You’re always going to have to impress someone in your work or school. And the best way to do that is learning how to give a great presentation.
Whether it’s actively staying away from vocal fillers (i.e. like, uhm) or mastering hand gestures, there are many elements that we think about when trying to improve our presentation skills. But the important thing is not to overthink it. You have to realize that all presentations have one goal: make the audience understand your message.
And to do that, there’s just no substitute for clear communication. No matter how aesthetically-pleasing your slides are, or how eloquently you speak, the audience won’t be able to understand your message fully if the content of your report is too hard to comprehend.
Trust me: I’ve sat through a lot of presentations before where I tuned out the speaker and just copied all the bullets in their slide to “save them for later”. My mind couldn’t understand what the presenter was trying to say at the time that I needed to review my notes afterwards just to know what they were talking about.
The worst presentations are the ones where you feel like you could’ve just studied the material yourself. And I don’t know about you, but I hate the feeling of wasting my time.
Now where do presenters, including myself, usually go wrong? It’s forgetting one of the core values in giving a great presentation: clarity.
Explain like I’m five.
Those four words may sound familiar to you because of the popular subreddit where people come in to ask questions and other users give answers, explained as simply and succinctly as possible. With that said, you probably know where I’m going with this.
The secret of knowing how to give a great presentation is by keeping it simple and clean.
You may be asking, just how simple is simple, and how clean is clean? Well as the four words imply, you should always assume that your audience is five years old.
By simplifying what you have to say, you can keep them engaged to your presentation and your words. They won’t skip out on anything just because they’re still mentally trying to understand what you had said five slides ago.
I’d argue that you should still keep this mindset even if everyone in the room is an “expert” on a certain topic. If you’re presenting to more than one person, I guarantee you that not everybody will understand every concept that you throw out there.
They may know the certain concept you’re mentioning, but just happen to be blanking during that moment. What you’re trying to do is avoid those moments from the audience where they go: “wait hold on, what does that mean again?”
While knowing your audience is key, it doesn’t hurt to underestimate them either.
Most of the time, you are not expected to dump all information you know onto the audience in a five-minute presentation. That’s what slides and written reports are for.
I mention this because in our quest to make them understand our message, we tend to cram everything in the time we are given. Not only do we tend to say too many words and rush through them, but we are not able to build on the simple concepts that are needed to understand the rest of the presentation.
“The mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell and is therefore, important in the production of adenosine triphosphate.”
You skipped explaining why the mitochondria is a powerhouse in the first place which would help explain the second half of your statement.
Don’t say too much!
The second thing that you should keep in mind is to not assume that your audience knows anything about what you’re talking about. Again, they’re five years old! Keep the jargon to a minimum, and avoid any acronyms that may confuse them.
In the example above, re-examine whether or not the use of adenosine triphosphate in your presentation is needed. Will it come up again in the next slide? Does explaining it help in the audience’s understanding of your message? If you do have to explain a complicated term or concept, you can make use of analogies and figures of speech that they can digest. Maybe the mitochondria is a battery that powers up the cell.
Relate the concept to a universal human experience.
But if you’re having a tough time, you can always opt to define the jargon in the simplest way you can. Again, explain like they’re five!
Do not use jargons to explain other jargons. The important thing is you take your time to explain. Something that is very obvious to you is probably the opposite for other people. It always pays to take the extra minute to ask yourself, will everyone I’m presenting to understand this?
Acting like your audience are all toddlers is the secret ingredient of knowing how to give a great presentation.
And trust us, if you are able to do the difficult task of making your audience appreciate and understand your message, they’ll think you’re way more intelligent than the presenter who just said complicated words to sound smart.
Do you agree with our suggestions? What is your definition of a great presentation? Leave your thoughts in the comments below! If you loved this article, then you’ll probably love the other advice we have for you here.
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