Presentation skills
Follow this step-by-step guide to help you to write, design and deliver presentations.
This is a general guide. The specific requirements for your course may be different. Make sure you read through any assignment requirements carefully and ask your lecturer or tutor if you're unsure how to meet them.
2. Designing presentation slides
To keep your audience engaged and help them to remember what you have to say, you may want to use visual aids, such as slides.
When designing slides for your presentation, make sure:
- any text is brief, grammatically correct and easy to read
- the colour theme is simple and the background colour provides enough contrast
- images and graphs are used to support your main points.
Images and graphs
Your audience will respond better to slides that deliver information quickly – images and graphs are a good way to do this.
When choosing images, it's important to find images that:
- support your presentation and aren't just decorative
- are high quality
- you have permission to use.
If you use graphs in your presentation, label the data directly instead of using a legend – legends force your audience to look back and forth between two points. If your presentation includes graphs or charts, make sure to explain these to your audience – describe each axis and note any important features.
Avoid using unnecessary visual elements – such as animations or complicated graphs – as they can distract your audience instead of enhancing your presentation.
Once you have finished designing your presentation, give it a trial run. Remember, images and colours can look different on different screens, so try to practice with the equipment you'll be using to present.
Learning Advisers
Our advisers can help undergraduate and postgraduate students in all programs clarify ideas from workshops, help you develop skills and give feedback on assignments.