Thoughts on practice presentations

Thanks to everyone for coming along so well prepared today for the practice presentations. And thanks for your evaluations at the end – although many of you were very hard on yourself I think. Anyway, I’ve put together some general points about strengths and things to work on. Not all of them will apply to everyone, but some will be relevant to you …

Strengths of practice presentations

In-depth knowledge of topics
Good introductions
Great use of a preview slide (list of topics that you will talk about)
Some excellent use of visual aids/pictures
Some folk got the right balance of text and images
Tone – sounding interested/passionate about topic

Things to work on …

Open up body and eyes to whole audience and avoid directing presentation to screen/board
As a general rule, the less text the better
Watch out for clashes in text colour and images underneath
Be careful with timings of animation
Explain and talk about images and graphics
Think about recapping or summing up – your last couple of slides …

Since everyone produced a PowerPoint, then obviously everyone did plan their presentation. However, some folk, in their written evaluation admitted that they could have planned a bit more. Nothing beats standing up at home and going through the whole thing – particularly if you can get someone whose opinion you trust to sit through it and make some, helpful, comments at the end.



Again, thanks for your work today. I, for one, learned a lot.

Preparing for practice presentation

Most of today's class was spent in the Learning Centre preparing for the 4-5 min practice presentations which will take place the week we come back. Remember that the list of bullet points on the handout is only a guide - you don't (and wouldn't be able to) cover all of these.

Also, you'll need to bring in a copy of your PowerPoint on a pen drive - or email it to me here.

At the beginning of the class, I tried to go through a very rough version of a presentation - something along the lines of what you might produce. However, the technology let me down - hopefully, it'll be working by next time.

You'll notice that I didn't cover all the contents of the presentation in the 4 or 5 minutes I took - this shows that you can't cover a lot of ground in that time. The key to getting the timing right is, no big shock, preparation.

Here's what it should have looked like:

Sample Draft Presentation

View more presentations from Jerry O’Neill.

Your criteria for a good presentation

We started off today by defining what you felt were aspects of a good presentation. You came up with the following - it would be hard to improve on your criteria:

• Be prepared
• Relevant
• Open body language
• Don’t fidget
• Keep it interesting
• Don’t rush it
• Concise
• Clear intonation
• Good voice projection
• Accurate information – good knowledge of topic
• Good eye contact
• Appear confident
• Don’t faint
• Know your audience
• Appropriate humour
• Appropriate language or vocabulary
• Appropriate use of tools
• Appropriate visual aids
• Be careful about repetition
• Appropriate dress
• Rehearse timings
• Pace of speaking
• Appearance of calm – the importance of breathing
• The importance of smiling – warmth

We also looked at a DVD which showed five interviewees contesting for a place with a prestigious advertising agency.

What was interesting was how much the interviewers focused on style, rather than content, when it came to evaluating performance in presentations.

We finished off by me giving out the brief for a practice presentation which will take place on the 26 Feb. You'll get a chance to work on that next week.

Introduction to unit

In the first session we broke (or possibly) smashed the ice by getting everyone to get up in front of the class and do a one-minute talk. As getting up in front of people to do a presentation is the thing that most people dread, it was good to deal with this head on in our first class. Everyone was up for the task - no one refused (although I never mentioned that was an option!).

So, anything that anyone does now will be easy compared to what you had to do in our first class. The worst part of having to do that was that you had very little time to prepare - if you can get up without preparation, think what you can do with a bit of planning!

Regardless of the content, I was delighted to see that as a class your non-verbal communication skills (body language) was very positive. In other words, you looked at your audience as you talked to us and, generally, you used your hands to help express your points.

So well done.

I also gave out some handouts which provided an overview of what we will be doing over the next couple of months.