The Secret of a Captivating Presentation
Reaching more by doing less

It’s only been 10 minutes in that huge lecture room and what do you find yourself doing? Scrolling through Instagram, daydreaming about your summer holiday and doodling to escape this wave of boredom.
Isn’t it funny how some professors just don’t get it? It’s not that we don’t care about what they have to say. The problem is simpler.
The presentation sucks.
So how can we do it better? What do we have to do differently to give a bad-ass presentation?
The answer is easy: Do less.
I guess you’re a bit surprised. Doing less? How will that help? Let me tell you 5 things that will take your presentation to the next level.
No Laptop
Put your laptop out of reach — that’s the first thing you should do. Take a pen and paper. It’s now time to forget about all the fancy PowerPoint layouts and effects. Instead, create your own layout. Only requirement: as simple as possible:

Strong Visuals
Now that you have a clear storyline, it is time to get your laptop back out and and search for strong visuals. Create graphs for any statistics you find crcucial to include and use webpages such as unslpash.com to find images similar to your sketches.
What to remember? One picture per slide. Here you see the differece it will make.

Cut the Text
There is nothing more frustrating than a presentation looking like this.

Just the thought makes me shivver. I’m sure you know what I’m talking about. No one can listen and read and write. The solution? Cut the text. Completely.
If you want your audience to remember everything that was said during your presentation, give them a hand out or add notes to the presentation they can go back to at any time.
Sometimes there are single words or a sentence of immense importance that you should include, but keep it at that! Don’t let the clutter-nightmare haunt your audience.
Be the Centre of Attention

Avoid any kind of destraction around you when presenting. It’s not just a cluttered screen that will make people’s attention drift. If you find a lecturer standing behind a table, on the side of the stage, lights turned off, how likely are you to give him your attention?
Probably not at all.
Be passionate about your topic, don’t just use voice, but also your body and the stage space to captivate your audience’s attention when presenting.
Stay Calm

Nervous hand movements, stuttering and hectic glimpses to the slides demonstrate insecurity. No one will listen.
Find your focus before starting your presentation and forget about cue cards — you don’t need them. Practice, practice, practice. Your confidence will grow and the people you’ll be presenting to, will see that.
Make it look simple. And if you struggle, fake it till you make it.

Presenting can be scary. Seeing teachers doing a terrible job, makes it even worse. If they can’t do it, how should we do it? The thing is, we can. We can even do it better. Simplicity is becoming increasingly popular as we see on Instagram for example: Interiour designs, fashion and even architecture lately follow one rule: Simple is beautiful. Let’s use the inspration we get and make it the foundation of our presentations.
Reach more by doing less. Simplicity is the secret.
If you are interested in more in-depth information about the art of simple presentations, I highly recommend reading the Presentation Zen by Garr Reynolds.
