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Self-Study Courses

Giving Clear and Compelling Presentations on Technical Topics

2 CPE Credits $41.00/credit hour
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This course is intended for professionals who deliver presentations or lead meetings. The aim of this course is to ensure that your message gets across to your audience.

During seminars and meetings, presenters tend to speak at the same pace as they think, and they advance their slides in concert. However, audience members lack the presenter’s level of context, so they require the presenter to deliver the information more slowly and in smaller chunks. This course will demonstrate how to ease your audience’s cognitive load when you are speaking about accounting and finance concepts.

The course will concentrate on presentations that involve visual aids, such as PowerPoint slides, diagrams, and charts. When presenters use visual aids, they frequently commit two critical mistakes, each of which forces the audience to engage in multitasking.

The first mistake is that presenters communicate orally at the same time as they are revealing written information. Studies show that audience members cannot consume both oral and written information in the same moment.

The second mistake is that presenters bring too much visual information onto a slide at once, causing audiences to peek ahead while also trying to absorb the current topic. In this course, participants will learn how to avoid these two ubiquitous mistakes and, instead, develop a smooth presentation style. As a result, audiences will clearly understand your technical presentations and be compelled to follow along.

Publication Date: July 2026

Designed For
This course is for professionals who give presentations or lead meetings about technical topics.

Topics Covered

  • The cognitive science behind delivering and absorbing information
  • The illusion of multitasking
  • PowerPoint tips for new and experienced users
  • Allowing audiences to actually read your slides
  • Progressive disclosure of information
  • The challenges of presenting orally as compared to communicating in writing
  • Subconscious techniques to ease absorption, such as alliteration, hiding of unnecessary details, and consistent ordering of information

Learning Objectives

  • Demonstrate how to use appropriate pacing when giving a presentation or leading a meeting
  • Demonstrate how to stagger your delivery of oral and written information
  • Identify when to add only one point at a time to your PowerPoint slides
  • Explain how to choose color schemes that help your audience focus on the key information
  • Explain when to enlarge, shrink, and move objects or text
  • Explain why audience members require a slower pace than presenters do, according to cognitive science

Level
Basic

Instructional Method
Self-Study

NASBA Field of Study
Business Management & Organization (2 hours)

Program Prerequisites
None

Advance Preparation
None

Instructor

Ryan Standil

Ryan Standil leads seminars about effective written communication. He is a regular speaker at accounting firms, law firms, corporations, and governmental agencies.

Ryan attended Western University, in Canada, where he graduated from the Ivey Business School and the Faculty of Law. After graduating, Ryan worked at a law firm in Toronto, focusing on corporate and commercial matters.

Today Ryan owns and operates a seminar company, called Write To Excite.

Ryan’s mission is to help professionals grow their income by improving their writing.

Ryan is a frequent contributor to the leading newspaper in Canada, The Globe and Mail. Unsurprisingly, his columns can be described as “writing about writing.”

During Ryan’s communication seminars, participants learn how to view their own writing from the perspective of their readers. By adopting this perspective, participants are able to draft emails and documents that resonate with their various audiences.

Ryan’s training leaves participants with practical tips that they can apply right away.

$82.00 / 2 CPE
NASBA Registered Sponsor
CPAs, EAs, CTECs Approved Credentials
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