Nervous about a presentation for an upcoming meeting? Anxious about whether you will make the expected impression or not? Don’t worry! This blog post will discuss eight methods that will improve your presentation skills using tools like online Slideshow Maker which will help you create attractive presentations and save time.
Making a presentation to an audience requires much thought and preparation. A minor mistake can make your presentation poor, but your presentation will be intriguing and appealing if you do everything right. Here are eight methods that you can implement to improve your presentation skills. Using these methods will help you ace your upcoming presentation!
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Know Your Audience
Before you start making your presentation slides, you must know your audience. Presenting in a meeting full of engineering students is quite different from presenting in a meeting of commerce professionals.
You need to change your presentation skills with respect to the audience. These changes might include the usage or restriction of certain slang words, jargon, technical words, etc. It would be best to consider your audience’s profession, age group, educational background, and more while preparing your presentation. You should present in such a manner that your audience can clearly understand you without any communication gaps.
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Create a Well Researched and Factually Correct Presentation
It is of the utmost importance that your presentation is well researched and factually correct. Hence, before making a presentation, you should conduct adequate research on the topic, and factually check all the information you are going to add to your presentation slides.
It is always better to write out the important points of your presentation before making the actual presentation slides. It will allow you to create a roadmap for your presentation and make it easier to check the facts and data you will use. Furthermore, it will help you alter the sequence and flow of your presentation.
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Do Not Write Sentences; Write Keywords and Key Points Instead
Do not write full sentences in your slides. Instead, write key points or keywords. You can briefly explain these key points or keywords later while presenting. Adding complete sentences makes the slides look crowded. A limited number of words on each slide is an excellent option to avoid overcrowding your slides. Using limited words makes your slides appear simple and aesthetic. It also creates space to add images or visualized data, which helps you keep the attention of your audience.
Moreover, using a pyramid presentation, you can highlight the words or points you want your audience to notice. Highlighting makes it easier for the audience to look for those words, and they can get a gist of what you are speaking about. Highlighting also indicates that you are emphasizing those words or points.
You can also use tools such as an Online Slideshow Maker, which provides a wide range of templates and helps you create your presentation in minutes. All the templates are created keeping in mind the word limit for your slides and providing adequate space for keywords and key points.
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Keep a Clean and Simple Format For Your Presentation
Choosing an appropriate font style and color scheme based on your presentation topic would be best. Choose a formal font style, and avoid fancy fonts. You can choose the color theme that looks minimalistic and suits your presentation best. You can also use color schemes based on the color theory mentioned below:
- Red: romance, anger, or passion
- Orange: optimism or happiness
- Yellow: hope or happiness
- Green: nature or abundance
- Blue: professionalism, transparency, or calm
- Purple: luxury or creativity
- Black: mystery, elegance, or darkness
- White: purity, peace, or cleanliness
- Brown: nature, enduring, or dependability
- Beige: conservatism, dullness, or piety
While formatting you presentation slides, make sure you do not clutter your presentation with too much animation, fancy fonts, different colors, etc. It is also important to align all content using the same alignment. A clean and simple presentation format with proper alignment makes the presentation look professional and fascinating. A Slideshow Maker provides you with pre-formatted templates that not only look intriguing, but also save time.
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Use Demographics, Visualized Data and Images
To convey data, use demographics and visualized data such as graphs, pie charts, line charts, histograms, and more wherever possible, instead of writing sentences. However, you must use accurate, reliable and relevant data every time. If possible, you should cross-check the data from multiple sources. Moreover, you should use images in your presentation, wherever necessary. Ensure that the infographics, visualized data and images you use are high quality.
The use of infographics, visualized data, and images make your presentation interesting, while the use of only text makes the presentation dull. You can also use a Slideshow Maker to convert your data into a visualized form in the app.
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Rehearse Your Presentation
Rehearsing is one of the most important aspects of preparing for a presentation. Before the final presentation, you must always rehearse it multiple times. Rehearsing before the final presentation improves your confidence, makes you familiar with the topic, polishes your public speaking skills, and more.
You can practice your speech in front of your friends or family. If you do not have an audience to rehearse with, you can rehearse in front of a mirror or even record yourself while rehearsing.
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Show Confidence in Your Body Language
Confidence is key. Always show confidence using body language while presenting. As mentioned above, rehearsing is a great way to improve your confidence. Making eye contact with the audience, leaning forward while speaking, standing up straight, keeping your chin up, and making clear hand gestures shows that you are confident about your presentation.
On the other hand, actions such as fiddling, putting hands in pockets, crossing arms, and keeping your eyes down show a lack of confidence, so you should avoid these actions.
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Vary Sentence Length and Avoid Monotonicity
Varying the sentence length makes you sound more interesting and makes it easier for the audience to understand you. However, while varying the sentence length, you must also frequently change your tone throughout the presentation to prevent monotony.
Raise or lower the tone of your voice while presenting different points. The change in tone and varying lengths of sentences makes the audience hooked on your words, and increases their attention. It also makes the audience more likely to be receptive to you. On the other hand, monotony makes your presentation uninteresting and your audience unreceptive.
Presentation skills, or public speaking skills in general, are among the most important skills we need. Presentation skills are required everywhere, whether it is at a formal workplace or an informal gathering. Therefore, it is necessary to polish and improve your presentation skills. You can use these eight methods to improve your presentation skills for your upcoming meeting – and nail it!
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