Delivering Your Presentation, Techniques of Delivery

Delivering your presentation

Presenters with a lot of experience learn how to communicate effectively through gestures, voice, and visual aids while trying to create a friendly environment for the audience.

Voice

It is important to use your voice effectively to improve your delivery. The most effective speaking voices are friendly, natural, and enthusiastic. Here are a few guidelines for developing a great speaking voice:

Make sure your voice has a variety of pitches (highs and lows) to avoid monotony. Be careful not to change the pitch too much, however, since it may sound unnatural.

You should speak loud enough so that everyone can hear you, but you should vary your voice volume to maintain interest and emphasize important points.

Underline certain words to make them more noticeable. The pitch and volume increase when you emphasize a word.

Maintaining interest and adding emphasis can be achieved by altering your rate of speaking. Make your voice faster in order to create excitement and suspense. Be sure you speak slowly when emphasizing the importance of your point. Let your audience digest important ideas by pausing briefly after each one.

Gestures

Physical actions and gestures are commonly used by speakers to communicate with their audiences, either intentionally or unintentionally.

• Maintain eye contact with your audience. When you make eye contact with your audience, you become attuned to their needs. Eye contact is also effective for detecting confusion or boredom and modifying your approach accordingly.
• Smile, avert your eyes, and show empathy and encouragement with your facial expressions to communicate your feeling and emotions.
• Your feet should be slightly apart when standing naturally while your arms should be relaxed at your sides.
• Be careful not to pace back and forth, rock back and forth, play with your pocket change, wring your hands, and other types of fidgeting. The gestures are not only distracting to the listener but also signal that you are nervous.
• Add expression to your talk with quick and energetic hand and arm movements. Make your movements unpredictable in order to keep the audience's attention.

Visual aids

The use of visual aids can be helpful in expressing main points, illustrating a concept, or stimulating interest in your listeners. Along with visual aids like overheads, flip charts, photographs, computer-generated slides, and 3D effects, audiovisual aids are also available.

• Add visual aids to your presentation to emphasize important points and add interest - but do not use them to repeat your entire presentation.
• Determine which visual aid is most appropriate for the environment. If you have a large audience, then you must project visuals. Small groups may be able to pass around visuals, but larger groups will need projections.
• Consistency in color and spacing is key to the visuals. Each visual should have the same position for the text.
• Use a maximum of seven words per line and no more than seven lines per overhead slide according to the "seven by seven" rule. These rules would also apply to flipcharts, PowerPoints, and other computer-generated slides.
• Fonts and typefaces should be simple. Avoid using more than two or three fonts.
• If the text is too small, people in the rear will not be able to read it. An ideal height for flipchart letters is 3 inches. It is customary to use fonts between 20 and 48 points on a projected overhead or slide.
• It's important not to show visuals that contradict what you're saying - even when you've gone beyond their content.
• Rather than reading the text, paraphrase it and add to it on the visual.

Techniques of delivering your presentation

When giving presentations, you are probably most concerned about delivering the message. Our goal in this chapter is to reduce any nervousness that you may feel during your presentation. First, you have to dispel the myth that public speaking is just reading and speaking simultaneously. It is more formal to speak in public than to converse casually. During a speech, you must present yourself professionally. Wearing clean, appropriate clothing does not necessarily mean wearing a suit or dressing up, but it does mean being presentable by grooming yourself well. It also means using language that is appropriate for an audience and a topic, maintaining eye contact with the audience, and showing that you truly know the subject. The formality of speaking is greater than that of talking, but less than that of reading. While speaking, you are able to make eye contact, change the word order and emphasize your voice, as well as take breaks that are meaningful. Reading is a process of reproducing words on paper as accurately as possible without relying on any nonverbal interpretation. Whenever you think of the best speakers you have seen and heard, you will realize they provide a more animated message.

There are 4 methods that include:

• Proper speaking
• Manuscript presentations
• Extemporaneous presentations
• Memorized speaking

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