Some of us have mastered the presentation skills while for many people this task is daunting as they're able to think massive amounts of good ideas and are good with imagination as well.
However, they are not conscious of how to put the thoughts from their head to a presentable format. But, don’t lose hope as it is very well said that “Every problem has a solution" and let me tell you the exciting news that most of your problems will be solved by the end of this blog as I am here to help you strengthen your presentation skills! Without squandering more moments, let’s get initiated!!
At first, let’s set the learning outcomes for today, by the end of this blog we'll be able to:
Discover as to what is the presentation? Why does our blog need to be presentable? And lastly, how to be presentable?
Have extreme fun on the path to discover!
What is Presentation?
It is the process of illustrating a topic/ thoughts/ideas to the audience. It’s a demonstration which is meant to persuade and inspire the reader. It also means to build a will to present authentic ideas which should be crisp and to the point. A well-structured presentation contains images, graphics and facts in such a way which makes it easy to remember and interesting to read.
Why is presentation important?
It is one of the most essential key elements of the blog as it organizes your information and topic into an engaging flow which creates a connection to the audience that they can relate to their real lives. This shows how confident you are with the information/ideas or solutions you are mentioning in the blog. This helps readers to increase their understanding and remember what they see and read in the blog as an effective presentation means to work with the audience as well as your perspective.
How to be presentable?
We have now come to the segment where we'll deal with how to be presentable in writing blogs? In order to achieve that, I’ve listed down ten different, precise and useful ways to be presentable! And they are as follows:
Design an attention-grabbing introduction: This is a beginning section which involves the purpose and outcomes of your blog. It typically gives a brief summary of what will happen in the coming segments, so make it as attractive as possible. In order to do that you can:
Start with a quote or intriguing question to spark curiosity in the reader's mind.
Open with a relevant fun fact.
Start with a fascinating story.
Start by introducing the problem by connecting it to real life.
Remove the repetitive words and replace them with powerful and new words rather than the usual ones.
You can introduce in whatever creative way you want just make sure to keep it crisp and impactful.
Create a flow in the blog: We often get confused on how to create a logical flow of the blog. You can start up the blog with the knowledge you already have or either you can start up with presenting one story/solution that you relates the most with problem statement or the topic of the blog . Things to remember while presenting the story:
Make sure you are using precise sentences, strong adjectives, verbs and making it simple and clear. The best way to present stories is in simple language, don’t make it too long or too short.
Give readers specific details or examples from your experience and it should bring that connection to the topic alive very strongly (remember this is just the intro to your blog, readers shouldn’t feel bored)
Now you can start building your blog explaining the problem: with facts, adding on images follow up the way mentioned in creative elements to choose images and the way you can represent facts.
You can now move on to explain the causes and give strong reasons for why these are the cause of the problem.
Relate this to the effects in your surroundings and in the world then finally explain them the solution. To build on the flow, you can also mention its pros and cons, images to create a closer picture in readers mind.
Use templates: Using templates make the blog look more effective and organized. There are two ways you can use templates:
Background templates: You can get a template from google or Pinterest according to which topic you are talking about. If you are writing a blog on waste management you can add a clean globe template or template of nature.
You can create your own templates for free from “Canva” there are thousands of several templates you can find here.
Templates to organise information:
You can put the information from surveys, research or if you want to use a template to present bullet ideas or solutions you can again use Canva (you can choose a template that you think would be helpful in Canva and edit information or ideas on it then you can download those and use in blogs). Here is small guide video on how to use Canva in laptop or computer. Here is a guide on how to use it in smartphones. The best thing about this is that we can get diverse templates for free both on mobile and laptop. You can also use such templates to organize your blog or stories.
Designing conclusion:
This makes readers leave with clarity, sparks and ideas. Let's explore how to design this. First step: Give a header called “Conclusion” that gives the reader clarity that this part is going to wrap up the whole blog for me and they get prepared to end. Things to follow while designing this.
make sure we are not adding any new points or information here.
Keep it short and crisp.
Summarise the blog to give the final message to the reader. You can maybe add it as “disclaimers” to make sure your readers are leaving with the right message.
You can either summarise the whole blog or the major idea of the blog in a few sentences and follow up with the next steps the reader can take and spark them with leaving a strong question in their mind. Eg: What is a small change you are going to bring from today in your lifestyle to save earth resources.
Checking grammatical errors and spellings:
When we correct the errors and have a blog with zero grammatical errors and spellings it makes our blog more confident we can use grammarly.com and google autocorrect. One more way is when we are using docs and use tools in it we will get spellings and grammar. It will give us suggestions to correct spellings and grammar.
Review blog by yourself: Read the blog as a reader while reviewing it before submitting. Read the blog twice and thrice before submitting, maybe make checkpoints with all the stages of the rubric, and also compare with the rubric. try to rate your blog according to checkpoints. You can check for:
The flow of the blog is like how well organised it is, what heading you've used, intro and conclusion then ask yourself are it engaging you as a reader?
Check for the visual aids you have used such as Graphics/images/pie charts/templates/ tables etc.
Check for research (have you mentioned facts, different perspectives from surveys, interviews, evidence and examples)
Check for connection with your stories, experiences, evidence, grammatical and spelling recheck it before submitting.
Ask for feedback from friends: It is good to ask for Glows and Grows as your feedback because this can improve your blog more. to get more specific when you ask your friends/family some questions. the questions you can ask each time you send the blog to your friends/family to get feedback are:
What are the things you are understanding or learning from the blog?
How much do you feel connected with the blog? If you have to rate from 1 to 5,
1 being not at all and 5 being very much connected. How can I improve it to reach a scale of 5?
Are there any challenges you faced while understanding the blog?
Does the flow engage you?
Is there anything that stood out to you in the blog?
Glow according to the feedback received: Feedback is impactful based on how you react to it with what mind-set and steps. There's more than one way you can do things maybe sometimes we might not able to think about that but feedback can really help us out to find our AODs.
When you receive feedback with a growth mindset keynote: Try not to put the information in only one way you can keep exploring different tools to represent your ideas. Explore Canva, flyer, bar- graphs, cartoons and pie charts to represent. Use tables to represent surveys and perspectives. Bringing out different perspectives in a blog makes it more engaging with the audience, effective primary research can also help a lot in this.
I would not want to end the blog with this note: “Let your heart out while writing!"
References:
-by Danyah Khan & Huda Sultana
Assessment Interns (Blogging)
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