If someone tells you to give a speech and a presentation, most people are going to ask what’s the difference? Well, there’s a lot of difference between a presentation and a speech! Both these terms have been used interchangeably but that’s just wrong! Let’s try to understand the difference.
According to dictionary.com, a presentation is “a verbal report presented with illustrative material such as slides, graphs etc” and a speech is “a talk or address delivered to an audience”.
Though there aren’t any distinguishing factors between a presentation vs speech because they have been used interchangeably for quite some time now, but they certainly do have their fair share of difference.
Speech
As mentioned above a speech is an address or a talk delivered to an audience and involves no visual aids. While delivering a speech, a speaker mostly stands behind a podium and speaks to his audience via a microphone. In a speech there is also no interaction between the speaker and audience and the audience generally just listens to the speaker’s point of view. Speeches go way back in history as well! There are so many notable speakers of past; Churchill, Martin Luther King, Abraham Lincoln!
A speech affects people emotionally too, depending on the topic chosen by the speaker! Famous orators of today and the yesteryears could greatly affect their audience just with their words. That’s the power that a speech holds!
Presentation
A presentation relies on visual aids! That’s why mostly a presentation is used for a sales pitch or during business meetings or even in schools and colleges! A presentation also relies on charts, graphs, images, videos used in slides with PowerPoint or any other presentation tool.
Whenever there is a need to present a lot of factual data like in a business meeting or a college project then it makes a lot of sense to use presentational tools because information like previous year’s sales or profit and revenue projection are best represented with visual aids.
As you can see there are some differences between a speech and a presentation! A speech relies more on the speaker’s point and a presentation is more focused on visual aids.
