Engaging in Oral Communication
Jered Hansmeyer/Deborah Gesimba
- Communicate ideas and plans effectively in front of an audience.
- Focus on purposes for your presentation and determine information to include.
- Engage listeners by organizing information in various ways and by using notes or outlines to help you keep track of what your doing.
- Design appropriate visuals and handouts to accompany your presentation.
- Create a professional image based on appearance and demeanor, vocal characteristics, and the way you handle questions from the audience.
- Be a good, active listener.
- Evaluate presentations fairly and thoroughly.
Types of presentations
Informal Presentations
Informal presentations consist of listeners that are already familiar with your work. An example of an informal presentation would possible be a work meeting. In this case everybody most likely already knows an issue that exists. Another form of an informal presentation would be to bring a new topic to a group and have a discussion. A city meeting or school board would have this type of discussion. A new topic is brought up in the meeting, and several different groups express their opinion.
Formal Presentations
A formal presentation differs in one way. The group one is presenting to doesn’t know the presenter, and isn’t aware of his/her work. A seminar could be an example of a formal presentation. The group listening doesn’t know the presenter, and is there to fully understand the topic. A lengthy presentation is given as a formal style leaving time for questions and further discussion.
Class Presentations
Class presentations have several benefits: giving honest feedback, role playing, helpful criticism, and developing strengths. Role playing as an audience helps the presenter to fully adapt to their audience. Making a proper presentation for the audience makes or breaks your effectiveness.
Preparing a Professional Presentation
Audience
Basically the more you know or understand your audience the better presentation you will have. The four types of possible audiences are: Professional peers, Nonexpert professionals, International audience, and general audience.
Purposes of Presentations
Once the audience is understood, the purpose can be better used. The purposes of presentations are: Informative presentations, persuasive presentations, demonstrations, and training sessions. The two types of information you need for a presentation is the information you need for the actual presentation, and the information you need for the questions asked. Engaging your audience is also very critical. Adding entertainment to the presentation will draw in the audience’s attention.
Organizing/Note Cards
Organizing your presentation makes the greatest impact on the success of your presentation. Your slides need to be organized in a way that it flows and continues interest. Breaks in the presentation to alert the listener of changing ideas helps to keep the audience with you. Including the main points, facts, and details on note cards keeps your eyes on the audience not on a screen. Making the correct amount of eye contact is critical to keep the audience interested.
Preparing Materials for a Professional Presentation
Visuals
It has been said that visuals boost a group’s attention by ten percent. Incorporating pictures, animations, and videos truly helps audiences to fully understand and retain some of the information. For example, if your presentation includes a large amount of numbers a graph could be used to gain interest. You don’t want to bore your audience by including several hundred numbers; instead a graph could be used to sum up the data shortly.
Types of Visuals/Size/Color
Visuals can range from white boards to slides, but can include: flip charts, prepared posters, transparencies, videotapes, models, and demonstrations. Making the visuals easy to view makes for an enjoyable time. Nothing is worse than making your pictures or other visuals hard to see. As a rule of thumb in a dark room use dark backgrounds, and in a light background use a light background.
PowerPoint for oral presentation
Content: Accessibility, usability and comprehensibility should not be hindered when presenting your PowerPoint. Example of items that affects the above the factors of communication are too many bullets, complex data display, too much or too little information on the slide and so many more
Presentation: When presenting, do not read your slides since the audience can read for themselves.
Handouts: They are important assets of presentation. When you are planning to use handouts in your presentation, think how your handout should be packaged including cover a page. Second, think when you should distribute your handouts and lastly how much details you should include in the handouts.
Professional Appearance
Professional appearance is important when presenting your project. Your presentation can be powerful if your behavior does not distract your audience such as your nervousness. It improve on your appearance let your presentation to be videotaped, view the tape and note areas that you need to improve.
Vocal Characteristics: Volume, articulation and pronunciation of words, rate and pitch are very important when doing oral presentation.
Handling Questions: Always plan ahead to be asked question in between your presentation or at the end. If you do not prefer to be interrupted ask the audience to hold their questions until the end if the presentation.
Evaluating Presentations
To be a good evaluator to you need to be an active listener by staying attentive, following the speaker’s presentation and understanding the content. Strategies to promote active listening are; determine the purpose, identify the organization, distinguish critical elements, monitor your reactions and make connection
24 comments:
This chapter is very important, because we have been doing so many oral presentations. Since everyone is presenting on topics most people in the class are not familiar with, it is important to explain everything fully. After doing the presentation and watching others, I realized that organization is extremely important. Also, keeping the slides looking professional is very important. I wish now that I would have used more graphics like other people in the class did. It engages the audience and makes the presentation less boring.
When reading about this chapter it made me think of doint the presentations in class. We use a power point to guide us through it. It has our main points and also a lot of tedious information. Class presentations are a good way of getting us ready for the "work world". Students need to learn how to communicate effectively. How is someone going to get promoted if they can't excel in communication?
Chapter 17 is a chapter that everyone can relate to and use. There are many times in our futures that we are going to have to give oral presentations. It is important to take this chapter into consideration while bringing these presentations together. I think one of the most important things when doing a powerpoint presentation is to use a lot of visuals. If you have a boring topic that is also important it is tough for people to pay attention. If you use more visuals you will be able to grab the audience and not only that you will have to do less talking because the visuals should help explain your topic.
This chapter describes many things that we as students have been involved in or will be involved in in the future. I can not even count the times I have given a presentation. I am not a big fan of the oral presentations, just because I get really nervous and I hate being nervous. When I have a visual aid such as a powerpoint presentation however, I feel that I do a better job. The powerpoint, or even handouts keep me focused on the presentation and less on being nervous. I think I've only had one or two formal oral presentations, once in high school when I was running for class president and another which was a piano recital when I was like twelve - but that wasn't an oral presentation. I think oral presentations are a good way to convey information and messages to a relatively diverse crowd.
This chapter is very helpful for the article presentation that I'm currently working on, as well as many other presentation that I will be doing in the future.I think that presentations can be very helpful when they are done correctly and presented, in a way that keeps the audience focus and not sleeping.For example: a power point presentation, you can have the best information to the audience , but in the presentor is not developing the information well, or doesn't know the informatio, the presentation can become very boring. And eventually the audience well lack intrested to it. In dietetics I'm certain that I will be ask to make presetations of reasearch that I will do and for sure this chapter can help me get prepare.
This chapter had some great insight of what kind of presentation is used. Through my experience I have only given class presentations, but have given presentations to an audience in my major that knows what I am talking about already and can judge my competency on the topic and judge if it was good or not. I think it might be easier to give a speech to people that don’t know you or what you are talking about. The main thing in this situation is getting your facts right but whatever you say they are going to believe you and you can be very general.
This chapter is very helpful in desribing the different types of presentations. In this class each person will give and evaluate presentaions so this is helpful information. As a constructions management major I have to give a lot of power point presentations in my classes so it is useful to know what has to be done with the presentation to make it beneficial to the audience. I have sat through some presentations in school that could about put you to sleep.
I thought this was a very good chapter because oral presentations are something we do often in classes and some of us will even do them in there profession. As a dietitian I will have to put together oral presentations to inform people on nutrition and the profession of dietetics occasionally. The other weekend I went to a dietetic conference and a few of the speakers had uninteresting topics to discus but the way they put the information together and the way they presented it made it even more uninteresting. I hope that I am able to take what I have learned in this class and other classes to be able to make my presentations interesting and easy to follow.
This chapter seemed helpful since I am an English major and will be teaching/presenting and orally communicating to a classroom full of students. I will need to communicate effectively and efficiently with my students in order to maintain a productive classroom. These pointers will definitely help me in the future as well as in my current career as a student at MSU.
Presenting orally is a huge part of todays world and we will go through many times in life when we are going to have to present in fron of many people in our workplace. Also within this class, we have a few different presentations that we have to do, and this chapter helps out with that. We need tolay out the slides with useful easy to ready information and than use good graphics and or pictures to fill in the dull spots.
As students, we work with presentations a lot. We had to give a presentation in this class, and there were many things listed in this chapter we should make sure we keep in mind when giving a presentation like that. People in our classes come from several different backgrounds and experience levels in the information we are providing. This is something we need to keep in mind as we are giving the presentation. I have the bad habit of assuming people know as much about the topic I am discussing. This chapter gave me a better understanding of how to avoid that habit in the future.
Chapter 17 on Oral Communication really focuses on what we did for our article presentation for class. It focuses on what type of audience you have and how comfortable you are with the audience. When I was making my power point I made sure to keep the theme and style the same through out for example my project was on Red Bull so I had the background blue and the writing red and white because a can of a red bull is red, white, and blue. Also I didn't include every little detail on each slide so I could talk to the audience more then read from the slide.
I think this chapter is pretty important when deciding what type of presentation you are putting together. Knowing and understanding what kind of audience you will be presenting to is very important because you need to keep the audience interested. I deal with informal presentations alot with work, but I am usually just a small part of the objective. Its alot harder at work to keep it professional because I usually keep people interested with humor and I think I will need to develop more professionalism when I move into my career in construction. When I'm in the audience I love visuals because I hate reading and I try to keep that a main concern when I try not to bore classmates or co-workers.
Chapter 17 was a good overview of what I've have and should have done in all my presentations throughout my years of schooling. A good solid presentation should includ many things to capture your audiences attention. Visuals are an excellent way and I've used many visuals throughout the years. To show the facts is to show people exactly what your trying to explain. Give people a handout and something for them to read after the presentation is done helps keep people interested and informed on the information that your presenting. I unfortunatly didn't have a hand out for everyone to see for my presentation that was given not to long ago.
For chapter 17 it was interesting finding out that there are different types of presentations and each of them are different from one another. We have probably only given class presentations and informal presentations. In our future career’s we will probably give more presentations that are formal so it was interesting learning what all goes into the formal presentation process. I liked how the group explained the purposes of presentations.
Chapter 17 is a good review and guidelines on oral presentations. As a college student, you have to do some form of oral presentation. As we graduate and begin our career, oral communications will become part of our job. This chapter really give a general overview of preparing and delivering an oral presentation. Since I want to be in the web development and design field, I know that effective and efficient oral communication skills is a must. I will need to present progress reports, project planning and design. The materials covered this chapter will come in handle for anybody going into a profession.
Presentations are very important to any technical job, especially oral presentations. If you are completely disorganized and don't have it completely ready you could compromise the integrity of your report. This chapter does a very nice job explaining the correct processes to a successful presentation. My profession involving technology will rely heavily on me delivering the correct instructions.
This chapter has came into affect alot for this semester for me. This is the final semester in my senior year. With the senior project that i am involved with, we have had to do too many presentations. We have done informal, formal, and class presentations to present the information about our project to judges, students, and faculty alike. Being able to present your information to a group is very important, especially in my major.
This is the same as going to a class and deciding whether the presentation that you are going to give is the final presentation or just mentoning something to the class. Your attire may be one of the ways that you can make a presentation more professional rather than informal. If you are trying to look good you might dress up and look nice for the presentation rather than blue jeans.
In school we are always required to give presentations, there has not been one semester where I have not given an oral presentation. After giving a few presentations you learn what works for you, but there are always ways that you can make it better and this chapter helped to focus on what could be better. I remember when I was in high school I would put really distracting background pictures, because I thought it looked cool, but it was very unprofessional and very distracting.
I think the best presentations are those that are done in small classrooms where the speaker can answer the audience's questions after or during the presentation. They are more effective when the speaker provides visuals like graphs and tables to go with the speech. They are also more effective than speeches with large crowds because the speaker is available for less comment.
I think the best presentations are those that are done in small classrooms where the speaker can answer the audience's questions after or during the presentation. They are more effective when the speaker provides visuals like graphs and tables to go with the speech. They are also more effective than speeches with large crowds because the speaker is available for less comment.
This chapter was very helpful because in my sorority I am the alternate delegate to our governing body and so on occasion I have to make presentations when our primary delegate isn't there to do it herself. these presentations are informal but the same principles apply as to a formal presentation. I still have to keep the audience and the purpose of the presentation in mind. I also have to worry about organization because meetings run tight on time as it is so it's better for everyone if presentations are kept organized and to the point.
This chapter had some great information of what kind of presentation is used. Through my experience I have only given class presentations, but have given presentations to an audience in my major that knows what I am talking about already and can judge my competency on the topic and judge if it was good or not. I think it might be easier to give a speech to people that don’t know you or what you are talking about. The main thing in this situation is getting your facts right but whatever you say they are going to believe you and you can be very general.
Post a Comment