Critical Skills: Presentations

Presentations are a way to convey information or ideas to an audience. Traditionally, presentations occurred through in-person oral delivery. However, modern technologies allow presenters to utilize a diversity of in-person and virtual formats to convey their message. Both in-person and virtual presentations must aim to provide concise, understandable, and important information during a set period of time. While some presentations rely on the speaker’s voice, others are assisted by visual images projected on a screen or fliers passed out to the audience. These visual aids are intended to supplement but not overshadow the oral presentation.

Presentation skills are critical to academic and career success because they display the ability to condense and convey critical information to an audience. While an employer ideally looks at a candidate’s entire résumé, a first impression is often set by the interview and/or a presentation. As such, strong presentation skills are essential to success in many academic and career fields. Many class projects involve presentations as a way to practice the most important skills and also allow students to gain confidence in public speaking. This training prepares students for the many types of presentations they might make in the workplace. For example, working in customer service might require giving presentations to customers about a new product, presenting sales reports to upper level management, or presenting an award at a staff meeting. By developing a full set of presentation skills, students and employees can be prepared for any type of presentation.

Core Skills & Competencies

Audiences expect that a speech will be well organized and include an introduction, body, and conclusion. To help audience members keep track of key arguments and the progression between the parts of a presentation, speakers often begin with a roadmap that describes what will be included in the presentation. As the presentation progresses, the speaker provides "signposts," a type of transition or verbal cue that a new topic is being addressed. For example, a speaker might say, "Now, on my second point . . ." Because audiences will not remember every point made during a presentation, speakers often identify a take-home message and repeat that message throughout the speech.

Three main rhetorical skills are used in a presentation: pathos, ethos, and logos. Pathos is an appeal to the audience. This can include, but is not limited to, emotional appeals such as making the audience sad or sympathetic, invoking feelings of pride or patriotism, or inspiring happiness. Ethos is an appeal to character and is used to assure the audience that the speaker is an authority on, or at least well informed about, a particular topic. Ethos reflects the speaker’s perspective. Logos, in rhetoric, pertains to logic; it is the content of the speech and the way that a speaker organizes the speech to ensure that the audience can understand the connections between the presentation’s points.

A strong presenter establishes the presentation’s pathos, ethos, and logos at the beginning of the speech and makes sure that they are all balanced. This means that the speaker will not move the audience to tears and then produce illogical arguments. If the speaker did so, the presentation would have an abundance of pathos but poor logos. Similarly, a celebrity speaker might already have strong ethos because the audience already knows all about the celebrity’s life. However, to give a strong presentation, the celebrity must also establish the audience’s emotional connection with the speech topic by using pathos and present information in a logical format by using logos.

Presentation software applications, such as Microsoft PowerPoint, Prezi, and Keynote for Apple, allow presenters to display text, graphics, and images for their audiences. Such displays are useful ways to convey information to an audience. For example, a presenter makes a bigger impact when displaying a bar graph rather than verbally explaining numerical data. Similarly, displaying a map can quickly allow the audience to understand the part of the world about which a speaker is presenting.

The i nternet has also allowed for the proliferation of presentations for entertainment and education. Organizations such as TED specialize in bringing together experts to give short presentations about their work and ideas. These presentations are designed for two audiences: audience members who are seated in an auditorium and audience members who will later watch or listen online. Knowing that there are two audiences forces the presenter to make extra preparations for the speech. The presenter cannot simply rely on nonverbal feedback from the audience during the speech. Instead, the presenter must anticipate how a person watching the speech online might receive the presentation’s message and what types of visual aids would make the message clearer.

Research & Theory

Presentations and the art of presentation-making have been studied for centuries. In ancient Greece, scholars such as Aristotle, Plato, and Socrates debated about the use of verbal presentation as opposed to written notes, and wondered whether it was ethical for a poor speechmaker to hire a coach and/or a speechwriter.

Contemporary scholars accept that many speakers have hired speechwriters and that many speechwriters are poor speakers. While the ethical nature of presenting another person’s words as one’s own is still debated, attention has primarily turned to the integration of technology and verbal presentation. The use of presentation aids, combined with verbal speech, is of particular interest to scholars such as Edward Tufte, who examines the ways that audiences interpret graphical depictions of information. Tufte cautions that audiences often look first to the visual representation and then pay attention to the verbal presentation. As such, he argues, graphics must be designed to avoid misinterpretation and to assist, rather than replace, the spoken word.

Bibliography

"Aristotle's Rhetoric." Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 15 Mar. 2022, plato.stanford.edu/entries/aristotle-rhetoric/. Accessed 6 Jan. 2025.

Beebe, Stephen A., and Susan J. Beebe. Public Speaking: An Audience Centered Approach. Pearson, 2014.

Hertz, Brigitte, Cees van Woerkum, and Peter Kerkhof. "Why Do Scholars Use PowerPoint the Way They Do?" Business and Professional Communication Quarterly 78.3 (2015): 273–91.

Kedrowicz, April A., and Julie L. Taylor. "Shifting Rhetorical Norms and Electronic Eloquence: TED Talks as Formal Presentations." Journal of Business and Technical Communication 30.3 (2016): 352–77.

Plato. Six Great Dialogues: Apology, Crito, Phaedo, Phaedrus, Symposium, The Republic. Trans. Benjamin Jowett. Dover, 2007.

Riegel, Deborah Grayson. "Your In-Person Presentation Skills Need a Refresh." Harvard Business Review, 19 July 2023, hbr.org/2023/07/your-in-person-presentation-skills-need-a-refresh. Accessed 6 Jan. 2025.

Tufte, Edward R. Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative. Graphics, 1997.