On 25th of November, 2019, students of School of Communication and Reputation were privileged to attend the workshop on presentation skills mentored by Rama Arya. At first the students were really confused as to how can presentation skills take a whole day session. But Rama ma’am with her calm exposure calmed us all. She really made us at ease by allowing us to introduce ourselves to the whole class with short introduction that was unique and by adding what legacy shall we leave behind. It was overwhelming to hear so many positive responses from batchmates and this great start made us believe that the day would be very promising and enriching.
It is of no use to lecture English Literature students about Mathematics and statistics as majors. The audience will never relate to it. Likewise, it can be of great embarrassment if your audience do not relate to you and your effort and hard work is put to waste. One must always do their Home Work about the audience and should stick to the topic on which they are going to talk upon.
If the speaker is drunk, or tired, or is simply restless or not in the mood, that will reflect in his speech delivery. The best pitchers have to be delivered with best body language. At the time of QnA, journalists or audience tend to ask you many people. One can master the act by practicing and practicing.
If you have the power to control your audience, the way they whisper in each other’s ears in-between the session, or the manner they pay or do not pay attention to you shows that you haven’t controlled your audience. If possible, go through, the venue where the event is about to happen. Do not give gimmicks.
During PPT, keep the visuals to minimum. Avoid longer sentences and replace these with bullet points and highlight the keywords instead of writing the lines. The client will understand anyways.
Let’s be honest, many a times the PPTs of the bosses are not created by them but by their juniors. It may happen that the juniors have made it wrong and the spellings and fonts and sizes are not up to the mark. It is adviced to use white backdrop of PPT if the room is well lit up. If the room is dark for certain PPTs, the backdrop should be used with dark colours, always.
Sometimes, instead of using big phrase and jargons, a small word works sometimes. Let the word or phrase be enough for the audience to get excited. Tell the audience in a gist the overall motive of your PPT. It may happen at the time of QnA, that you don’t know certain answer, politely tell them that you will get back to it.
Break into bullets, into clear sub ideas. Many a times its difficult for the sentences to be applied at PPT slides, therefore, it is always advice to make a bullet points and keep the sentences short.
There is no requirement to put multiple graphs. Key points in bullet forms and phrases rather than sentences will keep the slides at its best.
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These presentation skills are easy to remember yet we forget to stick by these guidelines whenever we make PPTs. These points, if nurtured well, will help us build our forte in presentations.
– Alisha Shireen
Alisha Shireen is pursuing her post graduation in Public Relations in School of Communications and Repuation (SCoRe), Mumbai. She did her schooling from Auxilium Convent School, Bandel, which is some 52.3 km from Kolkata and her graduation from Patna Women’s College in Mass Communications. She was a freelancer for The Times of India, Patna Times for a year (2018-2019) and wrote advertorials and event coverage for the English
daily.
This blog post originally appeared on Alisha’s Blog Page:
