Guidelines for good presentation

Most of us give more presentations than we realize. Updating project results, status reports, paper in scientific conferences, panel discussions, student sessions are all examples of public speaking areas we scientists have to cater to. In all these, ability to clearly communicate with your peers, bosses, students, stakeholders, and extension workers will lead the audience to perceive you as credible and capable and also a good scientific worker. While some presentations are more important than others, it is always better to understand the basics of preparing for a presentation for better results following the presentation.

In this session few guidelines are brought forth as tips for good presentations.

I. Pre-presentation planning

1. Determine the purpose
   Most of the presentations seek to achieve: to inform or to persuade. In an informative presentation, the audience learns about a new subject or new about a familiar subject. In a persuasive presentation, the speaker attempts to change attitudes of audience or behaviors. For e.g. Working in your project you seek to inform new information as a result of the experiments done. Your objective is to present your opinion of the work and tacitly to convince others that your opinion is correct. But if you need more resources for undertaking experiment you need to 'inform' your SRC members of facts and seek their help to overcome obstacles to achieve the targets

2. Assess your audience
   The audience will have an impact on your presentation. Although the exact message to an audience is same, it can be more meaningful if particular group we are communicating to is given consideration. As a speaker, the size, demographics, knowledge level and motivation of audience must be considered. A prior awareness of the audience is helpful.

3. Set the stage
   The physical attributes of your presentation stage must be known for planning. Type of seating, number, audio-visual equipment, distracters and other constrictors, time of presentation and your own appearance need to be considered in preplanning process.

4. Prepare an outline of your talk
   In these days of technology-driven presentations, LCD projections are the order-of the day. The presentation software packages are equally versatile and allow the freedom to set the presentation for OHP, slide or electronic shows. Thus you can set the file to what you want by clicking on the setup option. Preparing an outline of your talk allows the space for integrating some of tools for better presentation. It is advisable to prepare an outline of technical matter before starting to work on the computer.

5. Get all visuals in place before integrating all.
   While the computer can access all the links wherever they are, it is always easy to put the needed visual files in an easily accessible site. Keeping the path to links short is advisable.

II. Design hints from Powerpoint

In designing your visuals, four basic areas must be considered. Size and proportion Design and contrast Simplicity Available resources

1. Use a single font
   When too many lettering styles are mixed together, slide readability goes down. Stick to a single font and develop variety with tasteful use of different sizes and styles.

2. Six lines or less
   Avoid making slides with too many lines of text. Too many items in list force your viewers with difficulty in comprehension. Six lines is a rule of thumb.

3. Use key phrases:
   Use short key phrases, eliminating verbs, articles, and other words that are not essential to your message.

4. Use build sequences:
   Keep your audience in touch with more complex topics by building slide content, one item at a time.

5. Use initial capitals:
   Use leading capitals instead of all capital letters. All caps are hard to read and tend to lose the emphasis you want.

6. Break up complex slides:
   If a slide is too complex, break it into two or more slides

7. Focus on one point:
   Keep visual elements to a minimum. Incidental art have great eye appeal but when you add too many fancy frills ,your message gets lost in the clutter.

8. Minimize special effects:
   Unless you are trying to achieve a one-time dramatic effect, avoid using too many colors, too bright colors, overly ornate typefaces and other distracting effects.

9. Be mindful of contrast
   The greater, the contrast between foreground and background, the more legible the image. Stark white or light backgrounds well on slides as on OHP and prints.
   Below is a reference table to be used as a guide for using colors in slides
   
             Reference guide for use in preparing slides
   
   

   Background colour	Acceptable text/Object colour	Unacceptable text/ object colour
   Black	White Yellow Light Blue Orange Magenta	Red Blue Violet
   Dark Blue	White Yellow Cyan Orange Red Light Green	Blue Light blue Black Violet
   Dark Green	White Yellow Light blue Light green Orange	Red Magenta Purple Blue
   Dark Red	Yellow White Light blue Light green	Magenta Red Orange

   
   

10. Use traditional orientation
    Your audience is used to reading text from left to right, top to bottom. Techniques that alter this tradition detract from a presentation

11. Keep text format consistent
    Unexpected shifts in a text typestyle disturb the audience's attention.

12. Avoid nonessential values and grids on graphs:
    Such extraneous details obscure the technical import of your presentation. Round numbers on graphs:

13. Round off numbers and use axis tittles that indicate the rounding.

14. Start graph axis values with zero Axes that start in mid-scale confuse and mislead.

15. Summarize results of table or graph in the same slide.
    The leading conclusion of table or graph is best understood if put along with the graph/table in bullet fashion. Using text tool would be easy and also highlighting.

16. Do not read your slides:
    While presenting use slides as direction in explaining the points and not read the text on the slides. Use the bullets as pointers to explain your point.