By Janet C. Arrowood

How can you organize your presentation slides so that the information you present is engaging and that you're not just parroting material to your audience? Fortunately, you can use several strategies to keep your audience focused on your message. First, however, it pays to know what not to do when you're at the podium.

The two biggest mistakes presenters make

The two worst things a presenter can do are:

• Read the entire presentation word for word.
• Put most or all of what they're saying on the slides.

Slides dense with text are a sure-fire way to lose the audience. Audience members either will read the presentation and ignore you or will lose interest. Furthermore, reading your presentation shows a lack of confidence and familiarity with your material. Unfortunately, reading text directly from the slides is a common, although ineffective, way to present information. You can, however, avoid this common mistake by using the following strategies.

Keep your audience engaged

There are three ways to take the pressure off your performance and keep your audience interested in your message:

• Structure   A key element to earning audience interest is to structure your information. Your materials should fit together but avoid an unfocused "stream of consciousness" effect.
• Diversify   Present information in several forms: on your Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2003 slides, verbally, in handouts, with animation, and with graphics, quotations, or cartoons. If you can generate audience participation, that's even more effective.
• Practice   Rehearse and refine your materials in front of a live audience. Always do a dry run.

Start with a structure

If you don't know where your presentation is going, how will you — or your audience — know when you get there? Fortunately, there's a simple way to avoid getting lost in the presentation preparation process: Make and use an outline. The outline keeps you on track and serves as a document that you can annotate before you start creating your presentation. You can make notes to yourself about where to use animation, clip art, and cartoons.

In addition to making your presentation simpler to create, an outline is a powerful time-management tool. The various headings in your outline can become the PowerPoint slide titles and the bullets or points. And if you allow two to four minutes per slide, you'll know how long your presentation will be, too.

Diversify: Present information in several forms

• Animate and activate.   You can do a lot with PowerPoint to build a visually interesting presentation. The very action of something moving on the slide, or fading in and out, or appearing item by item can serve several purposes. Action engages your audience, and the visual emphasis can serve as a reminder to you about the key points that you want to make. By having material appear point by point or bullet by bullet, you control how information is presented. The members of your audience can't easily read the entire slide at one time, so they pay more attention to you and your message. You can even use sound effects if they're appropriate to your audience and subject.
• Make notes to coordinate with your presentation.   Creating your speaker's notes by using the PowerPoint notes feature will help keep you on track and reduce the amount of text that you put on the slides.
• Create and use handouts.   Most presenters provide handouts (three slides per page is a good format). Attendees use handouts to take notes and further engage themselves in the presentation.
• Introduce audience activities.   Attendees use sight to read materials, hearing to hear you and any sound effects that you use, and hand/eye coordination to take notes. The more senses that you can involve and the more activities that you can incorporate in your presentation, the more information attendees will retain.
  • Spur interaction   If you can include activities that get audience members talking to you and to one another, this engagement will enhance the audience's retention of your presentation. A relevant newspaper clipping or magazine article, a page or two from a company manual, or a cartoon can serve as reference and discussion material.
  • Provide tests   Worksheets and self-tests are effective ways to convey points and to reinforce presentation material. They'll also take some of the pressure off you, because you can take a breather while members of your audience are completing a quiz or self-assessment or are reading and discussing a handout.
• Take advantage of clip art, cartoons, and quotations   Humor and visual imagery are good ways to engage and entertain your audience. Many Web sites — including Microsoft Office Online — contain free clip art, cartoons, and other images. You can also find quotations that drive home your points. PowerPoint lends itself well to including these visual items in a presentation.

Note  If you must read your presentation directly off the slides, here's a tip: Consider having a second computer with the material you're going to read — keyed to the slides — and treat this computer as a prompter. Better yet, use the notes feature in PowerPoint. You can see the slide with the text that you're going to read on the second screen, but the audience can see only the PowerPoint slides on the first screen.

Pull it together with practice

Conducting a dry run is an excellent way to ensure that your presentation fits into its allotted time and flows in a logical and informative way. Find some fellow employees and ask them to sit through your practice run. They will almost certainly have insights and suggestions that will further enhance your presentation. The more familiar you are with your materials, notes, and handouts, the smoother and more interesting your presentation will be — and the less pressure you'll face on presentation day.

About the author   Janet C. Arrowood is the managing director of The Write Source/Continuing Education Unlimited, Inc., a Golden, Colorado–based writing, training, and course development company.