Planning an oral presentation
1. Planning an oral presentation
Welcome to the fourth and final chapter! We now know2. Presentation strategy
which elements we should consider when choosing the appropriate format to deliver our results. We focused on written reports,3. Chapter 4
now let's turn our attention to oral presentation. We'll learn to plan and build the presentation slides, to avoid common mistakes and pitfalls, and to deliver the presentation effectively.4. Plan a presentation
Just as it is a bad idea to dive straight into writing code for a data analysis without first thinking about what you want to do, it is usually a bad idea to dive into writing slides without planning. To help structure the presentation, we should consider its purpose, who the audience is, and the message we want to get across.5. Purpose
Let's go back to our sentiment analysis of product reviews that we summarized in a report in Chapter 3. To define the purpose of the presentation, we consider the type of presentation we are giving. Is it an informative presentation? If so, we might want to inform about the current number of negative and positive ratings and words associated with negative reviews.6. Purpose
Are we trying to instruct our colleagues or coworkers? Then we might want to explain how the model for sentiment analysis was built.7. Purpose
or are we trying to persuade some stakeholders? Our purpose would then be to convince stakeholders that actions need to be taken to revert the high numbers of negative ratings.8. Audience
After understanding the purpose of our presentation, we should think about who our audience is. Are we presenting to a technical colleague, to a manager or executive team or to the customer?9. Audience
But we should also think how big our audience is. Are we presenting in a small meeting, for example to 10 members of the financial team? Or is it large meeting or a conference? For example, a meeting with 100 employees from the software development department? Or maybe we are giving a workshop, like a technical training for 30 customer's employees from their respective IT departments?10. Message
Our audience will have forgotten 90% of the presentation a week after seeing it. If they only remember one thing from your presentation, what do you want it to be? You can then work backwards from that to decide what needs to be included in the presentation to get the audience there. Our opening statement should hook our audience and introduce this one thing you want the audience to walk away with. For example: negative ratings scare customers away from our website.11. Message
Then, we decide on the central message. It is advisable to just use one sentence. We might convey that delayed shipping is the main cause of negative reviews and immediate actions are needed to revert the situation.12. Message
Finally, we need a closing statement that sums up the presentation and strengthens the central message. We might say that there is a decrease in sales. Negative reviews have been increasing. Delayed shipping is causing negative ratings, and actions are needed to revert situation.13. Structure
Taking all these steps into account, we can think about the structure. Starting with the introduction, we should provide some background information to catch our audience's attention and give them a glimpse of the presentation content.14. Structure
After that, we can dive into the methods, analysis and model outputs. Who our audience is determines how detailed this part should be: if our audience is non-technical, you might justify skipping this entirely.15. Structure
Finally, we conclude, referring back to the introduction, adding a call-to-action statement or recommendations for next steps. This structure helps keeping our audience engaged, who is likely more attentive at the beginning and end of our talk.16. Outline
Now it's time to outline the graphs and visuals we want to use, and plan which sections we need, and their order. We should have around five sections and avoid having too many in general. It can make it hard to maintain our audience's attention. We might have the following sections: The reason for analysis the exploratory analysis, the sentiment analysis itself, the conclusions, and the follow-up actions.17. Keep time in mind!
Last but not least, how long we have to deliver our presentation impacts how we plan it. We will talk about timing again later in this chapter.18. Let's practice!
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