My elementary school days were not dull and I’ve gained much priceless experiences from it; particularly my presentation skills – like most newbie, I remembered my first time presenting in front of the students, it was terribly awful and raw that I can hear sounds of students yawning and disengaged with my presentation.
I barely remember what was I presenting but I would normally receive criticisms or feedback from teachers (or friends) about my presentation and that was indeed the hardest part to endure. Now, these criticisms have turned into “secrets” which is the core of creating the best PowerPoint presentation.
What is the “secrets” that I learned from my elementary school days?
Back to my elementary school days, I remembered that I had to list out the important points on the (dark green colored) blackboard. Obviously, poorly written points – perhaps illegible and size-small hand writing on the board is hard to read. These points are meant for the audience – not the presenter.
Same applies to your PowerPoint presentation slides; the points that you want to convey to your audience – it has to be reasonably big enough for your audience to read.
Your point has to be reasonably big for your audience to read
Sample of a unreasonably big point on a PPT slide
You’ll get several complaints if you use fonts are illegible and hard to read – it’s not a good excuse because there are several fonts available to use.
Comparison between two slides with different fonts – Calibri and Rage Itallic
Calibri-font PPT slide
Rage Itallic-font PPT slide
It doesn’t mean using “fancy” fonts able to capture your audience’s attention. One thing that matters most is that the fonts that you choose are readable at the first place. Your message has to be short and simple in which your audience take less time to read and focus on your speech presentation. Find out – How Do Fonts Affect Your PowerPoint Presentations.
Besides that, I had to learn to speak loudly and utter my speech presentation as clear as possible. Basically, a speaker has to use his own tone – there’s no need to develop a fake accent if you don’t really have one. If you’re worried about your intonation problems – one thing you need to do is speak slowly and control your nervousness when you’re facing your audience.
In contrast, when you speak too fast if you’ve intonation problems, you would expect getting bad rapport from your audience and this can actually affect the whole presentation regardless how good the contents of your presentation are. At times you need to elaborate points that are lengthy; you need to pause for awhile before you proceed elaborating further.
For instance, imagine that you’re in a singing performance and you have lack of breathing skills, you would expect the outcome could be either:
- You could be singing out of tune or tempo
- You could find it hard to continue singing
Always remind yourself to give yourself some time to breathe in before you continue elaborating your points. Furthermore, your speech accuracy will unlikely to falter as you’ve some ample time to think or recall what you need to say. Read more about Presentation Skills for Beginners – Free Yourself Up On Your Own Stage.
Apart from that, most school projects had certain deadlines. Some projects required presentation and I had to allocate some time to prepare for my presentation. Therefore, time management is crucial in order to get things done the right way.
My biggest mistake back then was that I didn’t allocate time for improvising my speech presentation. It’s like flying a real airplane without undergoing a simulation test beforehand. This is an actual way of putting the whole presentation at stake – even though you’ve put enormous effort of preparing good PowerPoint slides.
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