How to give great presentations
Published by O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Eight simple ways to wow your audience
From employee trainings and monthly sales goal meetings to large-scale formal proposals to upper management, presentations are an integral component of many professionals’ lives. Whatever your role, you want to give effective presentations that engage, instruct, persuade, and inspire your audience—not lackluster presentations that no one remembers.
In this 90-minute course, Curtis Newbold walks you through the eight-part POWERFUL presentation method—plan, open, weave, express, relate, frame, unify, and leave—that will help you develop and deliver engaging, organized, and memorable presentations.
What you’ll learn and how you can apply it
By the end of this live online course, you’ll understand:
- Best practices for giving memorable, professional presentations
- How to apply the POWERFUL presentation method
- The influence of presentation components on audience perception
And you’ll be able to:
- Organize presentations to create a powerful impact
- Tell better stories
- Design better slides
- Employ stronger delivery techniques
This live event is for you because...
- Your job requires you to present in front of teams, groups, or large gatherings.
- You're looking for new ways to energize, motivate, and engage the people you speak to regularly in professional settings.
- You struggle with public speaking and giving presentations.
Prerequisites
- You've sat through or given at least one poorly delivered presentation.
Materials or downloads needed in advance:
- Download and review the “Presentation Evaluation: Assessment Rubric and Comments” worksheet
- Identify areas that you struggle with or that you have witnessed and perceive to be common challenge for many presenters.
Recommended preparation:
"Audience" (section 1 in HBR Guide to Giving Persuasive Presentations)
"Presentation Structure" (chapter 4 in The Introverted Presenter: Ten Steps for Preparing and Delivering Successful Presentations)
Schedule
The time frames are only estimates and may vary according to how the class is progressing.
Introductions and roadmap (5 minutes)
- Lecture and discussion: What types of presentations do you give most frequently in your job?
How presentations work (20 minutes)
- Lecture and discussion: What makes presentations successful (and what makes them lousy); how fears prevent great presentations (and how to overcome them); what the research suggests about making presentations impactful, memorable, and effective; applying Aristotle to be more creative; the general structure of a presentation; why visuals matter
- Q&A
The first three steps: Prepare, open, and weave (15 minutes)
- Lecture: Preparing for your audience; opening with vigor; weaving in the stories
Developing a story (15 minutes)
- Lecture: Story components—character, setting, plot, conflict, and resolution; determining the relevance of your story; broken metaphors
- Hands-on exercise: Dissect the components of an example story
Step four: Expressing with visuals (20 minutes)
- Lecture: How visuals impact presentations; using the picture superiority effect; memorable visuals; 10 quick tricks to enhance your slide design—open/close slides, color, contrast, repetition, alignment, proximity, footer, bleeds, turning bullets into pictures, white space; working with preset templates
- Hands-on exercise: Improve example slides using your newfound knowledge
The final four steps: Relate, frame, unify, and leave (10 minutes)
- Lecture: Relating with delivery; framing the content; unifying the message; leaving with a punch
Wrap-up and Q&A (5 minutes)
Your Instructor
Curtis Newbold
Curtis Newbold is a passionate educator, speaker, and award-winning corporate consultant with a love for all things communication. He has designed and delivered courses, workshops, webinars, and presentations on scores of topics such as information design, data visualization, leadership communication, brand strategy, presentation delivery, business writing, and public relations management. Curtis has led graduate student marketing and communication projects in Peru, South Africa, Cambodia, Hungary, Morocco, and Iceland and he has taught at multiple universities in the United States and China. Curtis is the owner and chief content architect for the popular communications blog, TheVisualCommunicationGuy.com and is co-author of a textbook-in-progress, Business and Professional Communication, with Sage Publications. He currently serves as Clinical Associate Professor of Strategic Communication at the University of Utah and he holds a PhD in Rhetorics, Communication, and Information Design from Clemson University.