Helpful strategies to produce your best oral communications

I am fairly certain you have all heard someone say “communication is key” at some point throughout your lives. The reality is, they are absolutely right. However, many people find it hard to communicate with others. Luckily, there are many different types of communication. One in particular that we, students, are challenged to develop is oral/oral-visual communication. Some of you may be wondering, what is exactly is oral communication? Well, Harappa education states the following:

“Oral communication is communicating with spoken words. It’s a verbal form of communication where you communicate your thoughts, present ideas, and share information. Examples of oral communication are conversations with friends, family or colleagues, presentations and speeches”

Throughout the past few months of Boussole, we have completed a PPT presentation, a speech, a reportage/campaign video, and a play, which all required us to challenge our oral communication skills. Luckily, through trial and error, I have found a few strategies that I found helpful in producing oral-visual communications and I am ready to share them with you all. 

When producing oral communications such as a presentation, for example, it is very important that you organize and prepare the structure of your presentation beforehand. If you try to go into a presentation without knowing what you want to say it will be very easy for you to stutter, get off track, or even blank. Everything will come out as a jumble of words and your ideas will be incoherent and possibly inconsistent. In addition, I have found that it is much more stressful going into the presentation without preparing the structure of your presentation beforehand because you have no idea how or when you want to bring up different topics during your presentation.

As an example, imagine that you are preparing a presentation about dolphins. You may already know that you want to speak about their behavior, their evolution, their anatomy, and their relationship with humans, however, if you don’t organize your ideas, the public will have a much harder time understanding each of the topics you are trying to educate them on.  Therefore, setting the structure of your presentation beforehand is very important. You can do this by preparing a document with bullet points that lay out the order of everything you are planning to speak about. This could look like the following: 

My next strategy is to practice as much as possible. This could mean practicing by yourself in front of a mirror, practicing in front of others such as parents, siblings, or friends, or even just practicing in your head throughout the day (while you brush your teeth for example). This is essential because going into a presentation without having had test runs isn’t ideal. Sometimes when you practice you find that the structure of your presentation may not work, or certain things need to be adjusted. Also, when you practice aloud or in your head you get more comfortable with the presentation so when you go to do it everything goes much more smoothly, you’re more confident, more comfortable, less stressed/worried and your overall outcome will be far superior. 

To summarize, I find that organizing and preparing the structure of your presentation beforehand as well as practicing in your head, in front of a mirror, friends or family are the strategies I find most helpful in producing oral and oral-visual communications. I strongly suggest you all try these strategies out for yourselves because who knows, they might just be beneficial to you all as well. Of course, everyone is different, and these strategies may not be work on you but, there’s no harm in trying. If you have any additional strategies that you believe could benefit others, feel free to leave a comment below and share them with us all! 

Source:

“The Importance Of Oral Communication.” Harappa.education, 26 Dec. 2020, https://harappa.education/harappa-diaries/oral-communication-examples-types-and-process