3. Know your audience

Once you have established the purpose of the presentation, you will need to consider the audience and the environment in which you will present.

You will need to know and understand your audience to ensure you will effectively convey the information of the presentation. As an example, when presenting to your lecturer you will use formal academic language, and you would assume that they know the subject content; as opposed to when presenting to students, where you will have to provide background and explain the subject at a language level they will understand.

Watch the video below to learn more about understanding your audience:

As a reminder, you can analyse the audience by asking the following questions:

• Who will be your audience?
  For example, fellow students, colleagues, senior management, etc
• What do they know about the topic?
  Are they being introduced to the topic, or do they already have knowledge about the topic?
• At what level should you deliver the information?
  Should you use purely academic language or more informal language to ensure that the audience understand what you are presenting.
• If presenting on-line, what devices will your audience be using to connect?
  For example, will they be using mobile devices where the screen is not very big,
• How can you accommodate the varying devices and their display of the presentation application?
  For example, using large font to ensure slides are readable on small screens.