Comments on How to Make More Effective Presentations

Comments on how to make more effective presentations

Highlight what is most important (this means you must decide what is important)
•Try to pace your presentation so that the amount of time spent on a topic reflects its importance
•Make sure that what is important does not get lost among the unimportant
•Not everything you say should be on a slide, BUT make sure that the most important things you say are on slides
•There is a bad tendency to put things on slides that you don’t want to talk about. If it is not important enough to say, it probably does not belong on a slide!

Help listeners follow your argument

Use preview slides to provide an overview

Select slide titles carefully

Don’t mix topics on the same slide

Use summary slides

Use "presentation notes" to yourself to remind yourself why a particular slide is important and what parts of it are most important

Make sure that the various parts of the presentation are consistent with each other. For instance, if one slide says the budget total is a certain amount, later slides on the budget should cite the same amount

Maintain a consistent pattern in your slide layout so as not to distract viewers

Rehearse!
If you don’t know how to pronounce certain words, LOOK THEM UP!!! There is no excuse for not knowing how to pronounce a word. (Sometimes it’s okay to have a hard time saying a word as long as you appear to know what it is supposed to sound like. If necessary, spell it out for yourself phonetically [fone-ET-ically]. It is okay to mispronounce names if you don't know the proper pronunciation, but not to stumble over them.)

Fewer vs less: Say "fewer" homicides, not "less"; "less" income, not "fewer"

Using figures and tables

Use action titles

Give listeners time to look at them

Round numbers mercilessly (to two important digits)

Use colors or bolding to highlight important items in the table of figure

Use pointers (your finger if necessary) to highlight important items

Explain the units (for instance, if the numbers are, say, in millions of dollars, be sure to make that clear)

Figures that are meant to be compared to one another should use the same units and, to the extent possible, the same scales