Nataliia Fominykh, PhD, pedagogical sciences

Sevastopol Institute of Banking of Ukrainian Academy of Banking
of the National Bank of Ukraine

How to Improve Your Business or Scientific Presentation

The concept of delivering a presentation can be divided into three main aspects such as: the language of a speaker, his manners and of course visual aids. Some estimates say that over 40 million presentations are given every day. But unfortunately some of them are delivered badly, and not for the speaker’s language or manners, but for some mistakes with their computer visual aids. Everybody believe that our presentations must be both verbal and visual, but we often forget that our slide design and delivery must help people organize and integrate information, not prevent them from listening to the speaker or just confuse the audience. So, the aim of this article is to look at some ways how to make your presentation better from the technical point of view. It is widely known that there are a lot of kinds of presentations. In the paper I will be addressing scientific and business presentations.

I’ll be addressing three main points and the first point is going to be general presenting rules. In the second one I will reveal some Power Point secrets to you and finally the last point is which Web-2.0 services can be used to make and publish your presentations on-line.

So, first of all, specialists claim that there are general ideas and rules that should be used in every presentation. The first one is the rule of three that means we should not put more than 3 points or notions onto one slide, because Psychologists say that people can’t perceive more than three ideas at the same time. While preparing your computer aid ask yourself: “Can my visuals be understood in 3 seconds?” If not, redesign them to support your talk. Psychologists even advice to limit our ideas to one main idea per slide. If you have a complicated slide with lots of different data, it may be better to break it up into 2–3 different slides (assuming no side-by-side comparisons are needed).

The next one is 10, 20, 30 rule. What do these numbers refer to? Let’s have a look!

We should not speak more than 10 minutes. You will object because sometimes we ought to deliver longer presentations, but in this case we should interrupt our speech with questions or interactions with the audience.

20 means that the font size shouldn’t be smaller than 20. Of course it is sensible to choose your font size considering the audience you are going to present before. And when you deliver your presentation in a very small room the font size shouldn’t be bigger than 20.

Hoverer the best slides should have no text at all, so try to reduce the text on your slides to an absolute minimum. This may sound insane given the dependency of text slides today, but the best PowerPoint slides will be virtually meaningless without the narration (that is you). Remember, the slides are suppose to support/supplement the narration of the speaker, not make the speaker superfluous. Yes, it is true that many people often say something like this: “Unfortunately, I missed your presentation. I hear it was great. Could you possibly send me your PowerPoint slides?” Of course you could. But if they are good slides, they should be of little use without you, because PowerPoint was designed as a convenient way to display graphical information that would support the speaker and supplement the presentation. The slides themselves were never meant to be the “number one in the list.” People came to hear you and be moved or informed (or both) by you and your message.

And if you can’t avoid putting the text on your slides then do not read the text word for word off the slide. Despite the fact that it is very convenient for nonnative speakers to put their prompting text on the slides, the audience can read it without you and it is not very convenient for them listen to you and read the text from the slides. This fact is proved by the words of Yale professor and visual communications specialist, Edward Tufte “…convenience for the speaker can be punishing to both content and audience” [5].

And finally, your presentation shouldn’t consist of more than 30 slides. Because it is too much information for your listeners.

And the next rule is “Less is more”, that can be proved by Leonardo da Vinci’s words: “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication”. It is widely known that too much slide information overloads people’s cognitive systems, but the rule “Less is more” concerns everything: design, colours, layout, effects, animation etc. Specialists consider that nothing should distract the audience’s attention from the speaker and his speech. And here I’d like to quote an Australian scientist Enno Middelberg who says “Animations are bad! They grab attention which you desperately need for the audience to understand what you're talking about. If you feel you need to use one, keep one type, preferably “appear” [1].

As for the colours, psychologists advise us not use green and red as a colour of your texts because the results of the researches demonstrate that about 20% of men and 15% of women can’t read in these colours. Also we should avoid using grey as it disappoints the audience. The most comfortable colour scheme is dark blue/yellow (our national) or dark blue/orange, white/black or white/dark blue. The first ones in these schemes are background colours.

As for the background, try to avoid using templates included in PowerPoint because they have already been seen by your audience countless times (and besides, the templates are not all that great to begin with). You can make your own background templates which will be more tailored to your needs.

And of course Less is more concerns information on the slide. Non-native speakers tend to write long sentences to remind them of phrases etc. and to read them on the projection. Don’t do that, although it is tempting. We shouldn’t put more than 20 words onto one slide even if we need. Nobody will perceive them.

That’s pretty much about my first point and let’s now turn to the second point of my presentation. The most widely spread platform to make a computer visual support is Microsoft Power Point. How can it help us to make our presentation remarkable?

When designing our presentations and creating the supporting visual aids, we should keep in mind the way our audience will actually process our presentation. We must design our visuals and use PowerPoint in ways that take advantage of how people process information. Much can be learned, then, from a review of the key findings in the field of cognitive science concerning how people learn best in multimedia presentation settings. A cognitive scientist, Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), Dr. Richard Mayer, summarizes the three assumptions of multimedia learning theory: “Cognitive scientists have discovered three important features of the human information processing system that are particularly relevant for PowerPoint users: dual-channels, that is, people have separate information processing channels for visual material and verbal material; limited capacity, that is, people can pay attention to only a few pieces of information in each channel at a time; and active processing, that is, people understand the presented material when they pay attention to the relevant material, organize it into a coherent mental structure, and integrate it with their prior knowledge” [3].

Summarizing the ideas of Dr. Richard Mayer and Garry Reynolds, some advice can be given to make an effective Power Point presentation, among them:

Multimedia Effect. Narration with pictures (visuals) is better than narration alone.

Modality Principle. People learn better when words are presented as narration rather than text.

Redundancy Principle. People learn better from narration & graphics rather than narration, graphics, & text.

Coherence Principle. People learn better when extraneous visual material is excluded.

Of course you know that we can use a kind of menus to illustrate the contents of your presentation. It helps the speaker to make his presentation more logical, understandable and clear. To achieve this result the function of hyperlinks between the slides should be used. In addition, the hyperlinks can deliver to the screen not only the slides of the presentation, but also the Internet-sites or separate files.

Also triggering can be used. Triggering is an effect when you move special objects on the slide in a special direction. This function helps the presenter to make his or her presentation more interactive as it will react to the audience’s actions, answers. A lot of examples of interactive presentations with hyperlinks and triggers can be found on the site “How to Teach English with Technologies”: http://shvidko172.narod.ru.

Using PowerPoint, remember that the key with letter “B” stands for “blank” that means you can press it in order to make your screen black and al the audience’s attention will be placed on you. And one more advice: use a remote control device or a wireless mouse to manage with your presentation because it is not very pleasant for the audience to watch your back and it is not very good for you to lose the eye contact with your listeners.

I’d like to conclude this point by saying that if hyperlinks or triggers are used in the presentation we should check carefully if they wok correctly.

And finally let’s now turn to Web-2 services for presenting. By the way what about the synonyms of Web-2? Of course, you know that they are: collaboration, information sharing, recommendation, participation, cooperation, usability, mobility, accessibility and even economy because we don’t have to buy any storage devices in order to demonstrate your presentations as they will be published on-line. And it’s up to decide to make it public or private.

Among services that can be recommended to make and publish presentations are Photopeach, Sliderocket, Zooburst. As for the service Zooburst. If you have a Web-cam you can become the main character of your own presentation. Some more services: Eduglogster (gives opportunity to create your presentation as an interactive poster) and Prezi. These services offer new instruments to create highly functional and interactive presentations.

And don’t limit yourself with just computer aids, because as you have noticed the best presenters often scratch out their ideas and objectives with a pen and paper. Whiteboard and a marker can be used to sketch out your ideas. It gives the presenter opportunities to create an atmosphere of trust, sympathy, participation. By no means you shouldn’t reject using digital technology while making your main speech, but the act of speaking and connecting to an audience (when your main task is to persuade, sell, or inform) is much more analog than digital.

That brings me to the end of my paper. At this stage I’d like to go over my three topics again. So, today we have looked at general presenting rules, then I have revealed some Power Point secrets how to make your presentation more interactive and finally you have learnt about Web-2.0 services to make and publish your visual aids.

It is certainly by no means a complete manual but rather is a collection of ideas which capture common sense. Also, it’s biased on scientific researchers by Enno Middelberg, Erica Williams, Edward Tufte, Garr Raynolds, and Richard Mayer.

If you are eager to know more about presenting, Web-2.0 or any other ideas of How to teach English with Technologies, then visit the site “How to Teach English with Technologies”: http://shvidko172.narod.ru.

So, presentations count. An effective presentation can be the difference between winning or loosing, getting or not getting, being successful or unsuccessful. In conclusion I’d like to leave you with the following idea. No device, service or machine can substitute a human being. So, the best instrument for creating your presentation is your smile.

Resources:

1. Фоміних Н. Ю. Інформаційно-комунікаційні технології у викладанні філологічних дисциплін : Навчально-методичний посібник / Н. Ю. Фоміних. – Севастополь : Рібест, 2010. – 196 с.

2. Fominykh N. Using ICT in Teaching and Studying English / Nataliia Fominykh. – [Electronic resource]. – Access mode: http://shvidko172.narod2.ru/

3. Mayer R. An interview with Sociable Media, Inc. / Richard E. Mayer. – [Electronic resource]. – Access mode: http://www.psych.ucsb.edu/people/faculty/mayer/index.php

4. Reynolds G. Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery (Voices That Matter) / Garr Reynolds. – [Electronic resource]. – Access mode: http://www.garrreynolds.com/presentation/pdf/presentation_tips.pdf

5. Tufte E. PowerPoint Is Evil / Edward Tufte. – [Electronic resource]. – Access mode: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.09/ppt2.html