Oral presentation tips
An oral presentation is different from most types of assignments, in that you are required to prepare a talk rather than an essay.
- The listener of an oral presentation only has one opportunity to understand your point of view and ask questions to clarify anything that is not clear from your thesis.
- Have some kind of structure to your talk.
- Group similar ideas together under different themes and present each of these themes in order of priority, depending on the angle/focus of your talk.
- Remember to prepare the listener for what section of your talk is coming up next, with phrases like “having covered the first two central points, I'll now turn to look at the third”, or "the final issue to cover is situational dependency, which I will look at now”.
- Avoid just reading your presentation. Instead, aim to give the presentation using just a few bullet points to remind you of the main points (if you are using PowerPoint, you can use the notes section for this). If you practice doing this a lot, you'll find it is easier than it sounds.
- Make eye contact with your audience.
- At the end of the talk summarise what you have covered. Give a brief description of each theme or step you outlined.
Accompanying PowerPoint
Sometimes when you are asked to prepare an oral presentation, you will be asked to submit a PowerPoint as part of the assignment.
Here are a few tips for preparing your PowerPoint or Canva presentation:
- To save time and make it look tidy and consistent, use a template
- Keep the text on the slides to a minimum.
- If you include references, put in-text citations in the slides where you cite the information and include a reference list at the end.
