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Public speaking is rarely what we want it to be. More often than not fear, sweat and anxiety overwhelm us, leaving us shaking like a five-year old in front of a reprimanding teacher. The uneasiness that you experience before and during public speaking can make your presentation a big mess.

Don’t let a churning stomach and sweaty palms disrupt, or even worse, destroy your speech. While it’s not possible to completely eliminate your nervousness, improving your presentation skills is still possible once you learn a few tactics to control your nervousness.

Understand How Nervousness Manifests Itself

Unless you know what ruins your speech, how can you work on improving your presentation skills? The strange thing about speech nervousness is that it can take on different faces. It can be expressed through physical uneasiness, but it can also interfere with your language. People who are anxious about their speech often stammer, shake uncontrollably or have a squeaky voice, messing up their speech.

This is often a self-fulfilling prophecy: you focus so much on what might go wrong that you eventually make it happen. However, if you understand why and how your nervousness is expressed then you can easily learn to tame it and start improving your presentation skills.

Break Free From Your Nervousness

The first thing you should do is change your attitude towards public speaking. Understanding how deeply nervousness interferes with your public speaking success will give you a good perspective on how important it is to overcome it.

Control, Don’t Try To Eliminate

People set themselves up for failure when they try to completely eliminate their uneasiness. Even the most experienced, top-notch speakers will tell you they’re still feeling that subtle (or not so subtle) nervousness before their speech. And it’s fine too.

The key to adequately calming your nerves is to realize you cannot entirely and irreversibly eliminate them. Remember, improving your presentation skills means minimizing nervousness impact, not banishing it completely.

Be Prepared

Being fully prepared for you speech will sooth your nerves. You gain confidence when you know you can anticipate and handle any incidents during your speech. Get familiar with the speech room and its equipment. Network with your audience to remind yourself that they’re only human beings and not really that scary after all. Practice your speech until there’s no room for mistakes. Have alternatives for cases when something goes wrong, such as a forgotten point, a confusing conclusion, or a slide show being stuck.

Just Breathe

Being conscious of your breathing a few minutes before your speech will calm your nerves and give your lungs plenty of air to release all the built-up tension accumulated over the last few days. Deep breathing will improve your lung power and make you more alert thanks to better brain oxygenation.

Relax Your Mouth Muscles

Have you ever wondered why cats always seem so peaceful? They meow constantly. While you shouldn’t walk around your preparation area meowing around other speakers, you can still master the silent meow. This is something halfway between a yawn and a meow movement. Placing your hand over your mouth will conceal your trick of relaxing your mouth muscles for better articulation and freedom.

Speaking in public always instills fear and trepidation in most adults. Some adults tend to run away from presenting their proposals and ideas. However, avoiding yourself from speaking in public will never lead you to success.

Here are some useful tips which can assist you to develop more confidence during public presentation.

Prepare yourself

It is a true fact that even the most experienced speakers and presenters get nervous before they start delivering their speeches. The key point here is to use the nervous energy to boost your delivery. How can you do that? You are advised to spend more time to do preparation. The first thing you need to prepare is the content of your speech. You need to make sure that you know WHAT you are going to say, WHY you are saying it and HOW to say it. Always keep to the main subject and keep it simple, short and precise.

Practice makes perfect

In order to deliver excellent presentation, nothing replaces practice. You need to run through your presentation in front of the mirror and watch yourself as you speak. You are reminded to watch out if you have any strange or odd gestures. You must control your movements well. If you can get your family members or friends to help, get them to listen to your speech and ask them for positive and constructive feedbacks.

H2O

You definitely need water. It is always best to have a glass of water near to you in case your throat gets dry or when you cough.

Take a deep breath

Just before you start your speech, you are recommended to take 3 deep breaths to calm your nerves.

Being humorous

Personally I agree that not everyone is born comedian. If you are not comfortable with telling jokes, please don’t do that. Maintaining your smile during the presentation will be the best you can do. At the same time, you should make sure that you are actually addressing the entire audience and not just one person. If possible, make eye contact with as many of them.

Pause

If you are delivering a heavy-going subject, you are advised to pause when necessary to give your audience time to understand what you have said. If you have Q&A session, then you may get the audience to ask you during the session.

Do you know that you can actually look confident even if you don’t have full confidence in yourself? Please bear in mind that your audience can’t see your sweaty palms or hear your pounding heart. So, why are you worried so much? Stay cool!

There are various different formats for laboratory reports in use. These vary according to the type of work being reported, the purpose of the work or the report and the recipients for which the report is intended. Reports of original research conducted to further scientific knowledge in a specific area require a different format from reports of quality control experiments conducted in a company laboratory and yet other formats may be required for student reports on experiments. A student may be expected to follow one format for recording experiments in a laboratory record book as they are being performed and a different format when writing up the information from the record book for a formal laboratory report later in the term. The format may also vary due to differences in the type of laboratory work which is done for the different subjects. Where the purpose of the experiment is to confirm or reject a hypothesis, the format of the report will differ from that of an investigation of the quality, composition or properties of a product. The purpose of most student laboratory reports is to indicate the students’ understanding of aim, theory, laboratory procedures, etc., so would be emphasized in a format prescribed for these reports.

Finally, if the report is to be submitted to a lecturer, the format may be substantially different from that of a report submitted for publication in a professional journal, while a different format might be expected in a report to a government, an agency or private company. An obvious way in which laboratory report formats differ is the division of the report into sections. Whereas all laboratory reports can be thought of as consisting of four main parts (introduction, procedure, results and conclusion), there is considerable variation in the headings under which the information in each section of the report is to be written. Some of these headings may have an equivalent meaning: apparatus = materials, procedure = methods, data = results. In other cases, more specific headings are added where there is a need to draw attention to specific information in the report.

Example of the Form of a Report

1. Title needs to emphasize the nature of the work / investigation briefly (in less than 10 words) and accurately. This may also be called the Heading in a laboratory record book. State the date of performing the experiment.

2. Aim or Objective. This may be used in the place of the heading: Introduction. It is used to state clearly and concisely the purpose of the work.

3. Theory emphasizes the need to identify the background theory leading up to the experiment or the theory which the experiment is designed to illustrate or prove. This may also include a brief literature review to provide the status of current knowledge in the field.

4. Hypothesis – The hypothesis should be identified where the work is based on previous findings or involves the application of established theory to new situations. Note, however, that not all laboratory work is necessarily concerned with the testing of hypothesis.

5. Apparatus or Materials emphasize the need of the apparatus to be used and the way it is set up. It states the order of all steps to be taken.

6. Procedure or Methods emphasize the need to provide a step-by-step account of how the work was done, a separate heading may be used. This could be important to assess later a quality of investigation. It may include reference to a specific ISO or internationally accepted laboratory standard procedure.

7. Diagrams. A separate heading in the Procedure section devoted to diagrams or photographs emphasises the importance of presenting this information in a clear, concise form rather than written form.

8. Measurements or Results emphasize the importance of reporting specific readings or other observations as they were taken and to record results or outcomes with dates and signatures in order to provide evidence for possible future filing of a patent or intellectual property protection. In this step you take measurements, produce tables and give a relevant sample calculation of how you obtained the final results.

9. Graphs emphasize the need to present an overall summary of the results in a visual form. Data would be presented in tables whereas Graphs would show the relationships between the data and possible trends in a clear, easily read form.

10. Discussion or Results – It is one of the most important parts of the report as here you explain, analyse and interpret the results leading to conclusion. It shows the writer’s understanding of the concepts behind the data. If any differences with the Hypothesis or Objectives occurred explain the reason.

11. Conclusion – The purpose of the Conclusion is to discuss questions arising from the report and make suggestions for further work.

12. References – Here you state the information that has been obtained from textbooks, reference books, articles, investigations, etc. and where these sources of information are mentioned in the text. These references are used as a source of information for background theory, previous findings on which this work is based, laboratory procedures, etc. The References are listed numerically at the end of the report to enable a reader to consult these works for further details.