Blog Post #5: Some Insights about my presentation to the NUSEU

The primary goal of the presentation is to giving a persuasive speech to convince the targeted audience, in this case, the manager of the NUSEU, Ms Roberta Siew, the Dean and distinguished professors from the NUS Faculty of Engineering, to put our proposal into implementation. For such an objective presentation, I have to keep in mind that my ultimate aim is to seek acceptance of my credibility regarding the usefulness and feasibility of the proposal. I have to speak to convince my audience and there are various skills and techniques that I have applied with varying degrees of success to achieve this objective.

For the aspect on topic and purpose, I was very clear that my part of the presentation encompasses the need to assess the feasibility of the proposal, evaluate and propose solutions for some foreseeable challenges that may befall the proposal, and conclude on the presentation with a strong note of conviction that the proposal is beneficial, feasible and worth implementing. With good eye contact and a well-paced speech, I was able to portray my confidence to aid in establishing a convincing presentation to bring across my intent more successfully to the targeted audience in the allocated time.

To ensure that the presentation is well-organised and easy to follow, I felt that visual aids play an important role. My PowerPoint slides were carefully prepared to be audience-centered and smoothly integrated into my speech with the use of appropriate and well-timed animations. The display of key points and use of suitable pictures and graphs on the slides helped to reinforce and complement the ideas in my speech. The aesthetic aspect of the presentation was well boosted by the vivid animations and colourful graphics on the slides to capture the attention and maintain interest level of the audience throughout the presentation.

However, I need to take note of some weaknesses that I have displayed during the presentation. In my eagerness to explain my points, I tend to be too focused on my final idea that I may overlook my sentence structures and use of words. Based on the feedback from Ms Fazilah and my team members, there were quite a few occasions when I wrongly replaced the word ‘companies’ for ‘schools’, and used certain words like ‘ensure’ and ‘also’ too many times in one sentence. In addition, as I was quite nervous during the presentation, I could not remember some of the points in my speech that I have prepared beforehand, thus tend to over-rely on the slides to proceed with my speech.

Therefore, to improve on my subsequent presentations, I should prepare some cue cards so that I can refer to them during my speech in case I forget my points. However, I should take note not to be tied down by my notes as it is important to maintain a strong eye contact with the audience throughout the presentation. I should practice my speech with my team members or in front of the mirror until I am very familiar with it so that my speech would still be kept in check despite my nervousness. It should be noted that my speech should still be kept extemporaneous and sound conversational even though it is fully prepared and carefully rehearsed. I need to practice the use of appropriate hand gestures to aid my presentations.

Overall, I was quite pleased with my presentation because despite my nervousness, I was able to keep my composure by maintaining good eye contact with the audience and using pauses, rate, pitch, and vocal variety effectively during the speech. I hope that I would be able to overcome and improve on my weaknesses with more practice and experience with giving presentations.