The manual

The Manual aims at helping you to master speaking (making presentations and taking part in a debate) and writing (writing essays, summaries, reviews, survey reports) skills. READ IT!

Speaking

Term Presentation:

Useful tips

When making a presentation you, first of all, present yourself. Therefore, making an effective presentation is a vital skill.

1. Choose a topic which is challenging and off the beaten track.

2. Doing research for your presentation bear in mind that the content should be both educational and professionally relevant.

3. Structure your presentation carefully:

• In the introduction tell the audience what your presentation is about and what points you want to make. A slide with an outline of your presentation is a big help.

• Make sure each part of your presentation logically follows from the other.

• End with a summary of your points.

4. Rehearse your presentation several times: speak out loud to yourself in the shower, in front of the mirror, your family member, your friend, or your dog. Make sure you can keep to the time limit (10 minutes). Think of parts you can leave out if you feel you exceed the time limit.

5. When preparing a power point presentation, follow these suggestions:

• Use big enough typeface to be seen from the back of the room– font 20 to 24.

• Avoid white printing on dark background.

• Do not use too many fancy visual effects or use these as background for text.

• Avoid putting too much text into one slide (5 lines of short phrases).

• Have the title of the presentation, your name and group number on the 1^st slide.

• Conclude with a thank-you slide.

6. When making the presentation:

• Stand rather than sit when speaking.

• Do not read your notes or slides, speak.

• Do not speak too fast, make pauses.

• Make eye contact with various members of the audience.

• Move from slide to slide as you deal with a particular point, move on when you’ve finished talking about it.

• Remain calm, composed and confident in your delivery.

NB: Copying other people’s presentations is a serious offence!

Useful language for presentations:

To introduce the topic:

Today I'm going to talk about

In this talk I will deal with ‘the topic’…;

To emphasise its importance:

I would like to start by saying/ let me begin by saying that

this is a significant issue at the moment in many ways…

this is a really important topic today because...

this issue is particularly significant in this country/ the world at large at the moment because....

To present /outline the structure/plan of your talk:

I'm going to look at this issue from different angles. Firstly, I will talk about …. Then, I will deal with… Finally, I will try to explain the …

First, I will tell you some facts about the history of…, then I will look into where things stand and finally…

To recap what you have said:

To recap briefly, …

Let me now summarise what I have said about...

Before I conclude I would like to sum up the most important points once again