Effective Presentations

For a presentation of any length is important to clearly state your goal.

• What do you want your presentation to say?
• What should your audience know after your presentation?

As you compile the research for your presentation you should answer these two questions. Get rid of any information that does not answer these questions.

Just like any great paper a great presentation has a great structure. There are many different presentation structures you can follow guidelinescan, or create your own. For example:

This is one storytelling frame

• Ask your audience a question that frames the speech.
• Tell your audience how you’ll try and answer that question.
• Start with a personal or investigatory story.
• Drill down into the details of how the story applies to your presentation.
• Offer some takeaways or next-actions for this.
• Tell another personal or informational story.
• Repeat the drill down points, the takeaways, etc.
• Thread questions in earlier than the end.
• Finish with a solid set of steps people can use to take action based on your presentation.

Variations on the theme:

• Start with a question about a famous figure.
• Explain that your audience is there to help you figure out if that figure embodies the subject matter you’re covering.
• Ask them to consider the figure at every step in the presentation.
• And present…

From:

http://www.chrisbrogan.com/make-better-presentations-the-anatomy-of-a-good-speech/

A five minute one slide presentation could be considered a poster presentation.

Alternatively

A five minute one slide presentation could mean that you only require one image for your presentation. Often students are presented with power point and assume the must make multiple slides for a presentation. It is possible to have a great presentation with no slides at all.

This method calls for one image. This DOES NOT mean that everything you are going to say should be written on this slide.

Your one slide could be:

• A photo that is relevant to your presentation
• A graph of your findings
• A moving image of your findings (like the weather man)
• A display of the image/concept you are discussing

Information graphics are structures that tend to use one image to compile many forms of information. Here are some example of visually graphed information that do not require a formal spoken presentation.

http://datavis.tumblr.com/

http://infosthetics.com/

It might be interesting to consider yourself, the speaker, as an information graphic. Your slide will show the visual information and you will speak for the text that would be on the graph.

A longer presentation requires a longer story arc.

Consider your research as if it is imposed on this graph of a Novel structure. Consider creating slides for the "opening scene" of your presentation and the various "crises" or events that lead to your "climax" or main idea.

10 Tips on how to think like a designer

Practice restraint. Any fool can be complicated and add more, it takes discipline of mind and strength of will to make the hard choices about what to include and what to exclude. The genius is often in what you omit or leave on the editing room floor

 Become a master storyteller. Often it's not only the design — i.e., the solution to a problem — that is important, but the story of it. This is related to #5 above. What's the meaning of the solution? Practice illustrating the significance of solutions both verbally and visually. Start with the general, zoom in to the detail, pull out again to remind us of the theme or key concept, then zoom back in to illuminate more of the detail.

Think communication not decoration. Design — even graphic design — is not about beautification. Design is not just about aesthetics, though aesthetics are important. More than anything, design is about solving problems or making the current situation a little better than before. Design is not art, though there is art in design.

Glossary of Graphic Design Terms and Concepts

• Select a typeface appropriate for on-screen presentation.
• Do not add to much text to your slides Or consider making a presentation that has no text at all. Your audience should be listening to you instead of reading from a screen.
• Make sure that your presentation has a clear story arc, which means ideally there will be a "Wow" moment--a  moment of conflict or reveal.
• Have a theme that is consistent throughout your presentation.

Presentation Software Besides PowerPoint:

Google Presentation

Prezi 

Keynote

20 slides for 20 seconds each is a presentation style referred to as PechaKucha.

PechaKucha Night was devised in Tokyo in February 2003 as an event for young designers to meet, network, and show their work in public.

It has turned into a massive celebration, with events happening in hundreds of cities around the world, inspiring creatives worldwide. Drawing its name from the Japanese term for the sound of conversation ("chit chat"), it rests on a presentation format that is based on a simple idea:

20 images x 20 seconds.
It's a format that makes presentations concise, and keeps things moving at a rapid pace.

http://www.pecha-kucha.org/what

This presentation style discourages the use of text on a slide presentation. To create a PechaKucha presentation it is imperative that your script is entirely written and timed with each of your images.

• Create the story that you want to tell through your presentation.
• Once you have written that story mark the 20 points where an image will enhance or describe your story.
• Compile your 20 images and then restructure your story to move at the pacing of a PechaKucha: 20 images x 20 seconds.

Here is a link to some PechaKucha presentations on-line as examples:

http://www.pecha-kucha.org/presentations/

This method was introduced in Michael Alley's The Craft of Scientific Presentations and is the method promoted by http://www.assertion-evidence.com/

Assertion-Evidence is an NSF research-backed alternative to traditional research presentations in science and engineering. In Assertion-Evidence presentations, you create slides that include a sentence long topic they are discussing and an accompanying visual such as an image, infographic, or chart as evidence. Basically, you have a slide as a helpful tool and mnemonic for their talk, however, you can adapt your presentation easier to fit the circumstances you may find yourself giving the talk in. The research says that those watching these talks are better able to recall the information presented. Using the assertion-evidence approach is useful because it forces you to be more intentional with how you create your slides than PowerPoint defaults do.