Guidelines for effective presentations

Before you try to convince the others of the value of your idea, first you have to clarify to yourself:

Once you have clear the idea you want to present and what you want to achieve by presenting it, you have to concentrate upon the modality of making this idea clear to your audience.

First rule: do not present many "ideas" (you will confuse your audience): just present one coherent vision.

The coherent vision will be composed of different elements: develop the main points and order them strategically.

Once you have established your goal and identified your target audience, you should take the following steps to construct your presentation.

Step 1, Develop a General Premise: Constructing a presentation will require that you begin by developing your goal and translate that goal into a general premise you will state to your audience.

Step 2, Generate Main Points and Organize Them Strategically: After you have established a premise, you will be able to generate main points to support this claim. Be sure to coherently organize these main points so that the audience can easily follow your flow of ideas. Limit the number of main points to 2-5 for clarity and time, keep main points separate (transitions separate ideas) and balance the time spent on each point.

Step 3, Create an Introduction and Conclusion: After you have developed your main points, you will need to fill in the introduction and conclusion. Create the introduction first—the conclusion really reiterates much of what is said in the introduction. The introduction opens the speech and is responsible for getting the audiences attention, relating the topic to the audience, establishing the speaker’s credibility and previewing the main points of the presentation.

Step 4, Fill in Transitions: Prior to delivering your presentation, your final step will be to develop transitions that lead your audience between parts of the presentation and between distinct, main ideas.

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Developing Effective Transitions: Referring to the sample speech outline, write transitions for the presentation that would effectively lead and audience from one main idea to another.

Now that you have a general sense of how to construct a presentation, we provide you with specific information about the types of speeches you will likely give.