Every good presentation starts with two questions, and neither is about slides. Who is the audience? What do they already know, what do they care about, and what will they be listening for? At an assessment centre the audience is the assessors, who know the business well, so you needn't explain what they already know; Andrew Hirst's feedback to student teams makes the same point: remember that the audience has some prior knowledge. What should they think or do afterwards? Agree to a trial, remember your project, choose you. If you can't say, the audience won't be able to either.

Then write your key message: the one sentence you want them to remember and act on. Write it before anything else, because everything else is there to support it. If a fact, story or slide doesn't help the key message, it goes, however interesting it is.

Build the rest in three parts. The start sets the scene and says where you're going: why this matters to this audience, and what your points will be. Your opening is a pitch with a purpose, like the introductions you prepared in Module 1 and Module 3: short, specific and about them. The middle makes up to three points, each with its evidence: a fact, an example or a short story. Three is enough to persuade and few enough to remember. The end summarises the three points in a sentence and closes with what you want the audience to think or do. Andrew's advice is to start and finish well, because those are the moments people remember.

Between the parts, signpost: tell the audience where you are ("My second point is how it would work"). It feels obvious to you, but a listener can't flick back a page.

Andrew's presentation marking criteria give you a test for the finished plan. Structure: is there a clear start, middle and end? Clarity: are the language and tone right for this audience? Uniqueness: is there something that makes it yours, such as a story only you could tell? Non-verbal communication: will the way you stand and look support what you say? This lesson gives you the first two; the rest of the module works on the others.

One of the tips in Andrew Hirst's feedback to student teams is that less is sometimes more. Slides are there to help the audience follow you, not to hold everything you know. A good slide carries one idea: a short title, then a picture, a diagram or a single number. If you want the audience to see a result, show the one figure that matters and say what it means, rather than a table of figures. As Andrew put it to student teams, summarise the financial issues; don't put up the spreadsheet. If the brief allows, you can use no slides at all: a well-planned five minutes of you talking is better than three crowded slides.

Keep the detail in your notes, not on the screen. Speaker notes work best as prompts, not a script: a script tempts you to read, and reading kills eye contact and your voice. A prompt card holds your opening line, your three points as keywords, the evidence for each in a word or two, and your closing line. Most people find they need far less on it than they expected.

Using AI honestly. An AI tool can help you draft a structure, suggest a simpler wording or tidy a slide's layout. Treat what it gives you as a first draft: check every fact, cut anything you couldn't explain if asked, and make the words your own, because you will be questioned on them. Employers' rules on using AI in assessment tasks vary, so read the brief, and if it says nothing and you're unsure, ask.

Accessible slides help everyone, not only people with a visual impairment. University guidance, such as Cambridge's Centre for Teaching and Learning's, recommends plain sans-serif fonts, large text (it treats 18 point as the absolute minimum, and bigger is better in a large room), strong contrast between text and background (projectors wash colours out), and never using colour alone to carry meaning. Say aloud what's on each slide, so that nobody has to read and listen at once. If you share your slides afterwards, give each one a title and describe the pictures.

Check the room and the equipment. Andrew's tip was to check the room and bring a pen drive; today, bring your slides in two ways (on a memory stick and as a file you can open from email), and know what you'd do if neither worked. Online, test your camera, microphone and screen sharing beforehand.

Your voice works better warmed up. In the session Making yourself heard, Paddy Turner (Sheffield Hallam University, 2016) describes four parts working together. The body gives you posture and power. The breath powers the voice. The larynx, in your throat, holds the vocal cords that make the sound. The mouth (lips, tongue, jaw and palate) shapes that sound into words. When you're nervous, all four tighten, which is why a nervous voice sounds thin, quick and shaky.

Release tension first. Stand with your feet under your hips and your knees soft, not locked, with your head balanced on top of your spine. Lift your shoulders and drop them, roll them, and gently turn your head from side to side. Then breathe. Put a hand on your lower ribs, breathe out fully, and let the air come back in by itself; then breathe in for a count of five and out for seven, eight, nine. Wake your voice and face. Hum ("mmm") and feel it buzz on your lips, then open the hum into vowels: mmm-ah, mmm-ay, mmm-ee, mmm-oo. Chew an imaginary sticky toffee, then say a tongue twister or two ("Six thick thistle sticks"), slowly and then faster. It takes about five minutes, and works quietly in a corridor or a car.

Projection means making your voice carry by using breath, not by straining your throat: aim your words at the back wall. Articulation means finishing your words with your lips and tongue. Pace: speak slower than feels natural, and use the pause. A pause before your key message makes people listen; a pause after it lets it land; and a pause is far better than "um".

Andrew Hirst's voice and emotions exercises use a few lines of Rudyard Kipling's poem "If—" (first published in 1910). Read a line in different roles (a news reporter, a builder on scaffolding, a parent talking to a child) and with different emotions (happy, worried, angry, shy), and listen to how much your voice can do. The poem ends "you'll be a Man, my son"; if you'd rather, use any short text you like.

Your body speaks too. Stand balanced and look at different people around the room in turn (if steady eye contact is hard for you, look between people's eyes or at the front row). Andrew's advice is to "go big": move, but walk to a spot and talk, and make your gestures larger than usual rather than small and fidgety. On camera, put the lens at eye level, look into it for your key points, sit facing the light, frame your head and shoulders, and bring a little more energy than feels natural, because the screen flattens it.

Almost everyone feels nervous before a presentation, including people who present well. Nerves are adrenaline getting your body ready: a racing heart, a dry mouth, shaky hands. The audience usually sees far less of it than you feel, and the same adrenaline sharpens your attention and gives your voice energy. The aim isn't to get rid of nerves but to use them.

One technique has interesting evidence behind it. In a study by Alison Wood Brooks (2014), 140 students prepared a short persuasive speech on camera. Just before speaking, half said aloud "I am excited" and half "I am calm". The "excited" group felt more excited (though no less anxious), and independent raters judged their speeches more persuasive, confident, competent and persistent. The idea is that nerves and excitement feel alike in the body, so relabelling them is easier than calming down. A 2025 replication (Poynter and Pasqualini) found the same change in feelings, but observers rated the two groups' speeches no differently. So treat anxiety reappraisal as a promising, free technique for how you feel, not a guaranteed improvement in how you come across. (You may also have heard of "power posing". Its claimed effects are contested: a larger study didn't find the hormone changes first reported, so this module doesn't rely on it.)

Other things help. Paddy Turner suggests avoiding extra caffeine and sugar, sipping water, and burning off spare energy with a brisk walk or by shaking out your hands. Andrew Hirst's favourite is to think of three reasons why your audience will enjoy your presentation.

Rehearsal is where confidence really comes from. Rehearse aloud, standing up, timing every run, at least twice. If you're over time, cut, don't rush: remove an example or a detail rather than talking faster. Know your first 30 seconds so well that you can say them however nervous you are, because once you're under way it gets easier. And remember Andrew's rule: the presentation starts when you enter the room and finishes when you leave. The way you walk in, set up and say thank you is seen too.

Questions are a chance to show what you know. Listen to the whole question, pause, then answer briefly: a point and a reason. If you don't know, say so, and say what you'd do to find out; assessors respect that far more than a guess. Afterwards, while it's fresh, note what went well and the one thing you'd change.