Body Language

Every speaker must be aware of physical aspects of delivery:

1. Gestures

• should go along with your speech, emphasizing the most important information

• should be kept rather reserved

2. Eye Contact

• means looking directly into people’s eyes, not somewhere in the area above their heads

• should be diverse, naturally shifting from one member of the audience to another

• should not be too intense

• avoid looking at the slides for a long time

3. Facial Expression

• a friendly and natural smile is appropriate, but not throughout the whole talk

4. Posture

• natural and confident posture

• no signs of nervousness, such as crossing your legs and twisting your arms

• good bearing

• moderate movement (within the range of two steps) is appropriate

• the best position is to the right of the slides projected, without obstructing the audience’s view

5. Mannerisms

- should be strictly avoided

Ex. 22. Read the following list of recommendations for building a PowerPoint Presentation and note down the most important information.

Powerpoint Presentation Building Tool

PowerPoint has many features that will help you to give a smooth and professional presentation.

THE GOLDEN RULE: Human attention is very limited. Don’t cram too much information, either in each slide, or in the whole talk. Avoid details: they won’t be remembered anyway.

Below are several tips for a successful Power Point presentation.

ORGANIZATION

• Have a very clear introduction, to motivate what you do and to present a problem you want to solve.

• Use only one idea per slide.

• Have a good conclusions slide: put there the main ideas, the ones you really want people to remember. Use only one “conclusions” slide.

• Don’t count on the audience to remember any detail from one slide to another (like colour-coding, applications you measure, etc.). If you need it remembered, re-state the information a second time.

• Help the audience understand where you are going. Often it is best to give them a high-level overview first, and plunge into details; then, while listening to details they can relate to the high-level picture and understand where you are. This also helps them save important brain power for later parts of the talk which may be more important.

TEXT

• Slides should have short titles. A long title shows something is wrong.

• Use uniform capitalization rules.

• All the text in one slide should have the same structure (e.g. complete phrases, idea only, etc.)

• Don’t use small fonts.

• Spell-check. A spelling mistake is an attention magnet.

Illustrations

• Use suggestive graphical illustrations as much as possible. Prefer an image to text.

• Be absolutely certain that the trend or relationship you are trying to show will be very obvious on the finished chart slide.

• Do not put useless information in result graphs.

• Label clearly the axes of the graphs. Explain the unobvious ones.

COLOURS AND DESIGN

• Change colours or combinations only with a purpose to differentiate sections within your presentation, or different subjects within a longer, or multi-speaker subjects.

• Colour can enliven your slide presentation. However, poor use of colour or too much colour can detract or make your slides hard to read. Use colours that show up best in large rooms. Some colour combinations increase visibility. Such as: black on yellow, black on orange, orange on blue, green on white, red on white, black on white, blue on white, and vice versa.

• When using computer slides or transparencies it is recommended that dark letters are used on a light background.

• Font size should be minimum of 28 pt with header of 40 pt. Avoid using fancy fonts.

• Consistency of colour combination, graphic technique and writing style will allow your slides to continually build one on the other along with your speech. The audience will respond better and you will look more professional.

MECHANICS

• The more you rehearse the talk, the better it will be. A rehearsal is most useful when carried out loud. 5 rehearsals is a minimum for an important talk.