Presentations
Presentation slides are an important component of your narrative; they are there to tell a visual story and help you to communicate your message to your audience. A well-designed presentation will help you to deliver your message clearly and it will ensure your audience gets the most out of your presentation. A poorly designed presentation could distract your audience from your important information and create confusion, which will not showcase your knowledge effectively.
There are a variety of platforms to choose from when it comes to creating your presentation slides and they all have their own benefits and disadvantages. Here is a selection with some positive and negative aspects for your consideration:
You will have to upload all your assignments to Turnitin so make sure that you choose a platform that is compatible. You don't want any last-minute submission problems.
Once you have selected a platform for building your slides, you are ready to start drafting your visual aid to your narrative. Your slides should complement your speech, not tell your story for you and not be redundant. They should be meaningful, support what you are saying and give your audience a visual representation of your points to aid their understanding. Below are some general rules you should follow:
- Always opt for quality over quantity (see the tab below for guidance)
- Minimise your words by avoiding writing in paragraphs; use bullets instead
- Can you make the same point with a visual instead of text? For example, use a graph/chart, diagram or an image to communicate your information
- Avoid using animations and effects in your presentations. These can be distracting for your audience and are not always compatible with other technology if you need to download or upload the file to another computer.
- Make your slides meaningful by following a simple structure:
- Point; make this the title of your slide
- Evidence; use the main space of your slide to depict your information
- Explanation; use your speech to explain the relevance of your information (do not put this on your slides)
- You must include references on your slides to credit your research and all sources of information. This includes referencing any images you’ve used. See the Learning Skills Hub modules on Visual Literacy for further advice.
- Use a clear and simple font for your text, such as Arial or Calibri. Avoid using themed fonts or Times New Roman as these can be difficult to read. Avoid using italics.
- Use high contrast colours such as black and white (an off-white is better) and avoid using only colour to differentiate information. Red and green colours are hard to differentiate for people with colour blindness so avoid contrasting these hues.
- Keep your visuals simple and limit the number on one slide. You will need to describe and summarise the visual if anyone in the audience is blind.
- Make sure any videos you use have captions.
- Consult Microsoft's guidance on creating accessible presentations.
You can learn more about how to make your information and data more visual by watching the below. David McCandless presents 'The beauty of data visualisation' in his Ted Talk.
Below is an example of how to minimise the word count on your slides, taking a paragraph and bulleting the important information into key points. Notice the difference in the two slides; which one do you think is easier to read?
This slide requires a lot of attention from the audience to read and understand the text. When the audience has too much to read, they will not be listening to you talking.
This slide uses bullet points, highlighted in different coloured blocks to illustrate the key information from the paragraph in the first slide. It is clearer and easier to read therefore the audience can understand the information quickly and still listen to the speaker.
A note on referencing
Remember, this is an academic piece of work so you must include on your slides references to all your research used in your presentation. This includes referencing images and graphs. You should follow the guidelines for the referencing style used on your course and apply them to your work. You can learn more about referencing information from these other Learning Skills Hub modules:
Tips for group work
You will need to decide as a group which platform you want to build your slides on. Make sure everyone in the team can access your file for editing and final review.
The team might want to nominate one or two people in the group to design template slides for others in the group to populate with information. If you are all going to work on the slides, have one person do the final edit to ensure the slides have consistency in font style and size, layout of information and language. All members of the group should proofread the slides before presentation day and the final submission.
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