Researching and planning

Once you have determined the purpose of your presentation, you can begin the research. You may find it helpful to formulate the purpose of your presentation as a question, or to draft a presentation title, to ensure that you know the boundaries of your research before you begin the process.

Tailor your research to the length of the presentation: if your presentation is only seven or eight minutes long you will not be able to cover very much material and should not try to do so. Do not exceed the time limit for your presentation simply because you have too much material, nor for any other reason within your control. Audiences react badly to speakers who overrun their allotted time, and if the presentation is assessed you will lose marks.

Plan the presentation using the results of your research to build a logically ordered and coherent presentation. One commonly cited method for ordering material in an oral presentation is the ‘three times rule’ which says that when addressing your audience you should ‘tell them what you are going to tell them; tell them; tell them what you have told them’. The introduction is the place to tell the listeners ‘what you are going to tell them’, the main body of the presentation is where you ‘tell them’ and the conclusion is where to ‘tell them what you have told them’. In the conclusion you should take particular care to demonstrate that you have achieved all you promised in your introduction.

In one sense, there is nothing remarkable about the ‘three times rule’. It simply reminds the speaker that a presentation must have a beginning, a middle and an end. However, it serves the additional, and very important, function of emphasising the need for planned repetition in public speaking. For this reason many people plan the main body of their presentation first. This reduces the risk of making claims in the introduction that cannot be achieved in the time available and also helps to ensure that only the aims that have been fulfilled in the presentation are featured in the conclusion.

Plan the main body of the presentation by listing the issues and sub-issues you need to cover, and then arrange them into some kind of order. Use headings and subheadings to represent each point and sub-point, and sketch out your plan on a single side of paper if at all possible. Ideally, you should provide yourself with an overview of what you are aiming to achieve. This will help you to identify not only any gaps in your material and flaws in your argument, but also any aspects of your material or argument that you can jettison because they do not contribute anything useful to the overall enterprise. Some topics work best if they are presented in a chronological order, while others lend themselves to a thematic, topic-based, structure. Where you need to develop an argument, your presentation should follow a logical order revealing each step of your line of reasoning. Above all, the content and structure of your presentation needs to be planned for delivery as speech, in a way that makes sense of the topic and in a manner which makes it as easy as possible for your listeners to follow what you are saying. Once the main body of the presentation is in order, create an outline of your introduction and conclusions, before starting to make notes for your presentation.