Tips for effective presentation

Content

• Understanding the concept of analysing, it involves a lot of questioning and giving reasons and not just labelling things
  
• Questions to be kept in mind are Why? Where? What if? This applies to case study analysis.
  
• Keep in mind the structure of the presentation and accordingly prepare the ppt and also have minimum number of slides. Slides have to be prepared depending on the time. For a 15min ppt the number of slides should not be more than 12
  
• Don’t load the slides with data, keep it simple and sexy :)

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While speaking

• Expression is very important. Smile at the crowd and don’t look at them as if they are your enemies. Many times the words you speak and your body language don’t match. Keeping hands in pockets, folding hands,keeping hands behind, rubbing palms are signs of being scared/not confident
  
• Use hand gestures and show some passion in the topic.
  
• Even the best of the best speakers will have some kind of inconvenience before starting a speech.
  
• To get rid of this situation the first thing you need is sometime to settle before you get into the crux of your presentation, also you need to know the seriousness of the crowd and their energy levels so that you can act appropriately.
  
• Prepare some questions for the crowd and ask them to get their opinion on that. This has 2 advantages teh first thing is you can involve audience in your speech and the second thing is you can get some time to settle and also judge about the audience knowledge.
  
• Speech should not be monotonous.
  
• Usage of connotations should be kept in mind
  
• Stand and face the crowd and don’t stand sideways. If a presentation is ppt based the normal tendency is to stand sideways looking back at the slide and talk, this should be avoided
  
• Say something different from the slide, just reading slide would actually offend the audience cos they are expected to be literate enough to read the slide by themselves.
  
• Know your voice and accordingly use mike if need. Don’t shout to be heard.
  
• To avoid dry throat drink some water while speaking
  

Questions & Answers

• First of all appreciate the person who asked the question cos he listened to the presentation. 'Thank you', 'Good question', 'Interesting observation' these phrases can be used to make the person feel better.
  
• Have some slides for Q&As also if needed and you may show that later, this shows your level of preparedness.
  
• Many times you run out of time and have to rush and finish off the presentation in time and in this process you may skip some slides. You can use the Q&A session to talk on those, obviously if the question is related to it.
  

Group presentations
The people who start off the presentation are never under pressure to finish off it in time so they tend to take more time than intended, to avoid this appointing a time keeper is best practice.