Narrow Down Your Topic First and the Writing Process Will be Faster and Easier.
The broader your topic, the more stress you will feel when you try to create a presentation for the topic. For instance, if you try to create a speech on “World Peace,” well, good luck. However, if you want to create a presentation about how to improve security in your neighborhood, that is much easier. There are a TON of YouTube videos and papers about how to narrow down your topic. To be brutally honest with you, though, I wasted about 30 minutes watching a lot of them. The one common thread that many of them had was that the first step to narrow down your topic is to ask yourself the five W’s from journalism: Who, What, When, Where, Why?
For instance, let’s say that I am giving a presentation about our company financials last quarter. The who is the company. The when is last quarter. If I narrow down the where I might want to focus on just the Midwest Region. So, now I have to ask, “What exactly happened with our company offices in the Midwest Region last quarter?” Well. sales increased more in that region than anywhere else. The final question is, “Why?” Why was this region different from the other regions? They hired a new regional sales manager that had her team focus on repeat business from past customers. After finding answers to each of these questions, I can create a much more narrow and focused title.
Financials from Last Quarter
Becomes…
A Focus on Generating Repeat Business from Past Customers in the Midwest Region Generated a Sharp Increase in Revenue Last Quarter.
If you have trouble narrowing down the focus of your topic, make sure to focus on the WHY? Why would your audience care about the topic that you are presenting? Why should they pay attention to you? If you can answer these questions and add the answer to these questions into your title, your presentation will be much more narrow and interesting to your audience.
For instance, if my topic was, “Narrow Down Your Topic,” I’d just ask myself, “Why?” The answer is that it makes the writing process faster and easier. So, my new topic might be, “Narrow Down Your Topic First, and the Writing Process Will be Faster and Easier.” (Which is what I used for the heading above.”
Create a Presentation Outline
Once you have a good topic, the rest of the writing process is pretty easy. Make a list of the top ideas or concepts that explains the topic. For instance, in the first example, what are the most important things that the Midwest Region did to generate that extra income? For the second topic, what are the most important ways that I can reduce my time and effort if I narrow my topic? Write a list of the most important items related to the topic.
Once you have a list of three to ten items, rank them from most important to least important. If you used the Who, What, When, Where, Why, techniques to narrow down your topic, the concepts that you cover here will be the things that came up in the “What?” section. The process here is to brainstorm possible concepts or bullet points to cover, and then sort them from most important to least important.
By the way, you won’t be able to effectively cover ALL of the points that you brainstormed. You will only want to cover three, four, or five of these items. That is why you want to sort them by importance. If you can only cover a few points, why not cover the most important?
The number of items that you cover will be determined by the length of time that you have to speak. A good rule of thumb is to cover one item or bullet for every seven to 10 minutes that you have to speak. However, you definitely want to limit your bullets to just five per sitting. For speeches less than 20 minutes, three points is a good number. If you have 45 to 50 minutes, you probably want to cover five bullet points.
Pro Tip! Go through the same process of determining the “Why?” for each of your bullet points. This will make your entire presentation something that the audience will want to pay attention to. Just read each of your bullets and ask, “Why does my audience need to know this?” Whatever the answer is, add that why to the statement that you made in the bullet point.
Now that you have your topic and your three to five bullet points, you have a great presentation outline. You can also use this outline as your slide or visual aid.