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Giving Presentations

This guide will help you design and deliver an effective presentation. It's full of tips for both beginners, who need to learn the basics of delivering a presentation, as well as students who want to perfect their presentation skills.

Visual Aids

You may be required to use a visual aid, such as a PowerPoint or Google Slides presentation, as part of your presentation.Other common visual aids include posters, flip charts, or video clips. Visual aids can help you remember the structure of your presentation and provide you with confidence. Your instructor will likely provide you with instructions on what sort of visual aids you are required to use for your presentation.

Visual aids should add to, not detract from your presentation. If using presentation software like PowerPoint, Google Slides or Prezi to create presentation slides, it's important to follow some basic rules of good slide design.

Designing Presentation Slides

  • Keep it short! The general rule is to keep text on a slide to 4 or 5 short bullet points. Or, try using the rule of 33: no more than 33 words per slide. If you have too many words, your audience may stop listening to you and may start reading. 
     
  • Keep it simple! Do you really need to have a different transition animation for each slide? Probably not. 
     
  • Use visuals. Images to accompany what you are saying or to illustrate a point and can be less distracting than long sentences

For more tips, watch the video below: 

"How to avoid death By PowerPoint" presented by David JP Phillips for TEDx