ESC-100
TECHNIQUES OF ORAL
PRESENTATION
Upon finishing a project in industry you will often be
required to provide the results in the form of an oral presentation.
It is important that you develop excellent speaking and presentation
skills as this will probably be the most common method of giving and
receiving information once you leave the university.
When
making presentations they should be kept as short as possible, but at
the same time provide enough information so that the audience can
follow you. If the presentation gets too long the audience will loose
interest. Don't concern yourself with describing every little detail
of your project to the audience. The audience (and your boss in the
future) will only be concerned with the results, conclusions, and
recommendations of your project, so these are the important points of
the presentation.
An important part of any presentation is
utilizing visual aids to describe your results, conclusions, and
recommendations. The audience can more easily retain information from
graphs and tables rather than listening to someone explain the
results, conclusions, etc. You will also be able to retain the
audience's attention if you use visuals rather than just talk. You
will have access to a variety of visual aids such as the overhead
projector, VCR, slide projector, etc., which can be used to portray
your information.
The following list is a breakdown of how a
presentation should be made and what should be included in each
portion:
INTRODUCTION
A brief
introduction explaining to the audience what you are going to tell
them. State the objective(s) of your project clearly and provide the
audience with a visual list of the objectives. If necessary explain
any background information so that the audience can follow the
presentation.
BODY
This portion of
the presentation should include how the design was analyzed and
produced. Explain what you feel is needed so that the audience can
understand how the objectives were accomplished. Visual aids should
be used to clearly describe how the necessary information was
obtained. The body should be the major portion of the
presentation.
RESULTS
Explain the
design results obtained for the project. This portion of the
presentation should contain extensive use of visuals (e.g. graphs,
tables, etc.) to portray the results, because it will be much easier
for the audience to understand and follow a graph or table.
CONCLUSIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS
Now tell the
audience what you have already told them. This is the part of the
presentation where you get to use your engineering judgment to make
sound conclusions regarding the results of the project (e.g. where
there problems encountered?, what still needs to be done?, what use
can be made of the information collected?, etc.). Recommendations
should be made last. Provide a visual list of the recommendations to
the audience. People that attend many meetings rely on these visual
aids to make notes, and it is this part of the presentation that the
audience has been waiting for so it will be remembered if visual
aids are used. Remember!!! The recommendations will be the
most important part of any presentation you make because many
important decisions will be based on your information. Therefore,
make sure that you have reasonable and sound recommendations.
Last but not least is your personal appearance and conduct. A
presentation is not to be taken lightly, so dress appropriately and
conduct yourself in a professional manner (you never know when the
CEO of the company might just step in to listen to your
presentation!!).