for a demonstration of thoughts, knowledge, and vision. Therefore, prefer including less written content and more graphs, charts, pictures and short clips. A presentation with more illustrations always attracts the audience and explains the topic more appropriately. Whereas if you’ll fill your slides with written data that demands reading; believe me, the viewers will take least interest in it that will directly affect its impact.

Keep it short and engaging

To prepare an effective presentation, keep it short and engaging. Always add to-the-point information and explain in simple words to avoid lengthy lectures. Make your presentation more engaging by explaining every slide impressively in shorter duration. Long presentations consist of many slides and deliver lengthy presentation that is not a good thing. The audience gets bored after few slides and takes no interest in the further information. Therefore, whenever you prepare your presentation, try to keep it short in length and include some amusing and interesting facts to engage the audience. 

Don’t read, only express!

I’ve seen many presentations that include reading and no expression. This is the biggest mistake we make while delivering a presentation. When you prepare your presentation, keep that in mind that you put only necessary content in the slides for an overview because the rest of the information will be delivered by using expressions. Your body language can do wonders which your reading cannot! So, while creating your final presentation, you have to work much on your body language in order to put life into the presentation by using strong expressions.

An appropriate overall appearance

The last but the most important tip for preparing an effective presentation is to focus on your dressing as well. People think that creating attractive slides and developing good speech skills can make their presentation successful. Well, they don’t understand that first impression counts above all and in presentation, it is set by your overall appearance. An appropriate hairstyle and dressing are quite essential for a good presentation.  Always prefer formal and professional appearance to increase the impact of presentation.

In short, a good presentation is a combination of many elements and whenever you sit to prepare one, keep these all tips in mind to put your energy in a right direction and come up with an effective presentation.

Author Bio;
This article has been written by Jacob Arch. He is a lecturer and student advisor in a college, located in Birmingham, and also likes to write blog posts. He graduated from a University of Birmingham.