1.
FORMAL PRESENTATION
Presentations give you the opportunity to
share and receive feedback on your ideas and research findings. This page
offers basic guidelines for organizing, designing, and delivering formal
presentations. It also provides links for further discussion and examples.
But before you get started…
Know
your audience. As an engineer, you will deliver formal
presentations to different audiences who have varying levels of technical
knowledge: undergraduates, graduate students, professors, university
administrators, and supervisors and colleagues in industry. Anticipate what
your audience already knows about your topic. If you are unsure how to address
your audience, imagine having a conversation about your topic with a member of
the audience. You would employ different diction and sentence structures to
discuss your work with a fellow engineering student than you would to explain
it to a marketing student, wouldn’t you? Ideally, you address audience members
on a field of shared knowledge and then lead them to greater understanding.
Also try to anticipate your
audience’s mood. You should organize your presentation differently for a
friendly audience than you would for a skeptical or hostile one. Generally
speaking, a friendly audience will likely accept an early assertion of your
main point, followed by supportive details. A skeptical audience,
however, responds more productively to a presentation of shared concerns,
followed by a “delayed thesis,” or main point (Ramage & Bean, 1995, 164).
Finally,
make sure you know your audience’s preferences for presentations. Does your
audience expect or require PowerPoint or other presentation software? Does
your audience, like Edward Tufte (2010), despise PowerPoint? Would your
audience prefer other modes of presentation, such as displaying slides as Web
pages (Olivo, 2006)? These types of questions may be difficult to answer
for someone with little presentation experience, but doing some initial
research into your audience’s expectations will make you a more effective
presenter.
Organizing the Presentation
Most presentations have three distinct
sections: Introduction, Middle, and Conclusion.
1. Draft
the introduction
Think like a journalist: the
introduction should explain the “who, what, when, where, and why” of your
research. The Middle will explain the “how.” Your title slide will convey
much of this information. Fig. 1 shows a title slide that includes the “who, what,
and where.” Make sure you attend to font size and color contrast so that
your names are visible. Also, spell out the names of your university and
department even though they may be obvious. If you receive external funding for
your research, your title slide should identify the source of your support. At
this stage, consider your Introduction as a rough draft. You will revise it
later.
2. Concentrate
on The Middle and Conclusion
Imagine yourself at the end of your presentation.
What exactly do you want the audience to learn, or take away? Engineering
communicators recommend that you focus on 3-5 points per presentation (Doumont,
2009). Yet at a busy conference, most of us can realistically remember
only the main point of each speaker (Alley, 2003, 153.). Prioritize your points
in order of importance. Make sure all the information you include in the
Middle of your presentation contributes to your most important point; too many
unnecessary details will veil the important information. Select the most
persuasive visual data to use as supporting evidence.
3. Organize your argument and support
First, avoid your computer (Grant, 2010).
Instead, write down your points on note cards and organize the cards, so you
can see the entire structure at a glance and make changes quickly. If you begin
this work on presentation software, you risk wasting time on slide design
details. This process will also help to remove unnecessary information that
does not support your main points. It will be earlier to throw away a notecard
that you scribbled on than to delete a slide that took you an hour to perfect.
Repetition helps you to emphasize important
information. If you want the audience to remember a point, allude to it early,
present the information as clearly as possible, and repeat your point in the
conclusion.
4. Finally
Return to your Introduction
Review all the material in
your draft, including your title. Make sure your Introduction explains
why your work is important—and why we should pay attention to you. Also explain
the larger context of your work (or the “big picture”) for the least
technically knowledgeable member of the audience; that person could have the
most power or money to help you. If your presentation will last longer than 5
minutes, provide an overview slide to outline the contents. You can use the
overview to explain your scope: what you will discuss and what you will not.
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