1. Organizing & Outlining
Your Presentation

2. Organizing & Outlining Your Presentation
• Organizing your main idea
• Organizing your supporting material
• Organizing your presentation for
the ears of others

3. Organizing Main Ideas
• Strategies for organizing the main
ideas of the speech
– Chronological
– Topical

4. Organizing Main Ideas
• Chronological
– Sequential order,
according to when each
step or event occurred or
should occur

5. Organizing Main Ideas
• Topical
– Organized by sub-topics, equal in importance
– Recency, primacy, complexity

6. Organizing Main Ideas
• Cause & Effect
– Identifying a situation
and then discussing
the resulting effects
(cause/effect)
– Presenting a situation
and then exploring its
cause (effect/cause)

7. Organizing Main Ideas
Problem and Solution
– Exploring how
best to solve a
problem or
advocating a
particular solution

8. Introducing your presentation
• Introduction
– Get the audience’s attention
• An Illustration
• A Rhetorical Question
• A startling fact or statistic
• Quote an expert or literary text
• Tell a humorous story

9. Introducing your presentation
• Introduction
– Introduce the topic
– Give the audience a
reason to listen
– Establish your
credibility
– Preview your main
points

10. Developing your presentation
• Body
– Develop the points mentioned in the
introduction.
– Give numbers, facts, information that
support your ideas.
– Establish eye contact. Control your
body language

11. Concluding your presentation
• Conclusion
– Summarize the presentation
– Reemphasize the main idea in a
memorable way
– Motivate the audience to respond
– Provide closure

12. Creating your PowerPoint
• Use a set font and color
scheme.
• Different styles are
disconcerting to the audience.
• You want the audience to
focus on what you present, not
the way you present.

13. Creating your PowerPoint: Fonts
• Choose a clean font that is easy to
read.
• Roman and Gothic typefaces are easier
to read than Script or Old English.
• Stick with one or two types of fonts.

14. Creating your PowerPoint: Bullets
• Keep each bullet to one line, two at the most.
• Limit the number of bullets in a screen to six,
four if there is a large title, logo, picture, etc.
– This is known as “cueing”
– You want to “cue” the audience in on what
you are going to say.

15. Creating your PowerPoint: Bullets
• If you crowd too much text, the
audience will not read it.
– Too much text makes it look busy and
is hard to read.
– Why should they spend the energy
reading it, when you are going to tell
them what it says?

16. Creating your PowerPoint: Caps and Italics
• Do not use all capital letters
– Makes text hard to read
– Conceals acronyms
– Denies their use for EMPHASIS
• Italics
– Used for “quotes”
– Used to highlight thoughts or ideas
– Used for book, journal, or magazine titles

17. Creating your PowerPoint: Colors
• Reds and oranges are high-energy but
can be difficult to stay focused on.
• Greens, blues, and browns are
mellower, but not as attention grabbing.
• White on dark background should not
be used if the audience is more than 20
feet away.

18. Creating your PowerPoint: Pictures
• Use only when needed, otherwise they
become distractors instead of
communicators
• They should relate to the message and
help make a point
• Ask yourself if it makes the message
clearer
• Simple diagrams are great
communicators

19. Creating your PowerPoint: You
• Do not use the media to hide you
• The audience came to see you
• The media should enhance the
presentation, not BE the presentation
• If all you are going to do is read from the
slides or overheads, then just send them
the slides

20. Creating your PowerPoint
FOR MORE INFORMATION
• http://www.nwlink.com/~
donclark/leader/leadpres.html
• http://www.nwlink.com/~donclark/hrd/templates/pre