Oral presentations are forms of effective verbal communication that may be accompanied by slides. It is critical that you do not read your slides as your presentation; slides help you make a point, but do not replace your verbal communication. Presenters should not write out their presentations on slides or itemize all their points on a slide—this detracts from the engagement with the audience. If your head is always turned to your slides or looking down at your laptop, you will not deliver a powerful presentation.

Guidelines for presentation

• Consider the sequence and relevancy of your slides. A current slide should build a path to next slide
• Use graphs and charts to illustrate your prominent points. They will help the audience to clearly understand the content.
• Make it simple. Too much fancy graphs and charts with huge data and numbers will confuse the audience. Don’t use flash, gif images and fancy colors. The audience will only remember those effects, not your message. Make it simple!
• Use the 6-6-6 rule: (maximum 6 words per bullet, maximum 6 bullets per slide, and maximum 6 text slides in a row). The fewest words with effective imagery will have the most powerful effect.
• Use high-contrast, easy-to-read fonts that are common to most computers. Do not use ALL CAPS, italics, and other enhancements that clutter and distract. A good guideline is a minimum of 30-point font.

Presenting Effectively

Please follow the guidelines below to make your presentation effective. The tips below will help you to keep the audience interested throughout your presentation.

• Think of your presentation as a story. Try to tell a story about the ideas you are conveying, rather than listing statistics and lists of information. Organize your thoughts and develop clear transitions between slides.
• Consider the use visual aids—are they useful? Do they add to your presentation or detract from it? Visual aids such as slides can help attract and hold an audience’s attention and help to reinforce what you say as well as help you keep on track with your presentation. However, visual aids are not always useful and sometimes detract from careful listening. Carefully determine whether your presentation is enhanced by visual aids or not. Again, the visual component should only illustrate and enhance your words.
• Start off with a bang! Start the presentation with a story, a quote, an idea, or some eye-opening facts from your findings. It is also provocative to begin with a question.
• Short introductions. The session chair will introduce you and save time for important points.
• Never read from your slides. We can’t emphasize this enough. Your audience will be reading your slides. Again, they should be short and to the point. You don’t need to use full sentences: Keep in mind the 6-6-6 rule.
• Practice speaking. Practice your presentation as much as possible and consider the time you are given. You will only have 15 – 20 minutes. Use your time fully and effectively. The more you practice, the more comfortable you will be.
• Avoid jargon. Unless terminology is explicitly needed to convey your point, avoid disciplinary jargon, especially when speaking about your institute/ university/organization/company’s processes. If you must use disciplinary terminology, define it—don’t assume that esoteric language is universally understood.
• Give priority to your findings. Give priority to your findings and outcomes. Reduce the time that you spend on background, but be sure you have offered enough background, material and information for your conclusions to make sense to your audience.

Things to do before presentation at a conference to prevent technical delays/issues

• Ensure that you are available at least 30 minutes before the session starts on the day of the conference.
• All presentations must run on Windows operating system – the Laptop and the Presentations MUST be submitted to the IT table 15 minutes in advance to ensure that the sessions run according to schedule without any delays.
• Bring an extra-copy of your presentation to the conference on a USB media storage device. This copy is to be used as a backup if required.
• Make sure the USB media storage device and your presentation file are properly labeled with your name, presentation day, and time
• Send your final presentation via email to the organizing committee by the prescribed deadline
• If you need special arrangements (Different operating system, videos to be displayed etc.,) you should make that known to the organizing committee by the presentation submission deadline.
• Please note that the organizing committee will not be held responsible for any technical issues occurring due to late communication.

Technical Assistance for your presentation

• Technical assistance will be provided during your presentation
• All presentations must run on Windows operating system – a Laptop and the Multimedia Projector will be available. The Microsoft PowerPoint is the recommended software to be used.
• A SMART pointer will be provided to run your presentation on the screen.