One of the most important parts of presenting comes before you ever step foot in front of an audience. It’s the content development stage. Most presenters spend time reading and researching to support their ideas and fill out their message.
So today, we want to share some ways to save time during the research process of your presentation. Whether you are building a strong base of knowledge to start from or looking for specific examples or statistics, these tips will help you navigate the internet more efficiently.
1. Limit the domain or site.
It can be frustrating to wade through sources that aren’t credible to find legitimate information. One of the quickest ways around this is to limit the domains or site you pull from. This tip comes from the helpful speaker’s text Public Speaking: Finding Your Voice. “Use “site:” following a term or phrase to restrict your search to a given site or domain. For example, typing “oil spill site:whitehouse.gove” will limit your search results to presidential statements on the topic.”
For example, I typed “public speaking tips site:edu” in my search bar. The results that came back were only from academic sources because of the .edu domain. Information from Harvard and Purdue were the first two hits. Try this trick now for something you are currently researching and see what you pull back.
2. Use quotation marks.
When it comes to searching, specificity saves time. All Useful Info says, “A smart way of reducing the time taken to hit a search result is to use quotation marks; doing this helps the browser look for exact phrases on its server because it now understands the context of your search better.” So if you are looking for a specific phrase, put it in quotation marks. That tells your search engine to find those exact phrases in that exact sequence. This tip is especially helpful for search engines in which “and” is implied. As MIT Libraries points out, “Google automatically puts an AND in between your search terms.”
3. Use Boolean operators.
Boolean operators are the words “and,” “or,” and “not.” Each of the phrases “talks” to your search engine in a little different way, giving it directions for what to pull back. MIT Libraries says Boolean operators “connect your search words together to either narrow or broaden your set of results.” Let’s use an example to see how they work.
Say for example you are researching presentation design.
- AND: If you type “presentation and design,” the “and” tells your search engine to pull back all the sources that contain both terms. So you’ll get back any information that includes both the words “presentation” and “design.”
- OR: If you type “presentation or design,” the “or” tells your search engine to pull back all the sources that contain either term. So you’ll get back sources about presentations that have nothing to do with design. And you’ll also get sources about design that have nothing to do with presentations. This is the broadest type of search.
- NOT: If you type “presentation not design,” the “not” tells your search engine to exclude anything with the term “design” in it. This way, you’ll get search results about presentations but not any that contain the word “design” in them.
In our fast-paced and busy world these three tips can help you save time and do your job more efficiently. Instead of wading through information that you don’t need or isn’t credible, you can conduct a smarter internet search and get right to developing stronger presentation content.
For more tips and tricks on presentation design and delivery, get in touch with one of our experts now.
