12.8 Be concise

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12.5 Signal a move from one section to the next

Imagine at the beginning of your presentation you say something like, “I am going to give you the three most important findings of our research.” Then the most obvious transition from the introduction to the main part of your presentation would be to say “Okay, let’s look at the first result.” Then later when you introduce the other two results you can introduce them numerically, the second, the third.

If your structure is methodology, results, and discussion, then between the methodology and results you could say, “Okay, so that covers the methodology, now I am going to outline our results, one of which was really quite unexpected.”

This reassures the audience that there is a plan to your presentation, and that they are being guided from step to step.

The second part of the above transition—One of which was really quite unexpected—highlights another benefit of transitions. You can use transitions to regain audience attention by getting them interested in hearing what you are going to say next.

12.6Only move to the next slide when you’ve finished talking about the current slide

It is a good idea not to spend more than two minutes on one slide. The audience will soon get bored looking at the same slide and start thinking about something else. Don’t move on to the next slide before you have finished talking about the current one. Otherwise the audience will stop listening to you and start absorbing the information on the next slide.

12.7Only use an introductory phrase to a slide when strictly necessary

When the sequence of slides within a section is logical, you often don’t need any expression to introduce the next slide. The transition shouldn’t need any introductory explanation.

Instead of saying “In this next slide we have a diagram of X which shows how to do Y” you can simply say “Here is a diagram of X which shows how to do Y,” or even more succinct “Here is how to do Y.” By avoiding unnecessarily long introductory phrases the impact of your slides will be more dramatic.

12.8 Be concise

If you don’t practice what to say when making transitions, you will probably improvise and say something like

122	12 Outline and Transitions

OK, that’s all I wanted to say at this particular point about the infrastructure. What I would like to do next in this presentation is to take a brief look at the gizmo. This picture in this slide shows a gizmo. As you can see a gizmo is a . . .

Instead of attracting the audience’s attention, the above phrases are full of redundancy, add no information, and are likely to send the audience back to sleep.

Try to make your transitions memorable.

OK, here’s something that you may not know about a gizmo: blah blah blah. In fact you can see here that a gizmo is . . .

12.9 Add variety to your transitions

Try to vary your technique for making transitions, so do not always use the same phrase. Here are some alternatives:

Turn the screen off : This immediately regains the audience’s attention. You can then write something on the whiteboard or say something orally.

Ask a rhetorical question: For example, you can say, “Have you ever wondered why it is impossible to predict when your PC is going to crash? Well, after I have summarized what we have just looked at, I am going to tell why experts think it is impossible but how we think we have actually managed to solve the problem.”

Give the audience something to look forward to: The example above shows how you get the audience to concentrate now by telling them you will be giving them interesting information later. Another example: In the next slide I will be showing you some fascinating data on xxx, but first . . . or Later on, we’ll see how this works in practice . . .

Signpost: Tell the audience where you are in the structure of your presentation. For example if you say “And now to sum up briefly before the Q&A session” you are alerting the audience that you presentation is nearly over.