I spent the last two days in Leicester at Translation UK, a two-day conference that is an annual gathering for scientists working on all aspects of translation — the protein synthesis kind. The conference is friendly and informal. It is kept short so that it is cheap enough for labs to send postdocs and PhD students who dominate the roster of speakers.
As one of the older heads at the meeting I was collared on arrival to act as a judge of the oral presentations. This I was glad to do. It’s just the sort of discipline I need to make me pay full attention for the entirety of the proceedings.
The standard of talks was pleasingly high. Most people seem to have mastered the elements of PowerPoint and if any of the speakers were nervous, it didn’t really show. But there were a few elements of inexperience on display which I wanted to address while my impressions are still fresh.
Your title: compose with care — ask a question or make a statement — and make sure to refer to your title right at the beginning of the presentation. Don’t just tell the audience they can read it off your first slide, even if they can.
Your introduction: establish right at the start of the talk, especially if it’s a short one, the problem that your work is addressing. Outline the background and context to set the scene, and then tell the audience what your work is aiming to achieve. If you are feeling bold, state your conclusion right up front. This will help the audience keep on track for the rest of your talk, though it may reduce your scope for a dramatic reveal of a surprising result. That one is up to you but remember that the main purpose is to convey information effectively.
Your results: Less is more. This is perhaps the hardest lesson of all, one I still struggle with. Yes, you may have been labouring for a year or more on the results that you are about to present but you won’t have time in a short talk — 10 or 12 minutes is typical these days — to do them complete justice. So you have to give edited highlights. Pick out the most important findings and the most important pieces of data that support them. A talk is not a paper so you do not have to present every single piece of data that supports your thesis. Some people think they need to cram in all the data to make their talk seem substantial — though some crammers are just showing off — while others believe they are flattering the audience’s intelligence by presenting complex data at a galloping pace. But let me tell you this: I may be a professor but I am not as clever as you think I am. I would rather be taken through selected data with care. If my interest is sparked, I’ll ask you for more information after the talk. Trust me.
Your slides: Less is more. Try not to stuff too many results onto a single slide. By all means build up a complex figure piece by piece but make sure to give yourself the time to talk about every element that you show. Don’t put things on slides that you are not going to talk about as this will only distract the audience. And don’t forget to explain your figures; it is all too common to assume that the audience is as familiar as you are with your data formats — figures, photos, gels, etc. — but they will thank you for taking the time to make their meaning clear.
Your voice: Speak slowly and with feeling. If you pack in too many results you will feel pressured from the off to talk quickly for fear of running out of time. This is counterproductive. Give yourself the time to punctuate the talk with emphasis on the most important points, or those that make you most excited. Genuine excitement is infectious and audiences love it.
Your eyes: Try to spend as much time as possible speaking to the audience rather than to the screen. Look at them — make eye contact when driving your message home.
And that’s all there is to it, apart from forcing yourself to rehearse in front of a critical friend, of course. I look forward to these lessons being universally adopted at next year’s meeting, though feel free to take issue or to suggest additional pointers in the comments. There is an element of personal taste in all this.
Finally, for those with the time (27 minutes, to be precise), a more detailed video version of this little sermon is available on YouTube.
@SloopDrJohnB adds:
Completely agree. Can add:
Make sure font used on slides is big enough for hard-of-seeing to read. Do not use grey letters on grey backgrounds!
Also – no need for an overview slide at beginning of 12 min talks – get on with talk itself. If the overview is there for speakers own benefit, practise more instead.
I second the plea to make the text large enough – too many conference venues have projectors and screens that are too small for the space and also force people to sit a long way back. Don’t assume that because you can read it on a laptop screen in front of you that anyone can see it on a projected system from 40+ feet away – go and try it on a projector.
In the same general area, please replot figures for presentations so that the axis numbering is clear and large enough. The standard size axis numbers from most software are designed for print or laptop viewing, you cant see any of it in a conference room.
It helps pacing if you have a definite path through the slide, i.e. the item you want to make your first point about is placed top left, and the last point slide item is placed somewhere bottom or bottom right.
Finally most magazines use an L-shaped format for content with good reason. Words and pictures occupying either the L or the other quadrant respectively. You can’t always do this but the slide is much easier to read if you can do some of this.
Oh and as mentioned above, yellow lettering is a really bad idea
On the topic of lettering – yellow is bad. Even worse is red on blue or blue on red. Especially so if one considers the prevalence of various forms of colour-blindness, predominantly among the men in the audience.
Great post. My small addition: Hold laserpointers with two hands, or just make sure to move the beam precisely and deliberately.
+1 to this. Also – laser pointers are for pointing, not for making multiple small vaguely circle-shaped rings around an element on the screen.
And if you’re speaking into a fixed microphone, remember that means you can’t move around.
I agree with all of this, but with one caveat on “make sure to refer to your title right at the beginning of the presentation”: don’t repeat your title if the session chair just read it out for you. It’s surprisingly common (and, at least for me, very annoying) to hear the chair say: “now we have Dr Blah from the Blahdy Institue, presenting ‘Reads out full title verbatim'” then to immediately have that followed by “Hi, I’m Dr Blah, based at the Blahdy Institute, and my presentation is ‘Reads out full title verbatim’.” Argh… it’s annoying me just thinking about it!