Presentation Lecture

We had a lecture today teaching us how to improve our presentation skills. This is something that really worries me. I struggle with presentations and manage to wind myself up days or weeks before I know I have to do one. The lecture was very useful, Not that I'm cured of my fear of them but I now have a greater understanding of how to go about creating a presentation and what I should and shouldn't do when presenting it. Rick Ferguson made a good point that we can come up with reasons why we don't want to do presentations or learn about them, what we need to do is come up with better reasons as to why we should. I want to illustrate children's books and will have to pitch my ideas and work to publishers. I want to be able to do my work justice. if I spend all my time and effort making work that I believe in I want to be able to communicate my ideas clearly and effectively otherwise my work could go to waste.

Rick Ferguson mentioned studies that suggest the words we use in a presentation are the least important part of how we present. The most important things are our body language and the way we talk. We need to take into account the speed, volume and pitch at which we talk. He got us all to take part in an exercise where we thought of the speed and volume of how we talk as a scale ranging from one to ten. If we can understand that range and put a number on it, it becomes easier to judge what we are doing (if you know what too fast is and what too slow is you can understand how to find a mid point). We talked about replacing crutch words like "erm", "okay" and "ye" with pauses. I know from experience that it is easy to feel like you can't pause, that all pauses are signs you don't know what to say and you end up talking very quickly and the presentation becomes confusing. I think it is to do with being nervous and not being able to judge how long to pause or leave gaps between sentences.

We talked about eye contact, that it is important to maintain eye contact with the entire audience and not focus on one section of it. If the audience is a large amount of people we can separate it into sections and make sure we make eye contact with each section regularly. It is common when presenting to a small group of people to single out one or two that for some reason you are more comfortable with. It is important to make and maintain eye contact with all the people or sections regularly throughout the entire presentation.

When structuring a presentation it is a good idea to 'bookend'. Introduce a piece of information at the beginning and return to it at the end and use it to help tie up what you are trying to say. Use the 'power of three', introduce information in threes, more than that becomes confusing and hard to take in and less is less interesting and involving. Explain what you are going to cover in your presentation during your intro, that way the audience will find it easier to follow what you are saying.