Prepare your notes for your presentation on index cards, each containing no more than a paragraph. This will help you not lose your place during the presentation. When all of your information is written on a lengthy piece of paper, you will stumble looking for your place each time you come back to your notes. This will help your presentation be smooth and professional.
Presentations are not just about reading a written article off of a piece of paper. You need to have the words memorized and just use notes to help as props to remind you of the information you are sharing. Making eye contact with your classroom audience is also a big part of presenting your exam. Your eyes should be on your audience the majority of the time. You want to appear authoritative on the subject, but not stiff and rehearsed. Eye contact is one of the ways you convey that this is not a mechanical presentation, and it also helps keep your audience interested.
Everyone has words that they find hard to pronounce and, inevitably, there will be a few of those in your presentation. Break the words down on your notes into spelled syllables that will help you pronounce them correctly, just like the dictionary does. Put those in big letters on your notes so you have help at a glance. They do not have to be correct grammatically, just put them in your notes anyway that helps you say them correctly.
Parents can be critical, and this is one of the times you want them to be. Employ your parents, siblings or college roommates to be your audience for a practice presentation. Ask them to give you honest feedback and constructive criticism of your presentation. Take their suggestions back to the drawing board and rework you presentation. Once you have fine-tuned your work, ask your family and friends audience to sit through the finished product.
One of the best ways to get your presentation skills fine-tuned is to watch other speakers, according to Waterloo University. This is easy to do today with all of the DVDs of events available and with the many channels on the television that are dedicated to people speaking about politics and world issues. Find a style you like, but keep it as natural as you can. Watch these over and over again to get a feel for different techniques such as body language and voice volume.