This guide offers suggestions and tools to help you organize, illustrate and deliver your presentation. It provides criteria to judge and improve your performance. It is a guide to what will happen. It explains standards for visual aids, so that you can inform those who will help you prepare them. Edited from a guide prepared by Ken Giffhorn, Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection.
Tell your story in a straight line. Make one point lead to another. Plan a series of slides that progressively reveal your subject. Build from cause to effect, simple to more complex, question to answer. People understand more easily when the subject is simply organized. Give your talk:
A beginning
- Introduce your problem. What led to your work? What were your goals?
A middle
- Tell how you arrived at your solution.
- Why is it a good one? What are its disadvantages?
- Suggest other applications.
- Do you recommend further developments similar to your work? Why? or Why not?
An end
- Summarize what it all means.
The best presentation is an effective mix of verbal and visual elements. You have spent a great deal of time collecting the data, writing your script, and preparing your talk. You have something important to say! Don't ruin it with slides that are of poor quality, confusing, cluttered or irrelevant.
What to Illustrate
You know your subject, but your audience may not be as familiar with the topic. What is perfectly clear to you must also be understood by them. Do not assume they know what you know.
Words have limitations. Illustrate what you cannot verbalize, what takes too long to describe and, what you want to emphasize. Use slides to hold attention, to clarify, restate, explain, and interpret.
Ears have trouble accepting numbers. To remember numbers, we must see them written. Qualities and relationships must be visually compared.
There are several important types of slides:
Key Items - Topic slides focus attention on key thoughts and orient the audience. An outline of major topics to be covered makes a good opening slide.
Trends - Continuous line graphics show trends or correlations effectively.
Comparisons and Proportions - Bar graphics are best for comparing magnitudes. Pie charts are good for showing relative parts of the whole.
Symbols - Symbolic diagrams of processes or flow charts are useful if carefully prepared and if not too detailed.
Flow and Relationships - Simple schematic diagrams can convey flow of materials or relationships of people, etc. Show only those parts of detail necessary to explain an activity or event.
You can control the quality and effectiveness of slides in many ways:
Keep Visuals Simple - Limit information on a slide to a single idea. Keep color, design, lettering and photographs uncluttered. If your audience is busy figuring out what is on a slide, they are not going to hear what you are saying.
Magic Rule of Six - If a graph or drawing has too much information on it, understanding is reduced. Research shows that the brain identifies and recalls up to six (6) items with relative ease. After that, a compression stage drastically reduces identification and rate of recall. As a simple test; tell at a glance how may items appear on these auto licenses:
VOJ 152 6943297
Give your audience a break. Give them small bites. Break up complicated formulas, charts and statements into two or three visuals, each with about six items or less. Hold the number of words per line to six or seven and the number of lines to 10. Omit every extraneous number or word.
Size of Detail - To test legibility of material, put an 8 1/2 x 11 inch sheet of copy between your feet on the floor. What you see from a standing position is how big it will look on the screen, assuming you are between five and 6 feet tall.
To check legibility of details in illustrations larger than 8 1/2 x 11, measure width of material in inches and divide by two. Place the illustration that many feet away and try reading it. This test will help you decide whether to make a slide of all material available or whether to produce only a close-up detail.
As you can see, some illustrations prepared for printing have too much content and detail to make clearly legible visual aids. Visuals are useless or even embarrassing when the audience cannot read them on the screen.
For optimum legibility, use modern bold type. On visuals, sans serif type is twice as easy to read as Roman or Script.
Visual Contrast - Your visuals will be more legible if you show contrasts in brightness and tone between illustrations and their backgrounds. Adding color to visuals will create the most striking contrasts. Applying color to a curve on a graph will heighten interest particularly if curves cross or partially coincide.
Too many colors used at once can confuse, however. Two colors are usually enough. Some color combinations that increase visibilities are:
Black on yellow, black on orange, orange on blue, green on white, red on white, black on white, blue on white, white on blue, orange on black, white on black.
Black lettering on deep-colored background is difficult to read.
Arrangement - Condense titles of visuals, technical illustrations and charts. Use headlines to state briefly what is on the slide. Place the title at the top of the visual whenever possible.
Do Not Over Illustrate - Illustrating every point is as useless and boring as underlining every word in a sentence. Remember that your audience has viewing limits.
Minimum reading time for viewers is about nine seconds, depending on the difficulty, newness, and mass of details in the illustrations.
Screen time for text slides or motion picture titles is three seconds for the first word and one second for each additional word. The limit is 30 words. The fewer words on a visual, however, the better.
Blank Slides - Avoid screening visuals longer than 30 seconds. Focusing on a light spot in a dimly lit room for long periods will hypnotize your audience. Shift to a different view of the subject or go to a blank slide. This will prevent the disruptive annoyance of turning house lights on and off at these points.
Blank slides should also be used when you move off the topic but do not want the audience distracted by the next visual. Never say one thing visually on the screen and something else verbally! Blank slides should be in a subdued color. A white slide in a darkened room will irritate the eyes.
Duplicate Slides - If a slide is to be shown more than once, prepare a duplicate so all your visuals can be shown on command. Pulling slides out of sequence delays your presentation and leads to errors.
Format - Prepare information for slides in a horizontal rather than vertical format. Lower parts of vertical slides are not always visible to those in the back of the room.
Standardization - Confine your illustrations to Micro Sof t PowerPoint. Carry your presentation disks with you. Do not ship them with your baggage.
Recognize the size of this project. Keep ahead of deadlines from the start. Realistically schedule tasks from notification and receipt of your Author's Kit to your arrival at the Symposium. Set a critical path that will help you to do two things at once: Write your paper and simultaneously initiate production of script and visuals for your technical talk.
How to Make a Good Thing Better
Practice! Practice! Practice! Allow enough time in your scheduling to rehearse the finished paper. Record your talk and play it back. Listen for words or phrases that are difficult to pronounce or understand and rewrite them with words that come through loud and clear.
Talk to your audience, do not read to it. Use conversational language. Remember, your audience may not be specialists in your topic. Address your remarks to them rather than a small group of state-of-the-art colleagues.
Practice your talk with your visuals until you can practically ignore your notes. Underlining key words will help you recall ideas. Have photocopies of your illustrations with your notes so you do not need to turn away from your audience to look at the screen.
Be sure your final speaking notes are used so that you or the projectionist can control the visuals. Time yourself. Pace your words, depending upon the familiarity or difficulty of the material. When information is likely to be new to your audience, talk slowly. As you develop your subject, you can speed up a little.
Find out how you look. Use a mirror to observe your gestures, stance and facial expressions. Rehearse your talk for your family, your associates. All will help you discover how listeners will react. They will tell you where to polish, where to drop in another visual, when to give more explanation. They will let you know when you overlooked a point or failed to make something clear.
The Work Pays Off
You have thought your way through your presentation Now it is time to talk your way through it. Since you have done your "homework," you can approach the opportunity relaxed and with confidence. Your oral delivery will depend on how you see yourself. You reflect how you feel, how much you and your subject are a part of each other.
If you are alert, enthusiastic and confident, your audience will sense it in your face and posture. They will hear it ring in your voice. Without evidence of this personal aura, your audience simply hears words. Be honestly eager to share information, and you will convince your audience.
You have rehearsed. Your visuals are in safe hands. You and your colleagues are "in sync." Your audience is preconditioned. Stand up straight. Do not lean on the lectern. Face the audience. If you talk while looking over your shoulder at the screen, your voice will not carry to your audience. Speak distinctly with an elevated volume and try to animate your voice.
You will quickly realize that the audience out there is with you and will stay with you. It is more than worth the hard work you have put into preparing for this appearance.
Planning Your Presentation
