How to make memorable presentation points
How to Contribute Effectively in Meetings
Clarity is vital for successful presentations and public speaking. If your audience are unable to understand your message, they will likely feel confused and frustrated. You will not get your message across or achieve your speaking goals.
So how do we make clear presentations? There are lots of techniques that we can apply throughout writing and delivering the presentation to ensure that our audience follows and understands our message.
I have picked out five of the most effective and efficient techniques for creating clear presentations. In this article we’ll explore why they are so useful and how to easily apply them to your next presentation or speech.
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Use your introduction to set the structure
1. Focus on a single key message
Presentations that are difficult to understand and follow often contain too much irrelevant information. The presenter includes everything that they want the audience to know, rather than trimming their content down to focus only on what the audience needs to know.
Having too much irrelevant information overloads our brain. We don’t know what is important to focus on, and there is simply too much to remember. We feel overwhelmed and the result is often that we understand and remember nothing!
To help make your presentation really clear, take a minute to think about what your single key message is. What is the one sentence that you want your audience to know and remember after they have heard you speak? What is the one thing that they need to remember for them to think, feel and do as you wish?
Once you have identified your key message, review all of your content and slides. Does each piece of content reinforce or contribute to this message? If it doesn’t, then why do your audience need to hear it? Cut it! You will quickly find that your bloated presentation becomes streamlined and focused on what matters most; your key message.
The result? Absolute clarity with your content.
2. Use your introduction to set the structure
There’s an old saying about public speaking: ‘Tell them what you are going to tell them, tell them, and then tell them what you told them…’
This is great advice for clear presentations. Great presentation introductions always begin by telling your audience what you are going to tell them. They include details of what the speaker is going to talk about and outlines the structure of the speech or presentation. It might include a verbal or written agenda highlighting the key areas that the speech will cover.
Sharing the structure of the speech or presentation that will follow is a great way to support your audience to understand and remember your messages. It gives your audience a framework within which to organise all of the information in their brain. It makes the information that you are sharing appear logical rather than jumbled.
Imagine a speaker that appears on stage and just begins talking and doesn’t tell you what they are talking about or what they were going to cover. The speech and the information within it would likely appear and sound to you like just a random jumble of statements and information. It would be confusing and unclear.
If that speaker had begun with a brief outline of what they would cover and why, suddenly the information that follows becomes much more understandable and useful to you.
For this reason, always take a few seconds at the start of your presentation to talk about what you will discuss today. This can take the form of a detailed agenda, but can just as easily be a single sentence:
“Today we will look at the history of bananas, and I will share with you, why and how they have become such a popular fruit.”
Beyond giving your audience a structure within which to understand your presentation, sharing your agenda in this way also gives you a focus and framework for your content when delivering it. It should help you to remember and deliver your content in a clear and concise way.
3. Create an engaging agenda slide
We have already discovered that agendas are super useful for helping to make our presentations really clear and understandable. Agendas can be verbal, or they can be visual, often taking the form of a dedicated slide within your presentation slide deck.
Speakers that are great at making really clear presentations use both a verbal and a visual agenda. We all prefer to process information in different ways and so putting the agenda into multiple useful formats (verbal and visual) ensures that our audience ‘gets it’ and really understands the structure of our message. This all helps to ensure that we are super clear.
If you are speaking with a slide deck, then an agenda slide is a must-have. But it doesn’t just have to be a long list of boring titles. Consider using these easy techniques to make your agenda more effective and your presentation really easy to understand and follow:
Turn your agenda headings into questions
‘What is it?’ ‘Why is it important?’ ‘How do we solve it?’ - turning your agenda headings into questions highlights gaps in your audience’s knowledge. They will become keen to know the answers to these questions and as the speaker, you can provide the answers. These headings will also help provide a useful reminder for you on what to speak about within each section of your presentation. You just have to answer the questions!
Keep it to no more than 7 items
Lots of scientific experiments have shown that, on average, we can retain seven pieces of information within our short term memory. Any more and we start to forget things and get confused.
Try and condense your agenda sections into no more than seven headings or sections, to support your audience to understand and remember your content. More than seven will likely make your audience feel overwhelmed. They may also feel a little anxious about how long this presentation may last!
Return to your agenda slide frequently
Don’t expect your audience to remember your agenda structure. Return to it regularly throughout your presentation to remind them of where we are on your presentation ‘journey’ and to help make your presentation super clear.
You can discover lots more useful tips for creating agenda slides in our full article here.
4. Use transition phrases
It is vital that we support our audience to understand our content throughout our whole presentation, not just at the start.
Transition phrases are a great way to remind our audience of where we are within a topic, so that they can more easily understand and follow what we are saying.
What is a transition phrase?
A transition phrase is a sentence that we use as we move between sections within our presentation. A good example of a transition phrase would be:
“We have covered X and now we are going to move on and look at Y”.
A transition phrase such as this one highlights to your audience what we have just looked at and what we are going to discover next. It reminds them of where we are within the journey of your agenda.
Transition phrases help our audience, particularly if their attention has been distracted whilst we have been speaking. It reminds them of where we are, and gives them an opportunity to get back into your presentation and understand it. Transition phrases also help to reinforce the agenda and structure of your message within your audience’s mind. This helps them to even better understand and process your content, making your presentation super clear.
Plot some pre-prepared transition phrases into the script for your next presentation to help support your audience as they navigate their way through your speech.
5. Conclude with repetition
Remember that old saying from earlier in this article? Well now it’s time to conclude your presentation by ‘telling them what you told them’.
Great conclusions help to make your key messages really clear for your audience by repeating or recapping the main points of your presentation. This clear articulation of your key points ensures that your audience hasn’t missed them, and helps to make them more memorable too because repetition is great for increasing recall.
Our conclusion
So let’s provide a really clear conclusion to this article…
It’s your job as a presenter to ensure that your message is clear and that your audience can understand it. There are lots of techniques that you can use to do this throughout your presentation.
Five really easy ones that we have looked at today are:
- Focus on one key message
- Use your introduction to set the structure
- Create an engaging agenda slide
- Use transition phrases
- Conclude with repetition
If you want to be a clear, concise and successful presenter then the first step is to consciously plan some of these techniques into your next presentation. Prepare early and practice using these techniques and you will quickly find that your messages are clearer, your audiences are more engaged and you become increasingly effective every time that you speak!
Good luck. As ever, if you need any support or would like to organise a training session for your team that is full of techniques and tips like these ones, then please contact us here.
