Once the content of the presentation is solid, the other foundation is the delivery, for which here are a few useful pointers.
Formulate your words and speak slowly.
An enthusiastic approach towards your work or your idea and the urge to finish the presentation as fast as possible can easily lead to an overly quick delivery and to slurred words. If you feel that you're speaking at a slow and comfortable pace, slow down further to about 50% of that pace. Speaking slowly provides a variety of benefits beyond the obvious, and ensure that your audience can understand what you're saying; it gives you more time to choose your next words, helps slow down the pace to keep you relaxed and in control, and provides you with an opportunity for you to watch the audience's expressions and re-adjust your presentation strategy (for example, by rewording an explanation upon detection of blank faces) if necessary.
Train yourself to avoid sprinkling your speech with "ums" and "likes," and replace them instead with pauses. Either have a friend count your "ums" or "likes" or record your own presentation and count them yourself later. While initially uncomfortable, pauses actually sound more professional and help accentuate key points that you're trying to communicate. Colin Firth's Oscar-winning performance and delivery in the The King's Speech exemplifies how a carefully enunciated and pause-filled speech can motivate and move an audience.
Maintain eye contact with the audience.In particular, pick a few friendly faces from the audience that appear to be reacting to your presentation. Their nods of approval and understanding give positive feedback and bolster your confidence during the presentation, and any confused expressions act as an indicator that you might need to slow down and re-explain a possibly tricky point.
Don't read directly from your slides.
Time spent on reading slides is time not spent maintaining eye contact with the audience. Moreover, reading long sentence-like bullet points on slides conveys a lack of preparation and reduces the incentive of the audience to actually listen to you since they can just read the text faster themselves. A better approach is to list key, succinct points on the slides and to connect them together with your own words. This incentives you to better rehearse to have fluid transitions between points and forces the audience to pay attention in order to understand the presentation.
Move deliberately in time with your points, so that transitions in your physical stage presence correspond to transitions in your presentation.This helps to both reduce the amount of haphazard pacing while accentuating important transitions in your presentations.If your presentation has three points, one simple way of doing this to walk in the shape of squished baseball diamond so that you walk to a new base as you transition to each point and then walk back to home plate as you conclude.
If your presentation involves writing on a whiteboard, make sure to write with an open body that's perpendicular to the board rather than facing the board. Facing the board while you write occludes the text or diagrams and increases the lag between when you're writing (and likely speaking) and when the audience can actually read what you wrote.
If there is Q&A at the end of the presentation, always repeat the question, possibly rephrasing in your own words. Repeating the question ensures both a) that the audience is able to hear the question, and b) that you've actually heard the question correctly and don't waste time or look silly while answering an incorrect interpretation of the question.
Skills in structuring effective presentations and delivering them clearly come with practice. Keeping vision, steps, news, and contributions in mind for any talk or presentation will make it stronger, and dissecting strong presentations and critiquing weak ones to understand how the speaker handled or mishandled each cornerstone will make your own talks better.
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