Oral presentations are common assessment tasks that students often come across at university. These may take the form of group or individual presentations and can vary in time limit and formality. In these presentations, you may need to use a visual aid such as PowerPointslides. They are similar to written assessments such as essays and reports in their structure with an introduction, body and conclusion and have visual elements that make them different from written assessments.

Plan Your Presentation

Planning and preparing an oral presentation is essential to make sure your audience stays engaged and understands the content. Here are some key tips to keep in mind when writing your presentation:

Know Your Purpose

If your presentation is a university assessment, read the assessment criteria carefully. Also, familiarise yourself with the marking rubric and any other instructions for the presentation. Your lecturer will have set the assessment with one or more particular educational purposes in mind, apart from assessing your knowledge of the topic. Always seek to address the assessment criteria in your presentation.

Know Your Audience

When writing the presentation, it's important to consider who the audience is. Think about its size, age, gender, and background. Also, what do they already know about the topic? What do they need to know? What do they want to know and what do they don’t need to know? This information will help you decide how detailed or simple the language should be if there are any sensitive topics that should be avoided, and which visual aids might be most effective at reaching that particular audience.

Structure Your Presentation

Once you know what your purpose is and who your audience is, it's time to start structuring the content of your presentation. An oral presentation follows a similar structure that stories essays and reports follow.  They begin with an introduction, body and conclusion and these three sections should logically flow from each other.

• Introduction: The introduction is the first part of your presentation make sure that it captures the attention of your audience. You could start your presentation with an image, an anecdote or a problem that will ‘hook’ them into your topic. The purpose of a presentation is not only to introduce the topic but also to engage the interest of the audience.
• Body: The body of your oral presentation is where you will elaborate on your points, you can do it with images or sound. However, be careful not to use gimmicks, try and include only things that will aid in making your point clear. Remember to use examples for each point you will be making.
• Conclusion: Now comes the last part, the conclusion should restate what you write about in your introduction and body but make sure it is not longer than your introduction. It should leave the audience with something to think about and make an impression of your topic. To make your conclusion impressive, consider the following questions:
• What your major points were?
• Did you answer any questions during the talk?
• Did the audience ask any questions that you need to include in this part?
• What is it that you want the audience to think about?

Utilizing Visuals to Enhance Engagement

Visual aids can help to better engage your audience and make your presentation more memorable and understandable. The most common type of visual aid is a set of slides (PowerPoint slides) but these can also include models, posters, video clips, and pictures/images. Visual aids can help the audience understand complex concepts, visualise structures and processes which are hard to understand with words only and compare the information.