Presentation Skills: Communications Skills & Public Speaking

When preparing for a presentation, the most important thing to keep in mind is the audience. No matter how intelligent your ideas are, if you do not know who will listen to them, chances are that your ideas will fall flat. 

Communication skills are crucial to any person’s success. Why you ask? Imagine that you and a person of a different nation stand in front of each other. If you both have a common language, then you will be able to communicate your purpose of meeting him, but if you don’t, both of you will be lost in your circumstance, the only other option is to start using your body to try to make some signs that are universal. 

Presentations involve many factors and each has a role to play. From your outfit to your slides and everything in between, account for the success of your speech, therefore, where you stand on the stage and how you use it is also necessary to understand. If you understand the dynamics of the stage like a dramatist or an actor, you will know how to use it. 

As we have learnt the many dynamics of the written word so far, let us see how these same words on the paper transform to spoken words. While speaking the punctuation is not pronounced, however, through modulating your voice and tone, those punctuations marks can come to life and transmit the exact same information they do on the paper. 

When you take the responsibility of presenting a topic or an idea, you become in charge of what those minutes when you stand on the stand will be like for everyone in that room. The presenter and audience relationship is co-dependent, meaning you won’t be presenting if the audience doesn’t show up and they won’t be listening if you don’t show up. 

When you begin to prepare your presentation, you will most likely find the beginning of your thought, the reasons for your thought and the end of your thought. Everything in nature occurs in such a process and so will your presentation. In writing we call it Introduction-Body-Conclusion or the skeleton of your essay. 

Once you have your second draft ready, we will start structuring the content for the final draft. The points you have collected are clear and so is their purpose. The next step is to colour our idea with language. Language involves many elements, such as, grammar, punctuation, figures of speech, transition words, etc. and our aim is to incorporate these elements to make our idea whole. 

When you begin to write the structure of your speech, remember that it needs to serve a purpose. Once you have your purpose decided, you will need to find a structure that best complements your speech. Do you want to build the structure to reveal the solutions to people’s problems? Do you want to convey your message through your own journey? Do you want to show how certain concepts have many different aspects that make a whole possible? Etc.

When you write up a draft for your speech, you will first begin with the basic structure, i.e. Introduction-Body-Conclusion. This structure is important because it will bring your idea into a format easiest to understand. Following this, you will write the points you will use to introduce your topic then elaborate it with arguments and then conclude your presentation with a thorough understanding of what we have just learnt

The last thing most of us think of is what to wear to a presentation. But careful thought is required here as well. In fact you can use your attire for the event as a prop to your entire presentation too. This aspect of human existence is ignored by many, but think logically about your appearance, the only thing that successfully separates you from fellow human beings as an individual is what you put on your back or how you dress. 

Presentations involve many factors and each has a role to play. From your outfit to your slides and everything in between, account for the success of your speech, therefore, where you stand on the stage and how you use it is also necessary to understand. If you understand the dynamics of the stage like a dramatist or an actor, you will know how to use it. 

When you are asked, what is the part of a presentation that most scares you, you are most likely to say, standing in front of an audience. It is not at all frightening to have a purpose, it is not scary to even prepare a kickass presentation, but to stand and speak it in front of people who will watch you is scarier than death to some people. 

When you imagine delivering a speech or presenting an idea, which part of the act terrifies you the most? Is it speaking about what you have prepared for hours and put your energy and mind into, or is it the fact that people may not respond to it? If you have done everything that the presentation requires, chances are that you will be sufficiently satisfied by it, but the other doubt, that is not in your hands or is it?

Of all the things that go into making a presentation rock, body language is probably the most significant aspect. Just think of a scientist who is describing a natural fact and your favorite actor talking about his cat. Even though the scientist is speaking factually about a massive phenomenon of nature, we incline toward watching Ellen DeGeneres who discusses opinions. 

Fin or The End, used to be words at the end of a film and were a very important part of film-making. It allowed people to understand that the message of the film has now reached its end, so the audience can take what they learnt today and hopefully, think about it. Nowadays, we use the words ‘Thank you’ to achieve the same result when ending our presentation. But is that all we need to do? 

Have you ever been to a presentation where you were thinking about laundry while watching a slide with DNA molecules? This thing that we experience while sitting through a lecture or presentation is called a brain dip. We like to think that we can concentrate by just being in the room, but ‘concentrate’ is a verb, which means we have to actively do it. 

Before we get into the How of humor, let us understand what humor is. Many presenters try to senselessly include a joke that doesn’t help build their case and then wonder, what went wrong. Humor is not just making people laugh, it is a perspective that spins a story in such a way that you find it funny. You don’t change the subject matter though; humor is just a style of telling the same things. 

Presentations or PowerPoints are a valuable asset to any good presenter. Remember how we discussed that people remember much better through visual perceptions? Our brain is wired in such a way that we remember only about 10% of the textual content but when illustrated with a picture, this information becomes almost indelible. 

When you stand in front of people and speak, you have already singled yourself out as the leader of the thoughts of everyone in that room for the next half hour. You have also established your authority by simply being in charge of the topic but is this enough to be called a leader or a person with authority?