1. Chapter 12 Developing Oral and
Online Presentations
Title Slide

2. Learning Objectives After studying this chapter, you will be able to:
Highlight the importance of presentations in your business career and explain how to adapt the planning step of the three-step process to presentations
Describe the tasks involved in developing a presentation
Describe the major design and writing tasks required to enhance your presentation with effective visuals
Outline some special tasks involved in completing a presentation
After studying this chapter, you will be able to:
Highlight the importance of presentations in your business career and explain how to adapt the planning step of the three-step process to presentations.
Describe the tasks involved in developing a presentation.
Describe the six major design and writing tasks required to enhance your presentation with effective visuals.
Outline some special tasks involved in completing a presentation

3. Planning a Presentation
Puts all your communication
skills on display!
Research
Planning
Writing
Visual design
Interpersonal communication skills
Shows your ability to think on your feet
Grasp complex business issues
Handle challenging situations
These are all attributes executives look for when searching for talented employees to promote.
Oral presentations, delivered in person or online, offer important opportunities to put all your communication skills on display, including research, planning, writing, visual design, and interpersonal and nonverbal communication.
Presentations also let you demonstrate your ability to think on your feet, grasp complex business issues, and handle challenging situations—all attributes that executives look for when searching for talented employees to promote.
Planning oral presentations is much like planning other business messages: You analyze the situation and the audience, select the right medium, organize the information and develop the presentation.

4. Analyzing the Situation and the Audience
As with written communications, analyzing the situation involves defining your purpose and developing an audience profile. The purpose of most of your presentations will be to inform or to persuade, although you may occasionally need to make a collaborative presentation, such as when you’re leading a problem-solving or brainstorming session.
The size of your audience, the venue (in person or online), your subject, your purpose, your budget, and the time available for preparation all influence the style of your presentation. If you’re speaking to a small group, particularly people you already know, you can use a casual style that encourages audience participation.
If you’re addressing a large audience or if the event is important, establish a more formal atmosphere. During formal presentations, speakers are often on a stage or platform, standing behind a lectern and using a microphone so that their remarks can be heard throughout the room or captured for broadcasting or webcasting.

5. Selecting the Right Medium
The task of selecting the right medium might seem obvious. After all, you are speaking, so it’s an oral medium. However, you have an array of choices these days, from live, in-person presentations using something like PowerPoint, to webcasts (online presentations that people either view live or download later from your website), screencasts (recordings of activity on computer displays with audio voiceover), or twebinars (the use of Twitter as a backchannel).

6. Organizing and Developing Your Presentation
Go from this
To this . . .
Organizing a presentation involves the same tasks as organizing a written message: Define your main idea, limit your scope, select the direct or indirect approach, and outline your content. Keep in mind that when people read written reports, they can skip back and forth if they’re confused or don’t need certain information. However, in an oral presentation, audiences are more or less trapped in your time frame and sequence. For some presentations, you should plan to be flexible and respond to audience feedback, such as skipping over sections the audience doesn’t need to hear and going into more detail in other sections.
Although you usually don’t write out a presentation word for word, you still engage in the writing process—developing your ideas, structuring support points, phrasing your transitions, and so on. Depending on the situation and your personal style, the eventual presentation might follow your initial words closely, or you might express your thoughts in fresh, spontaneous language.

7. Composing Your Presentation
Introduction
Body
Close
Like written documents, oral presentations are composed of distinct elements: the introduction, the body, and the close.

8. Enhancing Your Presentation with Effective Visuals
Create interest
Illustrate points that are difficult to explain just in words
Add variety
Increase audience’s ability to absorb and remember information
Slides and other visuals can improve the quality and impact of your oral presentation by creating interest, illustrating points that are difficult to explain in words alone, adding variety, and increasing the audience’s ability to absorb and remember information.
Electronic presentations are practically universal in business today, but their widespread use is not always welcome. You may have already heard the expression “death by PowerPoint,” which refers to the agonizing experience of sitting through too many poorly conceived and poorly delivered slide shows. In the words of presentation expert and author Garr Reynolds, “most presentations remain mind-numbingly dull, something to be endured by presenter and audience alike.”
That’s the bad news. The good news is that presentations can be an effective communication medium and an experience that is satisfying, and sometimes even enjoyable, for presenter and audience alike.

9. Choosing Structured or Free-Form Slides
Perhaps the most important design choice you face when creating slides is whether to use conventional, bullet point-intensive structured slides or the looser, visually oriented free-form slides that many presentation specialists now advocate.
Effectively designed slides should be unified by design elements such as color and font selections.
Structured slides have the advantage of being easy to create.
The primary disadvantage of structured design is that mind-numbing effect Garr Reynolds describes, caused by text-heavy slides that all look alike.
Free-form slide designs can overcome the drawbacks of text-heavy structured design. Such slides can fulfill three criteria researchers have identified as important for successful presentations:
providing complementary information through both textual and visual means,
limiting the amount of information delivered at any one time to prevent cognitive overload, and
helping viewers process information by identifying priorities and connections, such as by highlighting the most important data points in a graph.
With appropriate imagery, free-form designs can also create a more dynamic and engaging experience for the audience.
Free-form slides have several potential disadvantages. First, effectively designing slides with both visual and textual elements is more creatively demanding and more time-consuming than simply typing text into preformatted templates. The emphasis on visual content also requires more images, which take time to find.
Second, because far less textual information tends to be displayed on-screen, the speaker is responsible for conveying more of the content. Ideally, of course, this is how a presentation should work, but presenters sometimes find themselves in less than ideal circumstances, such as being asked to fill in for a colleague on short notice.

10. Designing Effective Slides
“Death By PowerPoint”
PPT is just a tool
Can be used well or poorly
Why?
Lack of design awareness
Inadequate training
Time pressure
That’s the way it’s always been done
PPT slides are not a standalone document – they need some sort of presentation
Despite complaints about “death by PowerPoint,” the problem is not with that software itself (or with Apple Keynote or any other presentation program). It is just a tool and, like other tools, can be used well or poorly. Unfortunately, lack of design awareness, inadequate training, schedule pressures, and the instinctive response of doing things the way they’ve always been done can lead to ineffective slides and lost opportunities to really connect with audiences.
Another reason for ineffective slides is the practice of treating slide sets as standalone documents that can be read on their own, without a presenter.
As “Creating Effective Handouts” explains, the ideal solution is to create an effective slide set and a separate handout document that provides additional details and supporting information.

11. Completing a Presentation
Allow enough time to:
Test presentation slides
Practice presentation
Verify equipment operation
Create handout materials
Revise slides to make sure they are:
Readable
Concise
Consistent
Fully operational (including transitions, builds, animations and multimedia)
The completion step for presentations involves a wider range of tasks than most printed documents require.
Make sure you allow enough to time to test your presentation slides, verify equipment operation, practice your speech, and create handout materials.
With a first draft of your presentation in hand, revise your slides to make sure they are readable, concise, consistent, and fully operational (including transitions, builds, animation, and multimedia).
Complete your production efforts by finalizing your slides, creating handouts, choosing your presentation method, and practicing your delivery.

12. Finalizing Your Slides
Add or delete slides
Reposition slides
Check for design consistency
Verify transitions and animation
This lets you review the flow of your story.
Electronic presentation software can help you throughout the editing and revision process. For example, the slide sorter view (different programs have different names for this feature) lets you see some or all of the slides in your presentation on a single screen. Use this view to add and delete slides, reposition slides, check slides for design consistency, and verify the operation of any effects. Moreover, the slide sorter is a great way to review the flow of your story.

13. Creating Effective Handouts
Handouts—any printed materials you give the audience to supplement your talk—should be considered an integral part of your presentation strategy. Handouts can include detailed charts and tables, case studies, research results, magazine articles, and anything else that supports the main idea of your presentation.
Plan your handouts as you develop your presentation so that you use each medium as effectively as possible. Your presentation should paint the big picture, convey and connect major ideas, set the emotional tone, and rouse the audience to action (if that is relevant to your talk). Your handouts can then carry the rest of the information load, providing the supporting details that audience members can consume at their own speed, on their own time.

14. Choosing Your Presentation Method X
Speaking from notes
Use a fully written script
Memorizing entire presentation
Memorize a quote, opening statement or a few concluding remarks
With all your materials ready, your next step is to decide which method of speaking you want to use. Speaking from notes (rather than from a fully written script) is nearly always the most effective and easiest delivery mode. This approach gives you something to refer to as you progress while still allowing for plenty of eye contact, a natural speaking flow, interaction with the audience, and improvisation in response to audience feedback.
In contrast, reciting your speech from memory is nearly always a bad idea. Even if you can memorize the entire presentation, you will sound stiff and overly formal because you are “delivering lines,” rather than talking to your audience. However, memorizing a quotation, an opening statement, or a few concluding remarks can bolster your confidence and strengthen your delivery.

15. Practicing Your Delivery and Overcoming Anxiety
Can you present naturally, without reading your slides?
Could you still present if your equipment fails?
Do you know how to use the equipment?
Is your timing on track?
Can you easily pronounce all the words you plan to use?
Have you anticipated possible Q&As?
Practicing your presentation is essential. Practice boosts your confidence, gives you a more professional demeanor, and lets you verify the operation of your visuals and equipment. A test audience can tell you if your slides are understandable and whether your delivery is effective. A day or two before you’re ready to step on stage for an important talk, make sure you and your presentation are ready:
Can you present your material naturally, without reading your slides?
Could you still make a compelling and complete presentation if you experience an equipment failure and have to proceed without using your slides at all?
Is the equipment working, and do you know how to work it?
Is your timing on track?
Can you easily pronounce all the words you plan to use?
Have you anticipated likely questions and objections?
Even seasoned pros get a little nervous before a big presentation—and that is a good thing. Nervousness is an indication that you care about your audience, your topic, and the occasion. These techniques will help you convert anxiety into positive energy:
Stop worrying about being perfect.
Know your subject and practice, practice, practice.
Visualize success and remember to breathe and be comfortable.
Maintain eye contact with friendly audience members.
Keep going, even if you lose your place for a moment.
Don’t worry about being perfect
Know your subject and practice, practice, practice!
Remember to breath and be comfortable
Maintain eye contact with audience
If you get off track, just keep going!

16. Delivering a Presentation Handling Questions Responsively
It’s show time!
Whether you take questions during a formal question-and-answer (Q&A) period or as they come up during your presentation, questions are often one of the most important parts of an presentation. They give you a chance to obtain important information, to emphasize your main idea and supporting points, and to build enthusiasm for your point of view. When you’re speaking to high-ranking executives in your company, the Q&A period will often consume most of the time allotted for your presentation.

17. Giving Presentations Online
Online presentations offer many benefits, including the opportunity to communicate with a geographically dispersed audience at a fraction of the cost of travel and the ability for a project team or an entire organization to meet at a moment’s notice. However, this format also presents some challenges for the presenter, thanks to that layer of technology between you and your audience. Many of those “human moments” that guide and encourage you through an in-person presentation won’t travel across the digital divide. For instance, it’s often difficult to tell whether audience members are bored or confused, because your view of them is usually confined to small video images (and sometimes not even that).
To ensure successful online presentations, keep the following advice in mind:
Consider sending preview study materials ahead of time.
Keep your presentation as simple as possible.
Ask for feedback frequently.
Consider the viewing experience from the audience members’ point of view.
Allow plenty of time for everyone to get connected and familiar with the screen they’re viewing.
Consider sending preview materials ahead of time
Keep presentation simple
Ask for feedback frequently
Consider viewing experience from the audience members’ point of view
Allow time for all to get connected

18. Learning Objectives: Check Your Progress
Highlight the importance of presentations in your business career and explain how to adapt the planning step of the three-step process to presentations.
Describe the tasks involved in developing a presentation.
Describe the major design and writing tasks required to enhance your presentation with effective visuals.
Outline some special tasks involved in completing a presentation.
Check your progress:
Highlight the importance of presentations in your business career and explain how to adapt the planning step of the three-step process to presentations.
Importance: let you demonstrate your ability to think on your feet, grasp complex business issues, and handle challenging situations—all attributes that executives look for when searching for talented employees to promote.
Planning oral presentations is much like planning other business messages: You analyze the situation and the audience, select the right medium, organize the information and develop the presentation.
Describe the tasks involved in developing a presentation.
Although you usually don’t write out a presentation word for word, you still engage in the writing process—developing your ideas, structuring support points, phrasing your transitions, and so on.
Describe the major design and writing tasks required to enhance your presentation with effective visuals.
With a first draft of your presentation in hand, revise your slides to make sure they are readable, concise, consistent, and fully operational (including transitions, builds, animation, and multimedia).
Outline some special tasks involved in completing a presentation.
Complete your production efforts by finalizing your slides, creating handouts, choosing your presentation method, and practicing your delivery.