There are many times at university when you have to stand up and give a presentation - usually with presentation software such as PowerPoint but often to present a poster.

Sometimes these are individual assignments but quite often they are group assignments designed to introduce you to group working - an important employability skill.

Good practice with academic presentations

Why are most academic presentations so bad? Well, most people who give presentations have not actually considered what is good practice in this field and most students have had such poor examples presented to them by academics that they do not know any better.

Many lessons come from the world of business which is now moving away from text-rich slides full of bullet points to more visually interesting slides. Death by PowerPoint is a phrase often used to describe a presentation that is so dominated by the excessive use of PowerPoint features (bullet points, animations, complex diagrams, clip art etc) that the content is lost and the audience are brain dead by the end of it.

The pages here will introduce you to good practice in creating and delivering presentations which should ensure that your content is given centre stage and your audience is engaged with both you and your material.

Good practice:

We also have pages on:

Presentations workshops

The Skills Team run the following relevant workshops:

Creating academic presentations using PowerPoint
Presentations: designing slides for maximum understanding
Creating and delivering conference presentations

To book onto our workshops please visit the Skills workshops page.

Top Tips Printable Guides

Single page printable guides giving top tips for creating academic posters and working in groups.

Click on the images to download the PDFs.

Related books and eBooks available from our University libraries

Slide:ology (Slide:ology book and Slide:ology eBook) by Nancy Duarte
Resonate (Resonate book and Resonate eBook) by Nancy Duarte
Presentation secrets (eBook) by Alexei Kapterev
Presentation Zen by Garr Reynolds
Presentation Zen Design by Garr Reynolds
The Naked Presenter by Garr Reynolds
Beyond Bullet Points (BBP book and BBP eBook) by Cliff Atkinson
The Non-Designer's Presentation Book by Robin Williams
102 tips to communicate more effectively using PowerPoint by David Paradi
Teach yourself visually PowerPoint 2013 (book and eBook) by William Wood
Microsoft PowerPoint 2013 plain and simple (book and eBook) by Nancy Muir
Microsoft Office 2013 inside out by Ed Bott.