1. Effective Oral Presentations: Advice for Novice Speakers Dr. James Newell Department of Chemical Engineering Rowan University

2. Outline Introduction Knowing your audience Using your allotted time wisely Designing and using visual aids Importance of practice Appropriate dress Audience Interaction Miscellaneous Hints

3. Introduction What you are really presenting: Your Information Yourself Oral presentations are unavoidable in a professional life Everyone can learn to give better presentations

4. Knowing your Audience Different audiences require different levels of introduction You wouldn’t give the same talk to your grandmother and your boss If you lose the audience, you will not get them back At least half of the talk needs to be introduction

5. Using Time Wisely Fitting into the allowed time range is the biggest challenge in presentations Never run over time – it is unprofessional and it irritates the audience Have some material that you can cut and some filler that you can add Practice for time, but remember you will talk faster when it counts

6. Use of Visual Aids Nothing makes you look less prepared than handwritten overheads or having typos Overheads need to have clear, large font Graphs must be labeled and easy to follow Tabular data and equations should be used sparingly If you have more than 7 lines, it is crowded

7. Importance of Practice The more you practice, the more confident you become. Transition between slides is the hardest When giving a group presentation, make sure everyone knows who is covering what material Use overheads to help you, but don’t read them

8. Appropriate Dress You never want to dress more casually than your audience Typically, men wear jackets and ties; women wear business suit or dress For this presentation, shirt and tie is enough If I’m noticing what you wear, I’m not listening to you If I can’t remember what you wore two days later, it was fine

9. Audience Interaction Involve your audience as much as possible: they will recall much more if they are active Try to make eye contact with people in different parts of the room Once you have lost the audience, you will not get them back

10. Miscellaneous Hints Bring a cup of water with you (in case of cotton mouth) Control the talk -> only you know what you intended to say Relax, for better or worse you get to sit down in 20 minutes and half of the audience isn’t listening anyway