To make a good oral presentation, it involves great attention to the needs of our audience, careful preparation, and the way to delivery. It is a kind of art equipped with visual aids and computer presentation software as well as presentation skills.
There is some space for me to improve myself, although I made great progress by trials and errors.
My first oral presentation this semester was about Surveys and Interviews-Setting Questions. Some basic questions I asked to myself are:
- Who will I be speaking to?
- What do they know about my topic already?
- What will they want to know about my topic?
- What do I want them to know by the end of my talk?
By answering these questions, I made sure that I was in tune with my audience. The most important thing is not what I want to say about my topic, but what my audience wants to hear about it.
Besides, to make an effective presentation, I tried to adjust the content and structure to the medium of speech. I found that a presentation could become a failure if the content is too complex for the audience to follow or the structure is over complicated, so I made the difficult points easier to understand. For example, I tried to use some common choices of phrases and vocabulary to define Survey and Interview. Also, I tried to illustrate enough examples to explain the difficult points.
In addition, to give my presentation a simple and logical structure, it always began with an introduction to highlight the main points I was going to cover and ended with a conclusion in which I reaffirmed the important points.
I have to admit that people vary in their ability to speak confidently in public. It is easy for me to get nervous and cannot help myself to show my nervousness. How to improve my presentation skills has always been bothering me. Here are some tips I learned from past experiences and related materials.
In peer teaching presentation, Kitty and I made rehearsals by ourselves. It helped. We pointed out each other’s shortcomings like voice quality which involves attention to volume, speed and fluency. Maybe next time we can ask some friends to take a video tape for me, I can find more unproper places, such as clarity and pronunciations as well as facial expressions.
Visual aids and some interaction parts in oral presentation always help to make it more lively. I think it is also the part I am most satisfied with in peer teaching presentation.
hi ashely, it's good that you and kitty had some rehearsals and point out each other's shortcoming. i enjoyed yours and our group's presentation as it was clear and had showed sincerity. :)
ReplyDeleteHi Ashely!
ReplyDeleteIt has been great working with you for the past few months on this project =)You have always been very sincere and receptive, even towards some of my very critical feedback on your work, you will always come back stronger with better work. Thank you for all your hardwork, it is greatly appreciated!
Now here's my two cents on your presentation style. I think you really speak very fluently and smoothly even though you were from China. Just a little feedback on how you can further improve your speech. You can try to increase your volume and slow down on the key points in your presenation so as to make your persuasion more convincing!
Guess that is all from me, and all the best to not just your exams, but to your future endeavours too =)
Hey Ashely!
ReplyDeleteI felt that your presentation was good, you had the appropriate tone, you understood what you were trying to bring across, like what you mentioned in your post, and you were very friendly and constantly smiling so it engages the audience better.
I also feel that you were right on the spot about the weakness of your presentation from your blog post in that you were too nervous! Learning to be confident and natural is quite a difficult thing to do, so just really keep practising! It is really good that you are able to realise this now and thus you can improve more easily! =)
All the best in your future endeavours, good luck!