by The Open University
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Use handouts as the audience may appreciate some notes about your presentation ? it saves them work and means they are concentrating more fully on what you are saying. However, it is probably best not to provide notes (particularly a complete set of your slides or OHTs) before a presentation. This can bring about the irritation of people turning over pages while you are speaking. Also, you can guarantee that some of the audience will read ahead and miss what you are saying. So, handouts are probably best given out after the presentation. Of course, with small group work you may want them to use a handout for a particular purpose during the presentation and these can be given out at the time.
Let the audience know what they will gain from your presentation. Phrases like ?I hope that you will all be able to understand ? when I have finished? can be very useful in directing your audience. If you don't set the scene in this way at the start you can't expect to take the audience along with you. Another useful phrase which might work could be ?If you only remember one thing from this talk it should be??.
Use a ?table of contents?, for example by using a suitably labelled slide with each main section of the talk clearly labelled in order. Then you can use these section labels on the appropriate slide during the talk. The visual listing of the A, B, and C sections can be a bit bland, but by signalling to the audience where they are going you will support them through your presentation with minimal effort.
The main body of your presentation is the ?tell them? part. You have prepared your audience for what is about to happen. Now it's happening! The middle section should contain the images and words that are the main part of your topic. Unless you intend to ?ad lib? your way through this part, you will need to assemble and organise your material carefully.
At the beginning of this section we discussed the need to allow time to gather material and thoughts. You may end up with a large assortment of ideas, notes on paper or on a PC, index cards, printed extracts, diagrams and so on. You now need to sort all this out!
You may find you have too much material so you must select only the most essential, relevant information and reject the irrelevant, however much you feel tempted to include it.
As a rough guide, about 110?120 spoken words per minute can be presented comfortably to an audience. Of course, you will have to allow for things like explaining diagrams and answering any queries. So a 20-minute presentation with about ten slides shouldn't involve speaking more than about 2,000 words. If you take approximately 1½ minutes per slide as an average, you'll complete the slides in 15 minutes and you'll still have about 5 minutes to answer any questions.
The next stage is to look for the links between the various bits of information. When similar topics or issues crop up, they can be grouped together. It is helpful to give each group a heading. These groups may eventually become separate sections of the main body of your presentation. This process is very similar to the approaches used in note-taking and planning an essay.
The aim of this subsection is to help enable you to generate as many ideas, notes, diagrams and data that could be used in your presentation. Then you will need to ask yourself which of these ?items? will be most appropriate for the final presentation. Particularly interesting are the various ways in which people make notes to produce a plan. Table 2 shows five different ways in which notes can be made and what they can be used for.
