cheers, Dawn.

Content should be considered as well by the presenter. In some of the conditions the presenter could not be able to attract the audience such as too many details, already known information, unrelated things at a presentation. At presentations given in professional life, the audience is paying money to learn some information about a specific topic and they are willing to get as much information as they can. On the other hand when a student is giving a presentation about something, they should consider attracting the audience more. It could be done by some creative ideas, but how could you do it? I guess the presenter should figure it out.

Content is also key when preparing a presentation. I prepared a presentation for another class, and it had some content that was relevant but was known to most people. I learned the mistake of doing that the hard way. The professor literally said to the class “does anybody not know this” and when nobody said no, he said “Ok, on to the next slide” and did this several times. It angered me immensely, but I realized that if you want to make people care and have them take interest, you can’t feed them reruns of information that they already know. If we dig right into the new material and things unknown to our audience, and present it in an exciting and non-traditional manner, we are more likely to keep them awake and interested, and also make people want to know more about what we’re presenting about.

Now, I struggle to stay awake while listening to these bad presentations in my classes. The professor tells the group what a great job they did, and I find myself having to try extremely hard to resist the temptation to tell the professor that, no, that presentation was not “great”. I didn’t care about it, and there was nothing in it for me. But it’s hard to begin to fix that problem when many professors are themselves the ones allowing these bad presentations to become acceptable and expected.

The key that I’ve found to nervousness is eliminating those factors, or at least gaining some control over them. If you want to keep your audience’s attention, think like an audience member when you create the presentation and design it to keep people interested and focused. If you think you’re going to forget to mention something important, provide yourself clues on a slide, but chances are that if it’s unimportant enough to forget, the audience won’t even know or care it got left out. And that devil machine, the camera…not much you can do when he’s staring you in the face. Watching your every move, recording it so you can be watched forever. What you can do, however is to get used to the presence of cameras. We walk by hunderds every day, on our roads, city streets, parking lots, banks, stores, etc. We don’t panic in front of them. And you better believe that most of them are recording. So when presenting in front of the camera, just pretend that it’s a security camera, there to protect you. Don’t look at it, don’t put on a show for it. If you pretend it doesn’t exist (as we do for the hundreds that we are on every day), you’ll forget that it’s even there.