Analytical Reflection on Oral Presentation

This is an analytical reflection on my mock oral presentation and actual presentation which I did on the 13th and 20th November 2017 respectively.  

After my first mock oral presentation, I received many useful feedbacks from both my classmates and professor. The first feedback I got was that my presentation's introduction was too lengthy. I realised it was true as I started to lose my audience's attention after a good 5 minutes into the presentation. The mistake was that I made a bad choice to churn many numbers from the statistics I have gotten from my report, which highly probably did not make any sense to my audience. So one thing that I have learned was that a presentation is not a report. A report has to be clear and concise into the details of numbers and pictures. However, during a presentation, it is more important to be engaging and allow the audience to get as much easily digestible information out of the presentation that I give. So it is important not to bore your audience and to be brief. This can be done by adding humour to the presentation or by telling a simple and engaging story. 

Because of the boring statistics that I chose to remember, I had difficulties trying to recall the remaining content of my presentation. This resulted in many awkward pauses which can be prevented if I have planned the approach to my presentation differently. For example, I could have kept my introduction to the minimal and not bore my audience with statistics. 

My mock presentation was not all bad. I received compliments that I am good at projecting my voice and articulating my words accurately to my audience. I was told that I made ample eye contact with my audience which was a plus point. To be honest, I feel that my preparation was not enough for the actual presentation. Through this mock presentation, I got to witness many different types of presentation and the characteristics my classmates have shown. To better prepare myself for the upcoming presentation, better changes were made through this experiences I have gained in class.

During my actual presentation, I was told by my professor that I had made a great choice by standing on the other side of the screen, as it divided me from my teammates who were not presenting at that moment. It was a great approach because other teams did not do so. I felt really satisfied when I heard it. Our classmates were tasked to grade us and gave us comments accordingly in Google drive and these were the comments that I received from both my classmates and professor. Despite my effort to add in humour, it unfortunately fell flat as I failed to make a proper linkage back to my presentation. Even though it was good to try new things, I should have experimented it during the mock presentation instead. Nevertheless, this presentation was a good learning experience for me. I was also told that the background information and graph was not sufficient as it did not effectively deliver the message that I wanted to give. This was due to the missing information that could benefit the understanding of my audience. For example, there should be more of a focus in the information that I presented instead of planting the whole graph into it.

Lastly, this is something that I have discovered myself. I realised that the chemistry of my team could be stronger, as our presentation felt really divided. Even though it is hard to be fluent in a team for a presentation, due to different presentation styles and opinion, I thought that we could work better if we had done something more about our presentation together as a team during practices. For example, recording our presentation, listening it together and be our own judges and improve together as a team. Nevertheless, this was definitely a great and fruitful learning experiences!

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