A successful presentation helps audience connect the dots of information scattered in their brains.
After gleaning two important and interesting points from my readings, I tried to find examples for both points that would facilitate understanding and discussion among the audience. I tried to imagine how the audience would perceive my slides (Putnis & Petelin 1999). I found this vital to capture the audience's attention as they were more engaged in our group's presentation when we showed them interesting images of creative advertisements. The 'Redundancy' principle in combining graphics and prose as elaborated in Schriver (1997) was applied to enhance the audience's understanding of my points.
After gleaning two important and interesting points from my readings, I tried to find examples for both points that would facilitate understanding and discussion among the audience. I tried to imagine how the audience would perceive my slides (Putnis & Petelin 1999). I found this vital to capture the audience's attention as they were more engaged in our group's presentation when we showed them interesting images of creative advertisements. The 'Redundancy' principle in combining graphics and prose as elaborated in Schriver (1997) was applied to enhance the audience's understanding of my points.
Slide: The Redundancy Principle
I made sure my slides were clean with clear borders to categorize information, and that font size was standard and sufficiently large to be readable (Kress & van Leeuwen 2006). A colour scheme to guide the eyes was used (Reep 1997). The headings were worded appropriately for the content of the particular slide. I took care to insert one idea per slide and ensured that each sentence was not too long, within 8-15 words. I also ensured that my content was properly referenced.
During my presentation, I made eye contact with the audience and spoke in a friendly way so that the social metafunction of my presentation would be accurate. I asked questions and prompted them to further analyze the images I presented in the slides to enhance text-audience interaction.
The significant improvement I noted from our group presentation to my individual presentation is the absence of big chunks of text in my slides. The audience responded better to my verbal explanation compared to prose, which tends to include more jargon and lexicon words. The multimodal presentation worked better to maintain audience interest (Walsh 2006).
I have learnt that the way you convey a message can sometimes be more important than the message itself as the mode of communication itself adds subtle meaning to your content. Graphics, prose, slide transitions, verbal language, and body language all come into play to help audience connect the dots. If all of the these elements are properly constructed and graciously enmeshed, a sterling presentation can result.
References:
1. Kress, G & van Leeuwen, TV 2006, Reading images: The grammar of visual design, 2nd edn, Routledge, London.
2. Putnis, Peter & Petelin, Roslyn 1999, Professional communication, 2nd edn, Prentice Hall Australia Pty Ltd, Australia.
3. Reep, DC 1997, Technical writing: principles, strategies, and readings, Allyn and Bacon, Boston.
4. Schriver K.A 1997, Dynamics in Document Design: Creating Texts for Readers, Wiley Computer Pub., New York.
5. Walsh, M. 2006,” ‘Textual shift’: Examining the reading process with print, visual and multimodal texts,” Australian Journal of Language and Literacy, vol.29, no.1, p.24-37.
5. Walsh, M. 2006,” ‘Textual shift’: Examining the reading process with print, visual and multimodal texts,” Australian Journal of Language and Literacy, vol.29, no.1, p.24-37.
