Five presentation tips for school students

Making a presentation, especially when you're a school student, can be a daunting experience, and without proper guidance, you can easily find yourself in a tricky situation. 

That being said, here are five presentation tips that you can use to take your presenting skills to the next level.

Cram less, speak more 

When presenting, avoid cramming all your information in your PowerPoint slides. Putting lots of information on your slides can make your audience distracted and result in their attention being directed away from your speech. Instead, keep only the key points in your slides, which can better guide your audience on where to put their attention and result in them being able to absorb most of your message. 

Talk slowly and clearly

How well articulated your speaking is can make or break the quality of your presentation. It's important to keep an energetic, impactful tone when speaking since it can go a long way to keep your audience from getting bored.

It's also better to speak in a slow but clear voice, than a fast-paced but slurred one, since this can make your speech more stimulating and effectively transport your message to the audience. Through this practice, you can also avoid blurting out filler words like "umm" or "uhh" in the middle of your sentences. 

Moreover, speaking slowly can help you look out for potential mishaps that may occur during your presentation, such as forgetting a line in your speech, allowing you to swiftly use an appropriate connector and switch over to your next point.

Be animate

Your body language has an important role in your presentation performance. If you're given the space for it, try to move around and make the best use of your hands and facial expressions. This can help pass on your enthusiasm for the topic to your audience.

If you're speaking from a podium or a fixed place where moving around isn't possible, be animated with your facial expressions to change the depth and tone of your topic. Smiling as much as you can is also a habit every good presenter has.  

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Incorporate relevance

To make an engaging speech, use something that you and your audience have in common and incorporate it into your speech. One common example of this is to start off your speech with a common story or occurrence that most of your audience members might know, like an incident that happened at school.

You could also improvise and talk about things some of your audience members might be doing right in front of you, which can be equally engaging. However, make sure to do this at an appropriate time and avoid highlighting only one person out of the crowd when doing so.

Avoid making your slides too flashy

Decorate your slides creatively, but avoid going overboard. Having moving elements, such as GIFs, in your presentation slides can be distracting for your audience members. Additionally, slides with multiple things going on in them simultaneously, such as over-the-top graphics and many graphs can sometimes be too much to process for your viewers. Hence, it's best to segment them into individual sections entirely. 

Azneef Chowdhury is a student at Chittagong  Grammar School.