Tips on How to Create Awesome Presentations!

Identify Your Target Audience

The first tip is to identify your target audience. This has a direct relation to the content, language, and details that you are presenting. Who are you going to present to? Your classmates? Lecturer? The public? The main point is modifying your content to let EVERYONE understand what you’re talking about. If you bombard your audience with loads of sophisticated terms and words just to make others “feel” like you’re a pro, they are seriously NOT going to listen. Therefore, information that you have harvested from your research

might be very difficult to understand, but your job is to make sure you, and others understand the concept clearly. That can be achieved by replacing sophisticated phrases with words that are more commonly used.

2. Create a Professional Layout

Secondly, the layout of your presentation slides holds the utmost importance. What is your theme? What kind of tone, background, and atmosphere are you enforcing? Before jumping into creating your slides, plan and structure it beforehand. How’s your introduction going to

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ltUrMMO18Ys

be like? A hook using a definition or statistics? That’s up to you. I strongly recommend that you can include one slide after your introduction to state the structure of your presentation. Ask yourself, what should your presentation include?

Thirdly, make your design of slides uniform.

This is to make your slides look more original and personalised. Because it indirectly shows your character. In a set of slides I created together with my friend Jenizz (example shown in the YouTube video linked above), we tend to use more comfortable colours like aqua blue, lavender, pale orange and a shade of darker green for contrast. Different colours provoke different mood, we used these colours because we are presenting about Montelukast, a type of medicine. Hence, our choice of colours reflects our medical theme well. Besides, we also tend to use the same type of font for our titles and content. Instead of two different types of design reflecting two personalities, we designed it together as if there’s only one person designing. And that’s perfect group work!

Fourth, summarise your points and avoid your slides to be too wordy.

It might take some time to interpret long sentences to shorten them, but trust me it would be really rewarding to walk the extra mile instead of dumping lengthy sentences into your slides. It shows that you really understand what you’re researching about and reflects your maturity too. Technically speaking, this method is actually called paraphrasing.

Fifth, using SmartArts to turn your slides into a whole new level.

Instead of using plain bullet points, make your presentation more interesting by incorporating your points into SmartArt. In the YouTube video linked above, you can observe how you can use SmartArt, and look at a comparison between someone who uses SmartArt versus someone who’s just playing around with bullet points. State difference, think about which slides looks more professional, but the answer lies within your own perceptive.

Sixth, use a balanced proportion between diagrams and words.

Our brain works by seeing things first rather than reading long texts. Maximize your potential by including related diagrams to support your points and help your audience visualize what you’re talking about. If you are talking about wildlife conservation, put some diagrams of endangered species like pandas, kangaroos, or whales. If you are talking about drugs for medical presentations, include relevant diagrams like their chemical structures.

Seventh, use charts and graphs to make your points statistically valid.

It’s hard for someone who doesn’t know you to believe in what you’re talking about unless you show them proof and facts. If you found an outcome for an experiment or survey, you can draw a variety of charts using Microsoft Excel and copy-paste them into your slides. This would make your slides look much more convincing, promising, and professional. In the example shown in YouTube, I utilized SmartArt to compare the metabolism of Montelukast between males and females. As the scale tilts to the male side, it indicates that they have a higher value than females in general.

Eight, remember to cite!

If the presentation consists of information that is not from yourself, make sure you include in-text-citations, whether you learnt the Harvard style, APA style or any style that your're comfortable with. The truth is, using other people’s research findings to support your own arguments and findings holds much more power than doing without it. Include citations to avoid plagiarising content. Undeniably, plagiarism is a serious offence which might get you expelled from college or university if you don’t cite your acquire info.