The Four Organizing Principles Of Presentation

For a presenter it is very important to deliver a clear message with the right impact. Having organized content and more importantly effectively organized content is an important part of a presentation as it helps in the following ways;

Aides clear understanding.
Helps drive your point with ease.
Ease in negotiation.
Ease in collecting and accessing follow up.
Effective communication.

The four principles are:

Making things crystal clear.
Connecting ideas.
Focusing on key messages.
The art of improvisation.

Making things crystal clear:

As the name suggests it is about delivering the content in the correct manner in a sequence that is understandable and interesting.

Introduction: let the audience know about a new topic that is coming up, this will help regain attention.
Sequencing: having a correct sequence of information delivered is extremely helpful for the audience to grasp the message.
Connecting: after explaining the sequence it is advisable to connect these together to give information. This does not lead to information overload and is interesting.
Bridging: it is Important to bridge all the topics of the sequence so that the presentation makes some sense.
Developing: presenters have to introduce new data and complex reasoning at various points in the presentation. This stage is important when he presenters wants to talk about an unrelated topic or wants to recall something said earlier or to postpone a discussion for the future.
Closing: it is important to signal the presenters ending with a summary and a conclusion.

Connecting ideas:

In a presentation the presenter has to give out a lot of information in a very structured manner. It is thus very important that the ideas that he reflects in the presentation are connected, ideas that are not relevant to the following topic and not connected to the previous topic should be kept for the later part of the presentation and related topics should be explained in a proper sequence first. It is also important to explain the purpose of the presentation by contradicting and using humor to good effect.

Focusing on key messages:

The presenter needs to make sure the audience is alert and interested when he is discussing key points in the presentation. There are 2 kinds of focuses that the presenter may prefer. Focus on the message or focus on the intentions of the message.
The intention behind the message should be explicit and clear especially when dealing with international audiences. Communication with a multi cultural audience asks for a lot of hard work as one can easily be misunderstood.
To drive attention to the message it is advisable to stress on certain parts of the sentences, use pauses and highlight for better understanding.

The art of improvisation:

Presenters need to keep the slides to a bare minimum and rehearse well if they are looking to adopt an open ended approach for the presentation.
Slides with lots of bullet points restrict the possibility of improvisation.
It is advisable to use more graphic oriented and conceptual slide.
Ask the audience questions if one wants to really see if they are interested and paying attention.

Raul Gonsalves for naashtapaani.com