Assemble your report information. Look at your research materials and determine which information you want to include on your report. Whether you summarize it or have photocopies with highlighted sections, it's important that you know what information you want to say.
Make a list of categories or section titles that your desired information can fall under. For the average-length college oral presentation (five to 20 minutes), you'll generally want about four to seven sub-topics for your presentation. Determine your titles for these topics based on how to create the most even distribution of the information you've gathered in your research and want to present.
Determine an order for your sub-topics. The first consideration for order should be how to set up a logical flow of information and figure out if your audience is going to need to hear about one set of facts before they can understand or relate to another piece of information. For example, if you were doing a presentation about a famous musical composer, you might want to start with listing some of the music that composer was famous for before going into details about his life.
Write a set of bullet points for each sub-topic. These will be your cues to yourself when you're talking to remind you of what pieces of information you want to include and when to talk about them. Ideally, these should be short and should merely serve to get you started on a topic you've researched well enough to be able to talk about without a script.
Look at your time limit and figure out how long each of your sections is likely to take once you've flushed them out. Ideally, they should be more or less equal, but you may decide that you want to plan to spend more time on one section or another. Make an estimate of the time you want to spend talking about each section and see how these numbers add up to determine if you need to cut sections or add more.