Seven ideas to improve your presentations

Making a good presentation can be pretty hard. Here are some principles/ideas that may give you insights in how to improve your own presentations. Sharing your findings is an important part of academia. A common way to do this is by presenting in front of research groups or at conferences

Let your voice lead and your slides support

The main purpose of slides is to support your speech

• By both hearing and seeing the information, your audience will likely understand and follow your story better
• To create mental links between concepts you need to go back to previous information
• While you cannot rewind speech, you can look at a slide and simply look at previously presented concepts

Build up information from your audience’s perspective

Structure the information in a way that the audience can follow

• Explain all supporting information, or assume that your audience already knows it
• Any new concepts you introduce should be relevant for your presentation
• Visualize the audience as a brick wall – to get to a certain level, you need to build a strong foundation with the right concepts

Rehearse the presentation both during and after design

Go through the presentation a couple of times while you are creating it to identify bottlenecks

• Once the presentation is done, go through it at least once to memorize the narrative thread
• The main message of each slide, the order in which the slides appear

Limit each slide to one topic

Your presentation should have specific goals (e.g. presenting your results)

• Each slide should be a building block that is used to reach those goals
• How to implement this
• Consider what the goals of your presentation are
• What information you have and where it should start
• Create a rough draft of the narrative thread, i.e. what information you should present
• Divide the narrative into steps/slides, and for each step/slide consider what the foundational building blocks are

Add your personal flair

Jokes and images can be funny, but don’t overdo it.

Prefer images over text

Slides should primarily contain images, and should only contain text when it is the best way to convey the information

• It is better to balance the load on the channels by presenting images whenever you can
• There are cases where text is simply superior such as when you have to show a list of items

Present information in bite-size pieces

Control where the audience is looking, and it makes it easier for the audience to follow your story.

• If you are using images from other sources, consider removing words and parts that are not relevant to your story so that your audience knows what to focus on.

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