A short video on planning a presentation around purpose, audience and structure, aimed at students preparing for assessed or seminar-based talks.
About the resource
This is a narrated video covering three stages of planning an academic presentation: clarifying your purpose (inform, persuade, or analyse, with a single central message), understanding your audience (their existing knowledge, expectations, and what tone will land), and structuring the content into introduction, main body and conclusion.
It was produced for Durham University’s Academic Skills Centre, in collaboration with Durham students, as general presentation-skills content rather than material tied to a specific module or discipline.
A reuser would need to know the content is generic enough to apply across subjects, there’s nothing discipline-specific here, which makes it easy to reuse but also means it doesn’t address subject-specific presentation conventions (e.g. defending a thesis vs a poster session).
How you could use it
Works as pre-session viewing before a presentation-skills workshop, or embedded in a module that includes an assessed presentation component. Individual slides on audience analysis or structure could be pulled out as discussion prompts in a seminar on communication skills. The content is generic enough to apply across subjects, there’s nothing discipline-specific which makes it easy to reuse but also means it doesn’t address subject-specific presentation conventions (e.g. defending a thesis vs a poster session). Also, the video uses third-party illustrations (unDraw) and icons (Phosphor Icons) under their own licences, and background music from Pixabay under the Pixabay Content Licence, not the CC BY 4.0 licence applied to the rest of the resource. If you strip the audio out or reuse it separately, you’d need to source it from Pixabay directly.
Licence and attribution
© Abby Catterson, Durham University, CC BY 4.0, 2026.
Note: the third-party assets in the video/slides (unDraw, Phosphor Icons, Pixabay audio) sit outside this licence and carry their own terms.
Download or access the resource
Watch/download the video (to download the video, click the three dots at the top right of the page and select Download Podcast)