Effective Oral Presentations: Advice for Novice Speakers

1. Effective Oral Presentations:Advice for Novice Speakers Dr. James Newell Department of Chemical Engineering Rowan University

2. Outline • Introduction • Knowing your audience • Using your allotted time wisely • Designing and using visual aids • Importance of practice • Appropriate dress • Audience Interaction • Miscellaneous Hints

3. Introduction • What you are really presenting: • Your Information • Yourself • Oral presentations are unavoidable in a professional life • Everyone can learn to give better presentations

4. Knowing your Audience • Different audiences require different levels of introduction • You wouldn’t give the same talk to your grandmother and your boss • If you lose the audience, you will not get them back • At least half of the talk needs to be introduction

5. Using Time Wisely • Fitting into the allowed time range is the biggest challenge in presentations • Never run over time – it is unprofessional and it irritates the audience • Have some material that you can cut and some filler that you can add • Practice for time, but remember you will talk faster when it counts

6. Use of Visual Aids • Nothing makes you look less prepared than handwritten overheads or having typos • Overheads need to have clear, large font • Graphs must be labeled and easy to follow • Tabular data and equations should be used sparingly • If you have more than 7 lines, it is crowded

7. Importance of Practice • The more you practice, the more confident you become. • Transition between slides is the hardest • When giving a group presentation, make sure everyone knows who is covering what material • Use overheads to help you, but don’t read them

8. Appropriate Dress • You never want to dress more casually than your audience • Typically, men wear jackets and ties; women wear business suit or dress • For this presentation, shirt and tie is enough • If I’m noticing what you wear, I’m not listening to you • If I can’t remember what you wore two days later, it was fine

9. Audience Interaction • Involve your audience as much as possible: they will recall much more if they are active • Try to make eye contact with people in different parts of the room • Once you have lost the audience, you will not get them back

10. Miscellaneous Hints • Bring a cup of water with you (in case of cotton mouth) • Control the talk -> only you know what you intended to say • Relax, for better or worse you get to sit down in 20 minutes and half of the audience isn’t listening anyway