Anglès:

Oral presentation

Preparing your presentation - Visual Aids:

One cannot prepare an oral presentation without designing and writing some visual aids to go with it. You can use OHP transparencies, handouts, slides, power-points, and they can be made in the form of listings, graphs, statistics, charts … Apart from making your presentation more effective, visual aids will help your audience follow your ideas and remember them.

When writing a visual aid (for example, an overhead transparency -OHP-) you should take into account:

Is it large enough to be easily seen or is it too small and detailed?
Does it help to understand concepts or introduces confusion?
Is the aid necessary or superfluous?

Exercise:
Look at the following OHP examples. One of them is obviously inappropriate, which one?

OHP example 1:

Basic Presentation Structure

Introduction
Body
Conclusion

OHP example 2:

Basic Presentation Structure
All presentations follow this basic presentation structure

Introduction. The introduction clearly notifies the audience the main point (or purpose) of your presentation.
Body. The body develops each point you stated in the introduction.
Conclusion. The conclusion restates the ideas presented, and reinforces the purpose.

Which one is less appropriate?

Now, tick off the following Do's and Don'ts about visual aids:

	Do	Don't	Feedback
Squeeze lines to fit in more information
Use 1 message per OHT
Choose chart or diagrams to support your ideas.
Use 1 OHT for every idea you put across.
Use OHT to incorporate additional ideas.
Complex messages should always go on the OHP.

In LISAM you can also have some practice on how to use tables and figures, which might be useful when designing and writing visual aids.