We have all been to a conference where it is one presentation after the other, and inevitably your mind begins to wonder…. whether you left the stove extractor on or if you paid the bills. Other times, the topic they’re talking about is simply not your interest and you are waiting for the next thing. Other times, even if  the topic interests you, you can’t help but try to go back to your phone or your inner thoughts. Now let’s do a switcheroo and put you in the presenter’s spot.

“Why should the audience care about what you are presenting?” An important question you should ask yourself  if you want to avoid scenarios simialar to the past paragraph. This is a rather rough sounding question, but it is a vital criterion that can determine whether your presentation will be memorable and engaging or not. Even if you are talking about turtles to aerospace engineers, if you know your audience, you might make the link that will make the engineers interested in turtles! I will give you five hints that will help you keep your audience engaged in your presentation and help you get your point across better:

Whether you are a thesis student about to present your work or a non-thesis student writing to a company for an internship, these 5 points might just help you out whether you are at an expo, or simply at your desk with Microsoft Office open for that presentation for later, these point should help you craft and perform at a presentation professionally. Do not forget that crafting a presentation is not only following sciences of pedagogy, but also in itself a form of art. Think of presenting as a form of wrapping your work in a creative box or paper wrap as a gift to the audience (get it? Present? Gift?). What do they like and how will you wrap it? People often get enthusiastic when they think of giving a gift to someone. They happily choose what colors, wrap, and even how to hand it over to the person receiving it. There is attention to detail. Just as you should do when making a presentation. After all, we do care about something when we are given a gift.  

• Know your audience: Who are you presenting your topic to? Your peers, other experts, or a general audience? It is very important to know where most of your audience will be standing on. By knowing this, you will effectively get an “anchor” that will hook them to your topic. To do this, you will have to figure out the context your audience is living in. While it is your own work you are presenting, this whole thing is meant to be for the audience who’s listening, not you. In a thesis defense, while it is about your project, you must give reasons for why your project is important to the board.

• Tell a story within your presentation: Conveying your data is the goal of the presentation, but part of it is having the audience understand it means. They can’t understand something they lost engagement on so easily. Another way to keep the attention of the audience is to have some “protagonist” in your presentation. Someone or something they can care about, even if briefly. For example, if you are presenting about how a neurotransmitter is affected by a protein, you can come up with a neuron called Bob, who was happy, and you tell the audience Bob the neuron is dying because of something related to your data and research. This method isn’t probably fit for some situations, but when presenting it to peers or a general audience, it can be most effective.  

• Involve the audience or ask rhetorical questions. Making them do a simple nod can suffice to have their minds landed on your presentation. You can even move around the stage or closer to one if the scenario allows. If the presentation is for them, why not involve them in it? The best questions are crafted following point #1.

• Do not clutter your presentation slides with walls of text. You probably have already heard that an image is worth a thousand words. Also, graphs and tables can and should have their own slide to allow the image to be stretched fully and allow the audience all the way to the back to see the labels and details. Look at your slides as you are making them, sit 10 meters back and think “can I and do I want to read this?”. If the answer was no, rework it. If you don’t feel like you have the energy to read it, the audience won’t invest more energy to read it than you do. You can even ask your friend for their sincerity in the subject. 

• People do not remember the mistakes you made, but rather how you reacted to them. Not many people will care about the typo, but how you reacted to said typo. It is important to acknowledge that no one is perfect, but that gives us the opportunity to attract attention by learning how to land on our feet after slipping. You may and will eventually make a mistake representing the data or will be unfortunate to have a technical goof that might distort your visuals. It is important to know your content well enough to have back up plans or “fall smoothly”. Say the projector fails in the middle of your presentation, but if you have a whiteboard, you can go ahead and perhaps draw the graph yourself. Or somebody in the Q&A pointed out a mistake in your logic and you must accept your mistake to the public. “I will look forward to it, I appreciate you pointing it out, it is important feedback to my work”.

If you want to know more advice about giving effective presentations, you can always check out Skillsets’ sessions on how to do effective presentations and more! Click here to see what is coming next.