Chapter 7: Professional Presentations
Linda Macdonald; Kayler Mutyabule; and Saylor Academy
Just as you need to write professionally in your career to complete tasks and maintain relationships, you may need to match that professionalism while speaking. This chapter focuses on more formalized speaking–presentations–that take place in the workplace. For most people, the mere thought of speaking in front of an audience prompts a fear response, and part of our focus in this chapter is on how to deal with this anxiety.
After discussing the various methods of presenting in face-to-face and online formats, we will discuss structuring and outlining your presentation. Having a clear direction will help keep your audience engaged and boost your confidence. After discussing how to plan the content of your presentation, we will discuss designing visual elements and verbal and nonverbal delivery techniques.
Learning Objectives
By the end of this chapter, you should be able to
- Identify ways to manage presentation anxiety.
- Apply an appropriate delivery method for a particular speaking situation.
- Select an appropriate organizational pattern.
- Create an outline for a presentation.
- Create well-designed presentation slides.
- Identify the principles and types of nonverbal communication.
- Identify and be able to create effective transitions within a presentation.
- Understand how to use a variety of strategies to help audience members follow a presentation’s content: internal previews, internal summaries, and signposts.
This chapter has been adapted from the Open Education Resources:
Stand up, Speak out: The Practice and Ethics of Public Speaking available under the terms of aCreative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license
Writing for Success, Saylor Academy, 2022 under the terms of under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 License
Adaptations included editing tone, images, removing content to align the chapter with BCOM210 course learning objectives, revising examples for an FHSU student population, and adding some original exercises to align with course objectives.
AI Insights in this chapter were written through a collaborative process between Dr. Rose Helens-Hart, a professor of business communication, and AI writing applications, specifically Gemini and ChatGPT. Her approach involved extensive, iterative, prompt-based conversations with these AI applications, during which she explored and refined various topics related to AI’s use in business communication. While the AI tools offered valuable suggestions and generated initial content, the final versions of AI Insights reflect a significant amount of human research, drafting, editing, and revision on her part to ensure accuracy, clarity, and relevance to the field.
