A technical presentation should attempt to either inform or persuade the audience on one specific topic. To this goal, it is first necessary to determine the current situation. First, who is the audience and given this, what are the audience's:
The situation describes the intellectual/technical environment in which the presentation is to be given. The audience will affect the objective, the technical level of the presentation, the atmosphere (attitude and dress), and the presentation (formal or informal). An internal presentation to, for example, co-workers will differ greatly from an external presentation to, for example, investors.
Based on the situation, it should be possible to determine:
There is a subtle distinction between the last two: a 2nd-year ECE student needs to know how to organize a technical presentation; however a 2nd-year ECE stduent wants to know how to clear the technical presentation milestone.
With a topic and the situation, it is now possible to determine the objective of the presentation.
It should be possible to summarize the objective of a technical presentation in a single thesis statement, e.g.,
In this presentation, I will inform the audience about ... .
or
In this presentation, I will demonstrate that our proposed solution to ... is appropriate.
The thesis statement—in a clear, straight-forward, and memorable sentence—should:
Making the thesis statement too simple cause you, the author, to loose focus while one which is too complex will burden the audience. The thesis statement has also been called the take-away message of the presentation.
Once the speaker has an objective crystalized as a thesis statement, the balance of the presentation may be built around that objective. If the objective is clear, then it will be a straight-forward task of preparing the presentation. A straight-forward thesis statement yields a straight-forward message while a complex thesis statement results in a convoluted presentation.
When designing the balance of the presentation, it is always useful to ask, for every sentence, for every slide, and for every action: "Does this help achieve my objective?". If for any component, the answer is "no", then the component should be cut out of the presentation, both for the benefit of the speaker and for the audience. Superfluous information will confuse the audience.
At each point of the presentation, it is necessary to reinforce in the minds of the audience the objective: in the introduction, in the body of the presentation, and in the conclusions:
Repetition of the objective should not be taken as repetition verbatim. Making the same statement twice will be noticed by the audience, however, it is useful to remind, in different words, what the purpose of the presentation is. The minds of the audience will wander, and individual audience members will, according to their personal biases, give significance to different parts of the presentation. It is the responsibility of the speaker to remind the audience of the primary purpose of the presentation.
The Technical Presentation Proficiency Examination requires that a student give a presentation of a technical nature. The automatic question is whether a given topic is of sufficient technical content. While it is difficult to answer this question, two observations are possible:
then it is likely that the subject should have sufficient technical content. Engineering design or analysis requires that the subject revolve around an engineering problem, that is, a real-world problem which requires a practical solution.