Improving Presentation Style

Effective Use of the Visual Aids

• Write legibly and big enough that your writing can be seen in the back of the room.
• Think about the organization of the material on the board.
• Fill one board at a time, starting with the top of each board and writing down.
• Do not scrunch in words at the very bottom of the board or in the margins. The students in the back will not see the words at the bottom, and no one will see the words in the margins.
• Underline or mark major assumptions, conclusions, etc.
• Use color to emphasize points. Before the class starts, determine which colors are most visible in the back of the room.
• Erase a board only when you have run out of room.
• If you find a mistake on a previous board, do not erase it. Cross it out, then write the correction in, which is what the students must do.
• Do not use visual aids unless they serve a clear and important purpose. Visuals should aid quick comprehension and support the main points.
• Book and check out the presentation equipment in advance.
• Talk to your audience and not to the screen.
• Use the visuals to enhance your presentation, not as a substitute for a verbal presentation.
• Use a pointer, if necessary.
• Coordinate the audio and the visual.
• Use too few visuals rather than too many. However, exactly the right number of visuals is great!
• Design your visuals with clarity and simplicity in mind.
• Use single words or phrases
• Organize the content visually
• Choose a font that is easy to see
• Keep the design simple
• Use short quotes, not long extracts, from documents
• Assign a title for each visual
• Use summary lists
• Limit the number of ideas on each visual
• Use color for emphasis and organization
• Design diagrams and tables that are clear and simple, with readily recognized symbols
• Use horizontal layout, not vertical

Improving Presentation Style

"Effective lecturers combine the talents of scholar, writer, producer, comedian, showman, and teacher in ways that contribute to student learning." Wilbert J McKeachie

An effective teacher is an excellent communicator and therefore thinks about improving his or her presentation skills. One of the most important aspects of communicating is shaping both content and style to fit your audience. In the classroom, if you cannot communicate in a way that is both comprehensible and interesting to your students, their learning will be greatly reduced.

To strengthen your presentation skills, focus on improving your skills in these three areas

1. Verbal and non-verbal communication
2. Effective use of the whiteboard and other visual aids
3. Effective and meaningful organization of content

Verbal and Non-Verbal Communication

• Find out all you can about the room in which you will be presenting. Visit the room ahead of time to familiarize yourself with its size and layout, as well as the type of visual aids and multimedia available. In addition, obtain any necessary training on the multimedia.
• Use the room as a stage. Move around to interact and engage with your audience. Do not stand in one spot the entire time. Move with purpose; do not walk aimlessly.
• Prepare. Preparation is essential. All excellent teachers are well prepared for each class. Practice in the room if you can, especially if you are new to teaching. In addition, prepare yourself emotionally and psychologically by taking the time to organize your thoughts and to look forward to teaching before each class.
• Speak loudly and clearly. Project your voice and face your audience when you are speaking. Speak slightly louder than you do in a normal conversation. Use a microphone in a medium to large room. The class may include students with hearing problems. Moreover, a mic will help ensure that students can hear you even when you turn to the whiteboard momentarily.
• Modulate the tone, pitch, and speed of your speech. Do not speak in monotone. Vary the pitch and speed of your voice for emphasis and effect. Use appropriate pauses. Rather than using filler words such as "uh," for examples, simply pause before moving on to the next idea or point.
• Use gestures and facial expressions to help you explain, emphasize and communicate the material. However, be careful not to develop distracting habits such as pacing or repeatedly adjusting your glasses or hair. To find out if you are unconsciously doing anything that may be distracting to your audience, have a colleague observe one of your classes or have your class videotaped.
• Develop and teaching persona. Decide how you want to be perceived and what mannerisms you want to have. For example, do you want to be quiet, humorous, formal or informal? Whatever persona is right for you, aim to convey confidence and ease. Move with certainty and assuredness, and be careful not to seem pompous or intimidating.
• Show passion and enthusiasm for the topic. If you are not interested in the subject, you cannot expect your students to be interested, either. Point out the fascinating aspects of what they are learning.
• Do not read your notes or slides. Doing so will lower your energy level and lead your audience to feel less engaged.
• Interact with and pay attention to your audience. Make eye contact with the students, not with the wall or whiteboard. Build a rapport with the class. Make sure the class is with you. If they appear to be lost, take additional time to explain points and to ask and answer questions.
• Do not take yourself too seriously. Be able to laugh at yourself and your mistakes. Feel free to bring humor into the classroom, but direct it at yourself, rather than at your students' questions and ideas.
• Keep track of the time. Do not start early or end late. The students often do not recall or listen to information presented after the class period is technically finished.

Presentation Style Guide

Avoiding Common Presentation Pitfalls

• PowerPoint 2007 and later users should save their presentations in their versions native .pptx format, not in the PowerPoint 97 through 2003 format, as this will provide better overall compatibility with systems.
• PowerPoint is designed to display pictures and text generated within the program or inserted from other sources. If the outside source is a sound file over 5kb or any video file, the original file is not saved within the presentation. Source files meeting these criteria must be available on the computer where the presentation is going to run. Please copy any source video and sound files to the media with your presentation. If in doubt, bring the file along.
• Embedded charts, graphs, and object-oriented graphic files are often difficult to work with. These file types usually are influenced by the version of the program used to create them, often making them translate strangely on a different computer system. It is recommended that charts and graphics be inserted into your presentation as a bitmap format graphic. If you embed charts and object graphics in your presentation, it is advisable to have the bitmap format graphics available on your media.
• HTML presentations - make sure that your files are portable.
• If you use PowerPoint's rehearse timings feature, pay close attention to the dialog box that appears after you finish rehearsing. It will offer to save the timings from your rehearsal, and if you inadvertently agree it will set them as automatic advances of your slides at the times you rehearsed. Unless you want your slides to advance on their own at predetermined times, you'll want to say no to this option. To check if there are any automatic timings currently associated with your slides, choose the slide sorter view of your presentation; they can be seen as numbers below the bottom left corner of each slide.

Presentation Delivery Tips

• Be considerate of other speakers and the audience by staying within your allotted time. This is essential to ensure adequate time for questions and discussion and adherence to schedule.
• Please discuss the same material as reported to the meeting planner.
• Take the time to rehearse your presentation. Give your talk to one or more colleagues and ask them for suggestions for improvement. If your presentation runs longer than the allotted time, eliminate the least essential material and rehearse again.
• Give an opening statement to acquaint the audience with the nature and purpose of the study. Word choice should be simple: use active words and short sentences. Words should reinforce your visual material.
• Use the mic and be sure to speak slowly and clearly. When using the mic clipped to your lapel, it may be difficult for the audience to hear you if you turn your head away from the microphone.
• Face the audience, not the slides or graphics you are showing, and try to establish eye contact with member of your audience in various areas of the room.
• Do not read your presentation verbatim from your notes or slides.

Presentation Style Guide

Using Animation within Your Presentation

• Animated builds, moves, highlights and transitions can help visually reinforce your message. However, these are often overused by presenters and can detract from the message you are trying to convey. Different versions of PowerPoint have different sets of animation features that are not always backwards compatible; it is best to use as little animation as possible to keep your audience focused on your content, and minimize problems in portability.

Fonts

• The presentation systems are usually loaded with standard system fonts. If your presentation contains any special fonts, you must provide a copy of the font to be loaded on the presentation system. 
• PC users - to be safe, use a standard font like Arial or Times New Roman to create your presentation.
• Mac users - many fonts with the same names are spaced differently on Mac's and PC's. The Tahoma font is designed to be identical on both systems, so using it whenever possible will help avoid the need to adjust things once your presentation is moved to a PC.

Presentation Style Guide

Using Images within Your Presentation

• PowerPoint will display your presentation in slide show mode at 1024x768 resolution. The PC has a native display of 96 DPIs. You should consider these factors, when inserting images into your presentation. If your image file is scanned, or from a digital camera, it is likely to be much larger than the screen resolution. An image size larger than 1024x768 will not translate into a sharper image, when displayed on screen. It will only increase the size of your PowerPoint file and slow down the playback of your presentation. Reduce the image size in an image-editing program prior to inserting the image into your presentation.
• There are many different image file formats available. After you have made sure that your image size is appropriate, you should save your image as a .BMP, .GIF, or .JPG file prior to inserting it into your presentation. Generally the JPEG format provides high quality, small file size and portability to other machines.
• Once you have the images properly sized and saved, choose Insert Picture from file... to put the image onto the slide. Do not copy and paste the image, or drag and drop it into your presentation. Doing that might look fine on your machine, but it may not display properly when you transfer the presentation to another computer, particularly if you are a Mac user who will be presenting from a PC.
• Animated .GIF files - Although these are actually saved within your PowerPoint presentation, you should bring the separate .GIF file with you whenever possible. Microsoft has changed the way they handle the looping of these in recent versions of Office, which on occasion causes them not to play properly in PowerPoint. If you have the original .GIF file with you, you can fix the problem prior to the presentation.

Using Media Clips within Your Presentation

• Be aware that media clips may not be saved as part of your presentation depending on what version you are using. PowerPoint 2010 is the only one that embeds the media clip in the file. For other, the actual video or audio files need to be on the computer you will be presenting from. You will need to supply those files along with your PowerPoint file either when you upload or prior to the presentation.
• Avoid long file names for media clips. There is a limit in PowerPoint on the total length of the path to your media files, and much of it gets used up in pointing to your presentation folder. Though the absolute limit varies based on the presenter's information, movie and sound files with names longer than 20 characters should be renamed prior to inserting them into your presentation. The shorter the file names of your media clips, the better.
• PC users - Using the .WMV file format is the best way to ensure compatibility within PowerPoint on  another PC. While MPEG and AVI formats will generally work too, they use a variety of different codecs that may not be installed on the presentation machine.
• Mac users - Quicktime movies (.MOV file format) do not play directly within a slide in PowerPoint on the PC. You can create a hyperlink to them, which will open them in a separate Quicktime movie player window, and allow you to play them from there. If you are going to be presenting from a PC and you can convert them to .WMV format, they should play properly within slides in PowerPoint. Most MPEG and some AVI codecs will also work on the PC

Presentation Style Guide

Over the next several days I will be making entries from a presentation style guide. These are tips that I believe you will find very helpful when putting your presentations together. Enjoy!

Preparing your presentation

• Prepare your presentation in advance so that your ideas are logically organized and your points clear. Write a detailed outline of your presentation. Address the essential points and leave the details for publication.
• Presentations are most readable when using a dark background (blue, for example) and bright lettering (yellow or white).
• Use the absolute minimum number of words in the title, subtitle and captions. Remember that standard abbreviations are acceptable.
• Avoid using small fonts. In general, 28 point and larger fonts will be easy for everyone to read, while anything smaller than 20 points will likely be illegible from the back of the room.
• Use bold characters, not fancy serifs.
• Graphics must be well-designed, simple, and readable by everyone in the audience. It is worthwhile to use professional preparation services, if possible.
• Use a few graphics as needed that can be discussed in the time allotted. As a general rule, use one graphic for each one or two minutes of presentation time.
• Devote each graphic to a single fact, idea or finding. Illustrate major points or trends, not detailed data.
• Do not show long or complicated formulas or equations. Each graphic should remain on the screen at 20 seconds.
• Table preparation - Do not use more than three or four vertical columns and six to eight rows. If there are any more columns or rows, the information will not be readable. Do not use ruled vertical or horizontal lines; they distract the eye and clutter the graphic. Whenever possible, present data using bar charts or graphs instead of tables.
• Graph preparation - Generally, do not use more than one or two curves on one diagram; a maximum of three to four curves may be shown, but only if well separated. Label each curve; do not use symbols and a legend. Do not show data points unless scatter is important.
• Colored graphs are very effective. Color adds attractiveness, interest and clarity to slide and viewgraph illustrations and should be used whenever possible. If you use color, remember that contrasting colors are easier to see.
• Consider breaking up a complex slide into a series of slides, to make it more intelligible.
• Critically examine every graphic and view them under adverse light conditions before presenting at a meeting. It is sometimes impossible to provide excellent light conditions at meetings.
• It is often helpful to step 8-10 feet back from your computer screen and make sure that your slides are readable.
• An introductory and concluding graphic can greatly improve the focus of your talk.
• Make use of the Slide Master capability of PowerPoint, to standardize the look of your presentation. That way, if you need to change the bullets or fonts, they can be changed globally, and you won't have to edit each slide individually.

The "Lessig Method" of Presentation

The "Lessig method" of presentation is not an official method per se, but many people who know about the work of Stanford law professor, Lawrence Lessig, have been inspired by his presentation style and informally refer to his approach as something unique indeed.

Those who have seen Lessig present have been talking about his approach for a while. David Hornik at VentureBlog wrote a post entitled Putting the "Power" in PowerPoint over two years ago. In this post he heaps praise on the presentation style of Lessig. Hornik says Lessig's presentations "are a fantastic combination of content, art and brand..."

James MacLennan may have been the first to put a label on Lessig's presentation style, calling it the "Lessig Method" which he likens to the Takahashi Method in Japan because Lessig's slides often contain just a single word, short quote, or a photo. The Takahashi Method and Professor Lessig's approach do have similarities, though Lessig uses photos and other graphics, albeit sparingly. MacLennan does a good job of reviewing recent posts in the blogosphere concerning presentations and slideware.

In one of Lessig's presentations, you can see his slides and hear his narration along with them in the video. Unfortunately you can not see the presenter himself at the same time. Still, judging from the live recording of the presentation, we can get a pretty good idea of the smooth way Lessig synchronized his visuals with his speaking, ie, the story he was telling about his ideas on "free culture." Here is the video.

Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig

It's not the size of your deck that counts. I guarantee you there is no presentation book on the market that would recommend you use a few hundred slides, some visible for 1-2 seconds. That's crazy talk, right? Yet, it works in this particular case for this particular audience and the particular allotted time. This is why I never recommend a specific number of slides, or even that a presenter use slideware at all. It depends.