by The Open University
Available in 42 free installments
Owner:
Be prepared to adjust or adapt your timing, technical data, language.
Within university departments and many businesses there are certain conventions or agreed terminology and technical uses of language. You will be the best person to decide what is appropriate in your own subject area.
This is fine for internal presentations but remember that if you make the same presentation to outsiders you may well need to explain some terms and abbreviations. If you do use jargon that is not explained to all of the audience you will be in danger of confusing some of them. Another problem may occur if you use a certain term for something, but some of your audience know it as something else, or use your jargon for a different definition ? so be sure to define your terms carefully.
Although you have probably become accustomed to hearing a wide variety of accents in your everyday life, some accents can present a problem for certain listeners. It isn't simply a question of the words used, it is more about the pattern of speech and the actual sounds made and heard. The rhythms of, for example, Afro-Caribbean English are very different from those of an American or European English speaker. On top of this, certain speakers will not be able to make the same (identical) sounds that you can make due to the physical nature of sound. The sounds (or phonemes) that make up the talking voice are learned at a very young age, and once learned can be very difficult to unlearn. It is important to take into account your audience's background in order to ensure your message is clear, but also understood by all.
If you are undertaking an assessed presentation or viva, you may have the opportunity of developing a presentation with full support of a tutor or supervisor. There is always a risk with closely supervised or mentored work that your own individual ?voice? is lost. Understandably, a tutor wants you to do as well as possible and you respect their opinions and ideas. Yet many students feel uneasy about asserting their own points of view, and it can be very difficult to dispute the tutor's natural position of authority. This is where a well-prepared draft presentation, with a few well-reasoned aims and a clear progression of ideas will serve a student well in discussion. There is also the problem of time management, since in many cases both the student and tutor/supervisor are very busy.
If you have not made a presentation before, you might feel that you should write out the whole script. This can give you a good idea about the length and how it matches up with the timing you have been given. It can also be a good way to get your creative thinking going, as well as letting you experiment with what types of spoken word you plan to use. It is also a great way to allow you to interact with the presentation content and learn it ?deeply?.
But whatever you do, don't read your written script word for word from a piece of paper, unless you absolutely have to. Even with the best will in the world, a script which is read aloud loses the ?conversational tone? of real speech. Your audience may even fall asleep. An exception to this might be if you have to present something in another language in which you may not be fluent, but in that case you should make it clear to the audience why you are speaking from a prepared script. So by all means you should rehearse your script, but learn what you are going to say by exploring various different ways of saying it.
One way of doing this is to practise presenting (to yourself), speaking aloud, or to a small group of friends or family. Experienced presenters only use a few brief notes, or cards, to remind themselves of the main headings, or they may use the OHTs or slides as prompts.
