To plan the timing of a presentation, if a presentation is meant to occupy 15 minutes or 50 minutes, it is critical that you plan to finish at the end of the required time. Time should always be reserved at the end for questions from the audience; however, the speaker may also be willing to field question during the presentation. In either case, 10% of the time should be allocated to fielding question.
As mentioned in the previous section, a presentation should be divided into six sections shown in Figure 1.
Figure 1. Division of talk into sections.
We will look at each of these.
The welcome and outline of the presentation should be covered in under one minute. This is not the time to begin presenting new information to the audience: it is merely a chance to give the audience the direction of the presentation.
This should be two slides: a title slide and the outline slide.
The background required for a presentation depends on the audience:
The speaker should not use the background to teach: an individual can be told quite quickly how a transistor works without understanding how it works. The background should give enough information so that the audience can follow the presentation; the audience is not expected to be able to reproduce it.
Poor presenters will use the background to take as much time as possible and thereby limit the amount of time where substantial information can be covered.
A background covering 10-15% the duration of the talk is usually appropriate.
Five slides should be sufficient for the background.
The statement of purpose should take approximately 10%.
The introduction should be finished in one slide, possibly two.
The body of the presentation should be divided appropriately:
If the presentation is divided into separate components, take time to consider the order: if the components are independent, then an attempt should be made to place the most important components first. If the components are based on another—but more appropriate—ordering, more care must be taken to ensure that there is sufficient time to cover all components. If the purpose of the presentation is to persuade, then the most useful arguments should come first while less critical arguments (which could be summarized) could appear at the end where they could be left off or summarized.
Like the introduction, the conclusions should should take 10-15% of the duration of the presentation. This is the opportunity for the presenter to reiterate the critical points of the presentation and this should, therefore, not appear rushed.
If concluding on time is essential and the conclusions cannot be covered in detail, the speaker could simply display the summary-and-conclusions slide and state "These are my summaries and conclusions. Are there any questions?"
The summary and conclusions may be formed as either a single slide or perhaps two: the second last being in tabular form while the last slide gives the final conclusions and/or recommendations.
This can be the most difficult factor to anticipate. Depending on the audience or the presence of certain individuals in the audience, the questions may either be helpful or time-wasting. In either case, each question should be answered succinctly and if the anticipated time allotment for questions has passed, a statement redirecting questions to the end of the presentation would be appropriate.
Under no should the speaker not give the audience an opportunity to ask questions.
There are no questions from the audience during the presentation for the Technical Presentation Proficiency Examination.