“Prior preparation prevents poor performance” - James Baker
A presentation is basically just another assignment, and you would make a plan for completing that. Taking the time beforehand to prepare your presentation thoroughly will help you deliver a better presentation and boost your confidence. Like a regular assignment, there are things you need to do before you start working on your presentation and a logical order to how you approach the work
Just as with any other assignment, the first thing you should do is make sure you understand the requirements before you start planning. Read over the instructions and requirements and make sure you understand the following:
One you understand what you're supposed to be doing, write down the things you need to do. You can use the Presentation Calculator to break down the presentation into distinct tasks. This calculator will also tell you how much time you should spend on each task
Is the topic something you know about, or is it something you'll have to research? If it's the latter, you'll to spend more time preparing the content
Who is your audience? Your classmates? Your teachers? What your audience know about your presentation topic will help you decide on how much background detail is required; your classmates will require more background information than your teachers
Write the objective of the presentation in a single, short statement. Use this statement to help keep you focused as you research and develop the presentation. The objective needs to specify exactly what you want your audience to learn from your presentation. Once you have this written you will have a better idea of what you need to do to prepare the presentation.
Research the topic if required and think about what you're going to include. Do this before starting the work on your presentation
Having researched your topic, you should now be able identify the key message of your presentation, what you want to tell your audience.
Use this outline to plan the structure of your presentation. Like an essay, you'll need a beginning, a middle and an end - an introduction, body, and conclusion. Start by telling your audience what you're going to tell them in the presentation, tell them the key message and then tell them you've told them. This will help plan what your presentation will look like.
From the outline, flesh out a draft. This will help you with what you're actually going to say when you present, and it will help you create your slides
Chances are that you'll be using PowerPoint to create slides. Use your outline and draft to provide a logical flow to your slides. Think about what methods you could use to engage your audience (PowerPoint and an engaging manner should be sufficient though)
Practice does make perfect, or better at least. Once you have your slides prepared and know what you're going to say, find an audience to present to - a dry run. Take note of their feedback and use that to improve your performance. You may need more than one dry tun to get to where you want to be, but that's ok.
After the presentation have a think about the process: what went well? Did anything go badly? What could you improve upon and what would you do differently? Take note of all these so you that you'll remember for next time.
