The way how you give an information is as important as the information you are giving. This is why improving your presentation skills is crucial in order to capture your audience and pass your message.

In this article, Sarah Kessler provides a guide to teach us how to preprare and deliver a good presentation and to answer questions on it.

The first step is to prepare your presentation. While preparing you must:

  1. Research your audience (Who is it?)
  2. Structure the presentation (opening, body, closing)
  3. Practice, practice and practice but not memoryse (videotape yourself!)

The second step is to deliver your presentation. The delivery of your presentation depends on:

  1. Verbal delivery: be brief, ask questions to keep the audience engaged, work on your tone, avoid fill words, avoid speaking softly
  2. Body delivery: stand at comfortable distance, eye contact
  3. Power point

The last step are the questions that could arise after the end of your presentation. You must be prepared to them and anticipate them while preparing your presentation. It is a good idea to take questions before the end of your presentation. Anyway, remeber that you don’t have to answer to all the questions you receive from the audience.

Read here the full article

Presentation skills

Image source: Flickr – Lorenzo Gaudenzi (CC-BY-NC-ND 2.0)