Presentation Module Conclusion

This module on how to present in a professional context examined three key themes over four chapters: knowledge of self, looking outside yourself, and performing interpersonally.

The first chapter focused on Your Presentation Style with the key theme of getting to know more about yourself. Here you examined your ideas about successful speakers, began to delve into areas of self-awareness and your values, and learned the nature of your own verbal and non-verbal presentation behaviours.

This knowledge allowed you to move on to Developing a Presentation Strategy, which focused on looking outside of yourself to develop a presentation strategy. You did this by revisiting some tools you first learned about in both the Writing and Foundations modules with FAST and AUDIENCE, respectively. With these frameworks in place, you began to brainstorm and keep track of your ideas using an outline to write your presentation. This included writing an attention-grabbing intro, a body using classical rhetorical proofs, and a conclusion that ended on a high note.

Presentation Aids continued the theme of looking outside yourself by focusing on visuals or other tools that can aid your presentation by lending emphasis, clarity, and support. You learned about several tools and techniques, such as how to to use slide decks (e.g., PowerPoint) and use colours effectively to support your presentation.

Communicating with a Live Audience featured the final theme about working together with others (interpersonally). Here you should have learned how to prepare to present, how to manage anxiety, and how to cope with mistakes. You should have gained insight into how to read an audience’s positive and negative cues as well as the elements involved in constructively critiquing a presentation.

These three themes of looking within, looking without, and coming together interpersonally have aimed to give you useful and insightful foundation and practice for how to present effectively in a professional context in the twenty-first century. What you’ve learned in this module will serve as good preparation for your presentations and give you a solid foundation for topics you’ll discover in the module on Interpersonal Communication Skills.

Attribution Statement (Conclusion)

This conclusion is original content contributed by the Olds College OER Development Team, of Olds College to Professional Communications Open Curriculum under a CC-BY 4.0 license