Presentation skills

Before you begin writing, make sure you understand the purpose of your presentation and have researched your topic. Once you've done this, begin to think about your audience and how you'll structure your presentation.

Audience

To ensure your presentation is engaging, think about who you'll be presenting to. Ask yourself:

• Who is my audience?
• What do they already know?
• Why are they attending my presentation?

Make sure you pitch your presentation at the appropriate level. If your audience knows your topic well, they may get bored if you try to simplify the presentation too much. If your audience has no previous knowledge of your topic, they will find the presentation hard to follow if it's too complex.

Was your audience invited and will they be eager to hear what you are presenting, or is it a compulsory tutorial for them? This will affect the way you approach the presentation – in some cases you will have to work harder to motivate your audience to get involved and convince them to listen to you.

Structuring your presentation

To ensure your audience understands your message, your presentation needs to flow logically. To help you achieve this, your presentation should follow a set structure.

Most presentations use the following structure:

1. Introduction
2. Body
3. Conclusion

Introduction

A good introduction will capture your audience’s attention and give your presentation focus.

When writing your introduction, make sure you include:

• a strong statement to capture the audience's attention – this may include a rhetorical question or an interesting statistic
• an outline of your topic, what you'll be covering and the purpose of the presentation.

Body

The body is where you describe and link each of your main points to meet the purpose of your presentation.

When writing the body of your presentation, make sure that your main points are:

• supported by evidence, examples or statistics
• directly related to the purpose of your presentation
• presented in a logical sequence with links between relevant points.

Conclusion

By the time you reach the conclusion, you should have covered all your main points – don't introduce any new information at this stage.

Use your conclusion to:

• reinforce your main points
• link the points back to the purpose of your presentation.

Once you have finished writing your presentation, remember to read over it and check that information flows logically and is linked effectively.