What are presentation skills?

Presentation skills are the abilities and characteristics that enable a person to devise and deliver an attractive presentation that will communicate data and ideas most effectively. This includes what you say (words), how you say it (structure), and what you support what you say with (materials, such as PowerPoint slides, video clips, images, etc).

Why are presentation skills important?

Presenting yourself appropriately and in the best way possible is an important part of your professional as well as private life. At work you probably have to talk to managers and colleagues, give speeches or seminars, and sometimes also do training courses with less experienced staff – in all of these situations your presentation skills will be tested. At home you will, as soon as you have a partner, find yourself in situations in which you have to motivate your better half to join in and buy something expensive, or talk to friends or family about something important, for example, your wedding. Whatever your motives and the type of presentation, you will need to improve your skills of presenting yourself to others!

Effective presentation skills

Verbal communication

You can help your audience to hear your presentation in the way you want by the way you use your language to express it. Speak up clearly and confidently, at a volume that is audible to everyone. Think before you speak, stop talking when it is appropriate to do so, and speak in a manner that is appropriate for your audience.

Body language

It encapsulates the essentials of body language: posture; gesture; eye contact; expression and deportment; the set-up in front of your audience. For me, body language is the single element that, even at the eleventh hour, can rescue your boring presentation from being extraordinary and stimulating.

Voice emission

Loudness helps you to project your voice and that in turn helps your presentation. People will hear what you are saying. It can also help your confidence because when you are louder, any last-minute nerves tend to fade, as well as sharing in the engagement of the mass. To produce your voice, stand comfortable with your shoulders not in and not out.

Attitude

The way you hold your body as you approach the front of the classroom can dictate the types of gestures that you use and the tone you set. Do not slouch or appear to be too rigid.

Storytelling

Telling stories also works – many dynamic public speakers use it and it helps you bring the topic to life. Did you see the moment during Obama’s speech when he personally recounted what happened down the street from him during the riots? It was a smart play, creating drama and keeping people focused on his story. Tap into your personal story. Tell it slowly, then raise the tension, or include a hairy moment.

If you are presenting information, ideas, concepts and / or data to an audience, you should present those things well and, conversely, you should not present them poorly. Good presentations stick with your audience after they have gone home. You will be a better presenter if the people listening to you think that you are a better presenter. They are more likely to get the information from you, and they are more likely to carry it back with them.

Here are 10 simple ways to become a great presenter:

1. Know your topic well

If you know your topic well, you will present with high levels of confidence. In addition, if you review your presentation topic thoroughly before you talk, you will be able to provide great answers to questions that your audience will ask you after you present.

2. Outline your presentation

Having an outline for your presentation will keep you on track, reducing the chance that you will digress in your presentation and also maintain the attention of your audience on your major themes. One way to strengthen your presentation is, at the very beginning of your presentation you tell your audience what you are going to cover in your presentation. You don’t need a detailed outline, but you should have an overall summary of the main topics that are the focus of your presentation. This what your presentation is about and the message you hope they will take with them as they leave.

3. Practice your presentation

The greatest benefit of giving your presentation several times before you have to do it for real is that you have the opportunity to remedy problems that did not occur to you in the first instance: perhaps you had too many visual aids, or too few, or the presentation took too long, or too short, depending on the length of time you were allotted for it.

The more we practice, the better presenter we become, because not only will we be more comfortable with the content, but that might allow us to leave the comfort of the content, and to concentrate more on other things that are important for presenting – such as nonverbals, perhaps even our own personality, rather than our content.

4. Keep slides and visual aids simple

Keep it easy, text At first glance, slide presentations can be content with your audience and format your talking points; however, limit your slide presentation. Needless to say, pictures, bar and pie charts, and brief bullet points are way easier on the eyes than large white chunks of text, not to mention preventing those who need to rely on their notes to remember their talking points from reading off the slides. That great content, beautifully packaged, can potentially enhance audience participation in the QA portion of your presentation. Packaging is everything

5. Keep an engaging pace and tone

Your rate and tone can make or break you as a presenter. People like to prick up their ears when they hear that the speaker sounds like they are interested in the topics they are presenting about. Instead of giving your presentation in one monotonous tone, and at a steadily paced speaking voice through your presentation, try to add variety to the way you place it.

Give the analogy the same feel of information delivery as a narrative: emphasise the right words, slow down. You don’t have to transpose their speech to your auditory memory like a music video, but listen to other speakers and pick up on ways that they use the voice effectively. Then, take a deep breath and do this on your own.

6. Take a voice lesson

If you are in professions that involve a lot of public presentations, you might profit from vocal lessons – lessons in singing in other words, but not only. There are professional voice coaches who work with people who do not sing. We use our voice to communicate. It is a very important part of our conversation. It follows to reason that people who are not in the world of professional singing would also want to learn how one can effectively communicate clearly, loud, and pleasant. What are these voice coaches able to do? They can help you modify some of the voice qualities like pitch, tone, resonance, rhythm. A professional voice coach can also help you to strengthen or rather maintain the health of your voice if you may have some problems with it, like poor pronunciations.

7. Eliminate filler words

Speaking too quickly can throw the audience a curveball and cause them to lose track of what you’re saying. Filler words are also common pitfalls – words like umm, uh, aah, ya know, so, well, like – all of which interrupt the flow of your presentation and can make audiences think you’re nervous and don’t have much confidence behind your words. An easy way to eliminate the use of filler words is to run through your presentation when you know you’ll be doing it in front of a crowd. This helps you to become more aware of times when you say those meaningless words and to vary how long you take to translate that speech into actual words.

If all this feels hard to do, you might want to replace your filler words with silence: stopping the flow on some parts of your presentation might not sound as stilted, and it might also enable you to draw attention to certain things. Pause here to take a breath, or sip some water, or change to the next slide.

8. Use nonverbal cues

Probably most important is to address the audience as much as possible. If you are addressing a small group, try to take a moment to look at each audience member during your presentation. If you have a larger group, look in the direction of the audience members and not necessarily at a particular person.

Remember nonverbal signals can work here to project confidence, so when you refer to slides, try to stay facing your audience and look at your slides only briefly for a moment. Hand gestures can really make a presentation more interesting, and can replace some nervous habits of movement, such as fidgeting or resting your folded arms.

9. Know your audience

For different audiences, your style can be different. You might deliver your presentation with a specific style as if it were meet for the scene of your audience. In a workplace, giving a presentation in a professional style is required to convey your information to your audience. For a school setting, giving a presentation with humour might be required to keep the audience entertained and to stay appropriate for the intents of the kids’ education level.

10. Arrive early

At least one of the advantages to arriving early at your designated meeting place is that you can get acclimated to the room and your gear prior to your presentation. If you need to set up anything, you’ll be able to do it from a place of calm, giving you peace of mind that you won’t have any glitches might also have time to calm your nerves with some water and a little preparation.