In this lesson you learn the general principles for writing a presentation document, including ways in which a presentation is similar to or different from a written document.
There are a wide variety of presentations and reasons to give one. We will focus in this lesson on internal presentations (that is, presentations to people within your organization); however, most external presentations follow the same principles.
There are two general types of internal presentations:
Persuasive presentations
Informative presentations
Persuasive presentations are similar to recommendation memos—you're asking your audience to agree to something you're proposing. Informative presentations more closely follow the structure of a summary or analysis, in which you are providing information your audience did not previously have.
In general, you should structure your persuasive presentation similarly to the way you would structure a memo on the same subject.
Specifically, when you wish to persuade your audience to do something (for example, you wish your company's board of directors to fund a new plant) the structure should follow the form of a recommendation memo, with the following sections:
Overview
Background
Recommendation
Rationale
Additional Information Needed
Next Steps
In the overview, you will tell your audience what the presentation will be about, and what you're asking them to do. You would then go on to provide any necessary background the audience needs to understand your recommendation and why you're making it. Next comes the recommendation itself, and then the reasons why the recommendation is sound (the rationale). If necessary, in the Additional Information Needed section you would include any significant issues or concerns with this proposal, and how you're addressing them. Finally, you would conclude your presentation with your Next Steps section, a brief listing of what needs to happen next, along with when it needs to happen and who's responsible for making it happen.
Similarly, if you're preparing an informative presentation, your deck would follow the summary or analysis structure:
Overview
Background
Findings and conclusions
Indicated actions
Plain English
A presentation deck is the written form of a presentation—the "deck" of pages that you show your audience as you go through your presentation. A page of a deck is sometimes called a slide.
The Overview and Background sections would be the same as for the persuasive presentation. Exactly how the Findings and Conclusions sections are structured will depend in part on the nature of your conclusions.
For example, suppose you are the marketing manager of a line of leather products (wallets, attachés, organizers, and so on). You've just completed a major survey of a competitor's marketing activities, including differences by region, by month, and by major product line, and are going to present these findings to two different groups. The first presentation of your competitive analysis is to your company's senior management. They are interested in the broad overview of what competitors are doing, and how that generally affects the company. For that presentation, you might present only one or two overarching conclusions, supported by a number of important findings. (Three findings are listed here for illustration; in actuality, you might have several more.)
Alternatively, your second presentation of the same material is to the regional marketing managers, who must implement tactics in their own regions. For that presentation, you may wish to present a number of "smaller" conclusions specific to various regions or seasons of the year, rather than one or two overarching ones. If so, an appropriate format is to present each conclusion, followed immediately by findings supporting that conclusion:
As with a written summary of analysis, end your presentation with an Indicated Actions section, based on your conclusions.
While the framework for your presentation deck should follow along the same general lines as a memo, some of the mechanics will be different. We will examine four important aspects:
Brevity
Charts and graphs
Other visuals
Handouts
In a written document, the words on the page must carry the entire load—they must deliver your information, provide the support for that information, and persuade the reader to accept your message. In a presentation, however, you have the opportunity as speaker to shoulder some of that burden. This allows you to be judicious in how much written material you put on each page (or slide) of a presentation deck.
Two other factors contribute to the need for brevity. The first is that you want your audience to pay attention to you, rather than the slide; you don't want them to be reading more than they have to. The second is that presentations filled with pages of tightly packed prose are uninviting to read, so your audience may tune it (and you) out.
Caution
Your audience has a limited attention span. It's easy to create presentations that run too long—be sure to keep yours short enough to hold your audience's attention.
Therefore, try to limit your slides to the "headlines" of your presentation. A good rule of thumb is that more than 25 to 30 words will start to overcrowd the page.
Let's look at how the previous presentation example would look in slide format:
Notice that there is not much information on any single slide— generally only one or two important points. In this way, you can lead the presentation by focusing your audience's attention on the single point under discussion, rather than allowing your audience to "read ahead."
Charts and graphs can be effective tools in a presentation, allowing you to quickly demonstrate your point. As with words on a page of the deck, however, you must avoid trying to cram too much information into a single page or chart. Edit as much as you can to allow your chart or graph to show clearly the single point you're trying to make.
Consider the competitive analysis discussed in this lesson. Here's one possible slide:
A better alternative to showing all the information is to just show the relevant information:
In the first chart, your audience will have a difficult time picking out the relevant information and potentially will be distracted by trying to analyze the share numbers for the other regions. The second chart is preferable because it distills the data into exactly what is needed to make the point you wish to make.
Similar to the use of charts and graphs, the use of other visuals, such as a copy of a competitor's print advertising in a discussion of how successful that advertising is, can be effective in a presentation. As with charts and graphs, be judicious in your use of visuals, to avoid overwhelming your audience with pictures and causing them to lose sight of your key messages.
After your presentation is complete, you will often want to give audience members handouts of the presentation deck that they might refer to later. In general, the handout can be merely a close copy of the deck you used in your presentation. Occasionally, however, you may wish to include backup or supporting data for some of the key points made in the presentation. These can be added as appendixes to the deck itself. Since these appendixes are not part of the main presentation, they can contain more data than a chart or page in the regular deck.
Effective presentations follow essentially the same format as effective memos, for exactly the same reason—to deliver the information you wish to present as efficiently and effectively as possible. The presentation format gives you the additional flexibility of including charts, graphs, and other visual aids that are more difficult to include in written memos, as well as the opportunity to orally expound on the data you're presenting. For these reasons, the presentation can be an effective tool if used properly.
Structure presentation decks similarly to how you structure memos.
Keep individual pages of your deck brief, with at most one or two points and about 25 to 30 words per page.
Use charts and graphs to present data; as with other pages of your deck, streamline charts and graphs to focus on only a single piece of information.
Use other visuals to illustrate key points, but don't overwhelm your viewer with so many visuals that he loses sight of the point of your presentation.