Analyze your audience: Who are they? What do they already know? What do they need to know?
Define your purpose: What do you want to achieve in the minds of your listeners?
Review the presentation guidelines such as essential requirements and time constraints.
Designing your presentation
Organize your topic material hierarchically into major and minor points. Use this map to decide how much detail to include/leave out during the presentation.
Decide on the order in which to present points— this may depend on an already established format you have to respect. If not, structure your presentation around the key questions a listener would want answered in order to be able to understand your presentation. These might be questions like:
What is your topic /area of study?
What is the main question or issue you are trying to explore?
What has been the most important research in the field on this topic (literature review)?
What did you do (re research, interviewing people, etc)?
What did you find out (results)?
What didn’t you find out (limitations)?
What do you plan to do next?
Develop your content
Introduction: Explain what you will talk about; give an overview of the presentation.
Body: Cover the information required to answer your key questions (above).
Conclusion: Sum up and point to the future in some way: next step, future directions, etc.
Using visual aids
If using PowerPoint, go for a simple but professional appearance.
Give each a slide a title.
Don’t include too much detail — no more than six points/bullets per slide.
Choose graphics, figures, illustrations that support rather than distract from your content.
Adapt graphics etc. with the audience in mind—if they don’t understand them, they are not helpful.
Be prepared to lead the audience through a complex visual with the aid of animated stages, colour coding, a laser pointer or other type of aid.
