Presenting

At the end of the day, presentations are about standing before a group of people and communicating your ideas. Prepare yourself to stand in front of your audience and deliver your content: Practice, practice, practice. Dedicate some focused time on preparing to actually give your presentation, not just create the content and the slides. And see yourself delivering a successful presentation to help calm your nerves and prepare an effective delivery.

The Text Slide

Your audience will try to read all of the text you place on your slides, as soon as the slide is shown. And while that text can help support your point and argument, not everything you say needs to be shown on the screen. When you do place text on your slides, use good hierarchy and layer the text one section at a time to direct the audience’s eye and draw attention. Better yet, when possible, convert your text to visuals because people are more likely to remember and recognize visuals than text.

The Technical Nitty-Gritty

Preparing in advance about the technical ins and outs of your presentation will ensure that everything looks the way you expect and that things run as smoothly as possible. Visualize. Try to know what kind of screen or projector you will be using, whether you need handouts, and what adapters or inputs your computer might need.

Color

The look and feel of your slides will set your audience’s expectations; draw them into your presentation and keep them engaged. To that end, color matters: Use it carefully and strategically to highlight important parts of your presentation.

Introduction

Whether you’re a university professor, a researcher at a think tank, a graduate student, or an analyst at a private firm, chances are you follow three general steps when you approach new projects: You have a question. You read the literature and collect and analyze some data. Then you spend days, weeks, or months drafting a brief, a journal article, a background or white paper, or a book. You solicit feedback from colleagues and gauge interest from publishers. You revise, revise, revise, and then you submit your document. It’s accepted, and finally published....

The Scaffolding Slides

Scaffolding slides guide and focus your audience’s attention as you transition from one section to another, and to drive home important points. They don’t carry the message or content themselves, but rather support the delivery of this information. When using scaffolding slides, use large visuals—possibly simple text—that will act as simple markers to break or introduce sections in your presentation.

Conclusions

I hope you are convinced that creating more visual slides—with less text, bullets, and dense graphs and tables—is a better and more efficient way to communicate with your audience. Filling slides with sentence after sentence, number after number, and line after line forces your audience to work too hard while you are speaking. They will pay more attention to all those little details and less attention to you. These specifics are better suited for your written report....

The Image Slide

We are more likely to remember, recognize, and connect with content when it is anchored with a visual. To use visuals in your presentation, use large, high-quality (high-resolution) images that fill the entire slide space. Importantly, link text and images so that they draw the audience’s attention to the important parts of the slide.

Theory, Planning, and Design

Many presenters start designing their presentations by opening their slide software. Instead of starting in your slide tool, organize your thoughts and plan your presentation in a process that works for you. As you do so, you will be better able to figure out how your presentation will hold together and how it might differ from your written report.

The Data Visualization Slide

One of the primary visual elements researchers will use in their presentations is graphs, charts, and other visualizations to show estimates and findings. Because we are more likely to remember and recall information when it is presented visually, your graphs can have a profound effect on your audience, especially when they are created keeping the audience’s needs in mind. You can create more effective visualizations by using certain elements such as color, lines, shapes, and markings to highlight and show your data. But when you do so, be sure to link your text and your graphs and minimize or eliminate non-data elements like gridlines, tick marks, and data labels.