Ways to effectively destroy your presentation!

Delivering the right kind of content to the audience requires a synergy of crystal clear thinking and concise communications. In a business environment, everything you put forth should be in a format that is both engaging and easy to grasp. While delivering a presentation, certain things are to be kept in mind, lest you want your presentation to fail its desired purpose.

What not to do/things to be avoided in a presentation:

1. Reading from your slides

Perhaps the biggest faux pas is directly reading from slides without adding information. It should be kept in mind that presentation slides serve the purpose of visually highlighting information. Your contribution should supplement the information that is already mentioned on the slides. Instead of reading from the slides, you should elaborate on the slide’s gist by adding additional information.

2. Speaking in a monotone

Keeping your audience engaged is the most arduous task as a presenter. In order to assure that, you must vary your tone to convey similar enthusiasm. Speaking in a tone for the entire duration of the presentation should be avoided at all costs. To combat this, you should try to engage your audience in a conversational style. You can do this by pretending that you’re chatting with just one person. Irrespective of whether your subject matter is dry and lifeless, maintaining an upbeat tone would help ensure that the onlookers get your drift.

3. Dark Backgrounds

Not everything dark thing is charming! The same applies while you’re designing the background screen to your presentation. While some dark shades might pass off as “attaboy”, a majority of them actually end up tarnishing the impact, because of legibility issues.

The problem with dark backgrounds is two-fold: the primary being that it makes things inconsistent. The other reason is that it makes your slides harder to read when it is being displayed to a larger audience on a projector.

4. Stuffing of information

Cramming an hour’s worth of written material into a 15 minute presentation is most likely to leave your audience both confused and exhausted. It is therefore advised to focus your presentation around the one big idea that you want to relay to the audience. In order to stress upon that, you can have support points that strike a chord with the target group.

5. Intolerable Fonts

Comic Sans and similar fonts that are more likely to recreate an animated show format, are to be avoided while delivering a business presentation./