Oral Presentation Reflections

Oral presentations are scary. I used to dread being picked to do presentations in classes, and it was without good reasons. Slide designing was tedious. Wall after wall of texts with the need to animate the entry of every single bullet points made me fell asleep while doing my own slides. It couldn’t be helped at those times since I was taught in the school of thought that more is better, even for oral presentations. Basically, the slides themselves were the presentations itself.

But the scariest was the actual presentation. Even with the best laid scripts and clocking in hours of practice, the anxiety never fades away presentations after presentations. The need to follow the script point for point actually made my mind to go blank on many occasions. Cue cards weren’t much of a help either. There is nothing worst than to just look blankly into your audiences’ eyes.

Oral presentations are still scary. However, for this recently done presentation, it was actually a mixture of excitement, scariness and a little dose of anxiety.

I was instantly captivated by the style of slide designing conveyed by Garr Reynolds. He advocated simplicity on his slides, specifically the extensive use of graphics with minimal supporting words.

Me and Anh decided to adopt this style of slide design. We searched the internet for a slide theme which fits our proposal. We used pictures from the internet to replace a lot of words. In fact, we don’t rely much on the use of cue cards to recall the points we wanted to make.

Another interesting thing I adopted from Garr Reynolds was to actually plan the slides on paper before transferring the slides to its electronic version. It really got my ideas to flow the instant I face the blank piece of paper, instead of staring into blank electronic space which happened very frequently in the past. Furthermore, I found that doing this way actually helped me to know the important points and flow of my presentation. There was no need for a script or cue cards to jog my memory. Of course, there was still the need to practice diligently in front of the mirror to properly grasp the flow.

Robert Grahams made a few points for the oral part of the presentation. The most notable one when I visited his website was that the audiences do not know what the presenter is going to present next, or how the flow of the presentation would be like. This really decreased the anxiety felt. I do not have to worry following a script in case I jumbled up the order of the explanations. As a matter of fact, for this presentation, I actually discarded the thought of writing up and memorizing the script before. I noticed during the presentation itself, this actually resulted in my mind not freezing up.

That being said, I do notice several weaknesses while speaking in my presentation. These include:

• Stuttering – I still stutter during presentations. Perhaps it was the anxiety that I felt when facing an audience.
• Pace – I used to speak too fast. So I tried to reduce the speed after consulting with Mrs. Richardson. However, I had the feeling that I was speaking too slowly, and coupled with my anxiety and my natural tendency to speed up; it resulted in a rather unnatural tone of speech to me.
• Slide theme – I could had looked for a theme with better color scheme, as the colour blue would put people too much into a relaxed mode.

To wrap this blog post up, I would like to note point stressed by both Garr Reynolds and Robert Graham which entirely changed my view on presentations itself. This is not in their exact words but:

In a presentation, it is not the slides but the presenter, which is the presentation itself.