Hints for oral presentations
- Structure your presentation! As a template you may use the following:
- Introduction
- Introduce the problem
- Application areas, where the problem arises
- Approaches so far (if any)
- Basic idea of your approach
- Description of your approach
- Fundamentals
- Details
- Explanation using examples
- Summary and outlook
- Application areas
- Improvements
- Introduction
- Take the audience to which you are presenting into account. Can you presume special knowledge? Did you listen to common lectures or presentations? You may want to coordinate with other presenters in order to avoid giving definitions twice.
- Give your presentation without notes. Reading off from a manuscript just tires the audience.
- When planning your presentation, leave some room for interposed questions.
- After finishing your presentation, we strongly recommend that you present it for testing purposes in order to get a feeling how much time you actually need. Practicing also helps you to identify parts of your presentation where you still might have some difficulties formulating facts.
- On your slides you should mention the most important definitions, statements, and illustrations in a bullet-point style. Avoid whole sentences and copying passages from your textual workout.
- You should present each slide long enough such that each participant can completely read it at least two times. As a rule of thumb, each slide should be presented for nearly 2 minutes. Thus, your presentation should approximately include 20-22 slides when presenting for 45 minutes.
- What problem are you talking about? First of all, explain the context of the problem and the problem itself. By doing so, the audience gets attracted to it faster. The first impression decides, whether a presentation is interesting or not!
- At the beginning of your presentation make sure that all participants really know what you are going to talk about.
- If you start with a new part of your presentation, it is often useful to sum it up in a few sentences prior to explaining the details. A final summary helps in putting the presentation in a nutshell. General rule: "Tell them what you are going to tell them, tell them, tell them what you told them." (Aristotle).
- The university's furnishings, your shoes, and your laptop's display might really be nice, but you should try to keep eye contact with your audience and talk in their direction. This really works miracles in keeping up the attention.
