A workshop on presentation skills, including planning, speaking and using visual materials for undergraduate history of art students.

1. Good Presentations Matter
BA2 Academic Skills Programme - Advanced Presentation Skills

2. What are we going to cover?
• Planning
• Speaking - what works and what doesn’t?
• Materials - making the most of your slides and visual aids
• Activity: Learning from the pros
• Super advanced tips!
• Transferable skills and careers programme

3. 7 Stages in Planning an
Effective Presentation:
1. Preparation
2. Choosing your main points
3. Choosing your supporting
information
4. Establishing linking
statements
5. Developing an opening
6. Developing a conclusion
7. Reviewing your presentation

4. Planning: Preparation
• A powerful presenter will consider all of the following
• objectives: Once you have decided upon your objectives, you are in a
much better position to make strategic decisions about the design and tone
of your presentation
• audience: If you fail to consider your audience’s needs, you will fail to
appeal to their interest and imagination
• venue: Will your venue be formal or informal? What kind of atmosphere do
you want to create?
• remit: Have you been given guidelines or a brief? It is important to stick to
this.

5. 2. Choosing your
main points:
• Try presenting no more than three
main points
• Always allow time for your
conclusion and introduction
• It is difficult for your audience to
follow a complex audience
without help from you!
• What are your main points?
• Are these points structured in a
logical, coherent way?
• Do your points work for your
audience and reflect the
objectives you set yourself?

6. 3. Choosing your
supporting information
• Your supporting information should:
help your audience understand, believe
in and agree with your main points
1. What will add clarity to your
argument?
2. What will add authority to your
argument?
3. What will add colour to your
argument?
• What kind of supporting information do
we frequently use in history of art
seminars and lectures?
• What kind of supporting information
might you use in a gallery talk, for
example?

7. 4. Establishing
linking statements
• Remember - it is hard for your
audience to follow your argument
with our your help
• There are phrases you can use that
help establish the direction and flow
of your argument, such as:
‘In the next section of this text, Pollock
goes on to …’
‘Another important issue to consider is
…’
‘If we follow this line of argument we
can see …’
For more helpful vocabulary - use the
University of Manchester Phrasebank

8. 5 and 6: Developing your introduction and
conclusion
• Your opening is crucial - this is where you can either
capture or lose your audience
• Use your introduction to lay a clear foundation for the
presentation to follow
• Use your conclusion to remind your audience of the main
points
• Draw these points to a stimulating conclusion

9. 7. Reviewing your
presentation
Once you have written your
presentation make sure that you
review its content. Ask yourself:
• does the presentation meet
your objectives?
• is it logically structured?
• have you targeted the material
at the right level for your
audience?
• is the presentation too long or
too short?

10. Speaking: What works …

11. Practice your presentation in a meaningful
way.
Don’t just read over your notes in your head. You need to ‘perform’ your
presentation out loud.

12. Get your presentation down to the right length
(the time limit you have been given).
Then try trimming it down by about 10% - this gives you some space to ad lib
and too short is always better than too long!

13. Familiarise yourself with the facilities.
If you are speaking a new or unfamiliar room - try to get there early or try out the laptop/projector, mic etc
in advance if you can. If you are showing videos - make sure they will run on the computer you will be
using.

14. Speaking: What doesn’t work

15. It is hard to get away with reading straight
from a script.
Why isn’t this an effective presentation technique?

16. Don’t read out a long list of bullet points
straight from your slide
This is redundant (the audience can read the information) and boring.

17. Facing the projection screen/wall is never a
good idea.
Look at the screen or monitor in front of you instead. Face the front so that your
audience can see and hear you properly (consider people with hearing difficulties)

18. Don’t draw attention to things that go wrong
by apologising - most of the time your
audience won’t know/don’t notice
Move on swiftly and don’t mention it!

19. Making the most of
your visual materials

20. Everyone likes
pretty slides
Nobody likes:
• Old-school powerpoint (think
clip art and animations)
• With Times New Roman
• Too many bullet points
• Cheesy templates

21. Is its worth taking the time to put together a
smart looking presentation?

22. Emphatically YES!

23. If your slides look good, research shows that
your audience will learn better.
• Four principles of using multimedia in your presentations
that will give your message more impact:
1. Coherence
2. Signalling
3. Redundancy
4. Spatial and visual contiguity

24. Coherence
The coherence principle - we learn better using multimedia, which is free from
extraneous information

25. Coherence
• Avoid extraneous
information such as
- animations,
templates and
sounds

26. Signalling
The signalling principle - learning is improved when our attention is focussed on
the parts of the presentation, which highlight key material

27. N.B. it is good practice to use a font size of 24 or higher for
accessibility reasons (this is size 26)
You can signal key information using
colour and font size
to emphasise key information on each slide

28. To help with
signalling, it is a
good idea to stick to
communicating one
key point per slide.

29. Redundancy
The redundancy principle: learning is reduced when the information presented
is redundant - i.e. if you read the text from your slides verbatim

30. How can you avoid
redundancy?
• Avoid packing slides with too
many bullet points - this will
only encourage you to read
them out
• You don’t need to include your
name or the logo of the
organisation you’re
representing on every slide -
once or twice is enough

31. Research shows that people are able to recall
your main points better if you have a full
sentence headline on your slide - as opposed
to a word or phrase as a headline.

32. Spatial and temporal contiguity
Learning improves when words are placed near relevant pictures
Learning also improves when narration (your speech) occurs at the same time as looking
at relevant pictures

33. The spatial and
temporal contiguity
principle is good
news for art
historians as we
use so many
images in our
presentations and
papers!

34. Finding relevant images to illustrate your
presentations
• For art historical/architectural images - ARTStor,
Bridgeman Education, Oxford Art Online, Art & Architecture,
Slide Library E-Museum, Museum and Gallery databases
• Thematic or illustrative images:
• morguefile.com
• TinEye Labs - allows you to sear Flickr for images to fit in
with your colour scheme
• Photofunia - good for more creative images you can
manipulate

35. A good way of developing your skills is to
observe and learn from people who are more
experienced than you.
Watch Thelma Golden’s ‘How art gives shape to cultural change’ TED Talk.
How does she conform/deviate from the TED Talk model?

36. Some super advanced tips …

37. Using a blank slide before or after a really
important point, i.e. when you want the
audience to stop looking at the screen and
look at you, is a great technique when you
want to make your message really clear.

38. If you need to introduce a lot of theoretical or
background information, using the ‘flashback’
technique can a be really effective way of
holding on to your audience’s attention.

39. For example …
• Can you think of a film with a
really gripping opening scene?
• Films start with an exciting/
scary/mysterious premise (or
ridiculous action scene) to get
you hooked.
• Then they go into the
exposition, setting the scene,
introducing the characters etc.
• How could you apply the
flashback technique to an art
history presentation?

40. Useful tips and
resources:
• My presentation tips guide and
guru is Ned Potter - an
academic liaison librarian at
the University of York
• Lots of the tips and guidance
came from his slideshare
presentations - which can be
found at:
https://www.slideshare.net/
thewikiman