What Are the Greatest Ways to Improve One's Presentation Skills?

There are so many possible answers to this question that it’s almost impossible to find a reasonable response in one single article. But it’s not my goal here…

I use multiple points of view all the time, and I love doing it, but not all of my stories require this multifocal approach. But in this case it does. I have just made a little research on the internet to find some reasonable answers to my question and here are the best of them. Hema Manickavasagam’s advice from 'Quora' is for example the following ‘Watch a lot of amazing public speakers’! After mentioning her, it’s quite important to note not to limit your focus to technology leaders only and probably you need to pick a speaker closer to your personality to copy anyways. She says : ‘You might not be able to pull off a Steve Jobs presentation or a talk by Obama. But, Bill Clinton or Bill Moyers, might be more your style. You might be able to tell a great story and hook the audience in a quieter way. Either way, you learn a lot by observing good speakers. ‘

If you really like a presentation, check out the transcript as well, not just the slides. It will give you a better understanding to organize your own content. Being prepared to give a speech and having a clear outline in your head is more than half the battle won.

Always observe your audience to see what they want. Don't force a prepackaged talk on an unprepared audience. If you are unsure, ask them. In the worst case, you might have to skip all your slides and just have a discussion. Or, just do an overview of fundamentals and skip the speech part entirely. You cannot win them over with a speech that is either too simple or too complex for the audience.

According to Edmond Lau - member of a Speech and Debate team for 5 years - a great presentation consists of two important parts: well-structured content that empowers the idea that you're trying to convey and an eloquent style of delivery that keeps your audience's attention focused on your content. Both parts aim to facilitate a more neat and efficient communication of your ideas to an audience.  Poor structure makes it more difficult for your audience to follow and extract salient points, and poor delivery might affect the quality  of the content.

There is an effective and almost ordinary paradigm for structuring content that's applicable to any presentation, essay, research paper, funding pitch, job application presentation, resume, or tech talk.

Based on this structure, any compelling presentation or paper would build rely upon the following four cornerstone ideas:

• a clearly defined vision statement
• an enumeration of concrete steps toward achieving the vision
• an articulation of salient news and results with clarifying details
• a summary of contributions to the topic

Most presentations, surprisingly enough, fit into this paradigm and become much more powerful if designed with these principles kept in mind. Weak presentations on the other hand, usually omit one or more of these parts.

Offering a brief, however, clear vision (preferably on its own slide if slides are used) early in the presentation establishes the thematic goal of the talk. It defines the boundaries of what's relevant in the ideas presented and provides the glue that ties various points together. Briefness and clarity in the vision ensure focus in the speech.  Overly detail-focused individuals, in particular, sometimes create presentations where themes are only implicitly defined and points diverge continuously and unpredictably flail around haphazardly.

Once a high-level vision is established, enumerating concrete steps for attaining that vision gives the audience a mental path to follow and understand what's necessary to reach that goal. The steps review progress already made and highlight what still needs to be done. Most presenters tend to get this part right, since it's a straightforward summary of an already completed work.

With the path established, sharing news and details about recent accomplishments provides an excellent opportunity to win the audience over. Numbers, statistics, graphs, analogies, demos, and stories that showcase results often work well.  Engineers tend to  overestimate abstraction and inadvertently neglect to include details, though details and stories are often what make the talk compelling.

Wrapping up the talk should be a summary of contributions. A common mistake is to end a well-organized presentation merely with listing major points over again rather than crystallizing the unique contributions the presenter or the presenter's team actually accomplished.The contributions listed may be an already completed work that moves a field, product, or company forward or they may simply be the refinement of ideas that offer a completely new perspective.