When giving a presentation, the type of presentation you do depends on your audience, timeframe, topic, and much more. Here’s a breakdown of some common types of presentations and a few examples of what they might be best-suited for:
- Lecture (with or without handouts). When there’s just one or two people standing at the front of the room talking, it shouldn’t be a lengthy presentation. Lectures should be no longer than 30 minutes without handouts, or 1 hour including handouts and a question period. Lectures can be tricky, as you need to be a dynamic and enthusiastic speaker to hold your audience’s attention. Try not to talk about the same thing for any longer than about five minutes, as most attention spans don’t last much longer than that.
- PowerPoint or Prezi. These should be flashy – go for lots of pictures, graphs, and bullet points. Most of your presentation should be you talking (NOT reading off of the PowerPoint or Prezi), but this gives you a great option to supplement your words with images, which the audience will enjoy looking at while you speak.
- Demonstration. When the audience has something to watch as well as listen, they’ll be able to pay attention for a longer period of time. Make sure that your demonstration makes sense for the presentation and that it’s something easy for you to do and interesting for others to look at.
- Hands-on interactive session. These can be much longer sessions than any other type of presentation. Explaining instructions and giving everyone enough time to carry out the activity can mean that your audience won’t even notice the minutes ticking by. This is especially good for youth or for an audience that might otherwise be bored by your topic, but do make sure that the activity is relevant to your topic!
- Discussion. Want feedback from your audience? Discussions are a great way to encourage others to share their thoughts, ideas and opinions. You do need to act as moderator here, however, to keep the participants on topic and on time.
If you’re in doubt of which type of presentation is most appropriate, try mixing and matching a couple of these! Done right, they can work beautifully in conjunction and it can be a fantastic way of holding your audience’s attention and ensuring that they learn as much as possible from your presentation.
What’s your favourite type of presentation?