How to make an impact with your speech

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Be absolutely clear about what you want to achieve by presenting. Your aim dictates and influences everything – the medium you use, the length of your speech and your overall attitude to the presentation. Be clear about what is there for your audience. This advice comes from the presentationmagazine.com website.

You need the right motivation

Many people present either because they have to or because someone wants them to talk about the subject. This can be a problem because your audience is interested only in what is in it for them. Your presentation should have a goal, which is often to urge your audience to do something.

Usually, you should want them to change something, so you need to have a clear intention and not just rely on coincidence. Your presentation will then be much more powerful, amusing and effective. A presentation needs to be designed with a view to its goal.

What are you trying to achieve?

You need to know your aim in order to design your presentation accordingly because the standard medium is not always the right one. Sometimes you should use a different format from PowerPoint or Prezi. Words are often better spoken than read from a screen. Facts and figures are better distributed as handouts; they should not be projected on a screen.

Don’t be too demanding

A regular audience will be capable of concentrating only for a short period of time. The precise length of this period is unknown but it is most probably somewhat shorter than you would expect and hope for. Chances are your audience will reach saturation point well before you have told them everything you want. They just want to hear what is relevant to them and how they can use it; for them, everything else is only your ego talking or an irrelevance.

-jk-

Article source Presentation Magazine - free presentation resources
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