Before I want to take you through the five steps, which I outlined in my next to last post, I want to talk about the actual trigger that starts the whole process.
In Business, the Boss probably assigns his employee to prepare the numbers of the last quarter in a presentation. A speaker might be invited to a conference and she or he wants to prepare a presentation to guide the talk. A group of entrepreneurs might have to pitch their business idea to a board of venture capitalists. There are lots of reasons and incentives why we are making presentations, but I don't want to focus on this too much.
In University, a presentation - single or in a group - usually is an assigned task that might even be graded to a certain degree. I had a lot of assignments to do presentations. And there were many different approaches with different rules or limitations - which, by the way, apply to any kind of presentation.
Time:
There are a lot of opinions on how long a presentation should be. It has to be long enough to cover the required topics, but short enough that it fits into a given time slot. Guy Kawasaki - a venture capitalist - states that the time for a presentation must not exceed 20 minutes and TedTalks range around this time as well. Now you might not be an entrepreneur or Al Gore to give a presentation in either setting. In my opinion it should be relative to the content and sufficient to bring your message across.
Well this sounds very nice but how can it be applied?
A crucial thing is that the rules and guidelines set by the initiator have to be realistic and precise. A ten minute presentation about World War II or a forty minute presentation about the financial crisis seems unrealistic too me. Maybe for an overview but not for a detailed analysis. A twenty minute presentation about how a certain battle led to the end of the civil war in the US, with key factors and implications is better.
Make also sure, that there is enough time to prepare. This is however no excuse to procrastinate!
Format:
"Your task is to create a PowerPoint Presentation about ..." or even better: "with a maximum of 15 slides." Why does it always has to be PowerPoint? And in my opinion it should not matter how many slides you use, but I will come to that in later posts. PowerPoint seems to be THE tool for presentation creation. There are a lot of other ways to present content and messages. A car-salesman doesn't tie you down onto a chair and shows you a PowerPoint. For now I will leave it at that and encourage everybody to think outside the "PowerPoint-Box" and try to think about alternatives. I will point out a couple of methods in upcoming posts and also tackle the "slide-count" issue. My bottom line is "Freedom of Choice" as long as it is used effectively.
Topic:
My advice to students would be, to make sure what the task really is about. A presentation about the economy of greece would seem very broad and uninteresting. If it is stated as "Give a twenty minute presentation about the economy of greece", try to define your own topic and check with your teacher.
How about: "Present key factors, that lead to the current state of the greece economy as of 2012." The more a topic is defined, the easier it gets for the presenter to create an interesting and effective presentation. Maybe, even one key event is worth presenting about.
In my opinion, everybody is able to read a Wikipedia article about a broad topic such as the economy of greece. But the more detailed and defined the topic is, the easier it gets to target the research and to do an interesting presentation. In the end both the audience and the presenter will benefit.
In summary, when it comes to the ground rules:
1. Be sure to define the topic as good and precisely as possible.
2. Make sure that you have enough time to prepare
3. Relate content to given time
4. There is nothing wrong with PowerPoint* but try to think outside of the "PP-Box"
Comment about your experiences with great tasks and bad guidelines and rules. What are the trade-offs? What is the difficult part, when defining a topic for yourself?
*to be challenged at a later time - stay tuned ;-)
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