Making presentations

Creating an effective presentation involves careful planning and thoughtful execution to ensure your audience remains engaged and gains a clear understanding of your message.

Over the years, I have come to appreciate these principles while making presentations

Note
  • A scientific presentation is about making your audience smarter, not making yourself seem smart.
  • A blind high schooler and a deaf high schooler should both get the same message out of your presentation.

Here’s a brief guide based on best practices for delivering impactful presentations:

General guidlines

  • Face the audience, speak to them!
  • Don’t read the slides
  • Don’t put to much writing
  • Don’t use color maps that are not blind-color friendly
  • Don’t write long equations, no one can follow those
  • Please respect your time, it’s the audience time and other speakers time too.
  • Keep the number of slides under the number of total minutes
  • Keep the number of messages per slide to one, or at most…one
  • Don’t be surprised by the next slide (like, “crap now I have to explain this slide”)
  • Don’t put on a full manuscript table and then say “I know you won’t be able to read this”
  • Also, don’t skip slides in front of your audience like no one is noticing. “Sorry, just want skip these here for the sake of time… Ok… Oh, one more. Yes. As I was saying…”
  • If you show an equation, give an intuition for what it’s telling you. The title of a data slide should (almost always) be a SINGLE SENTENCE that tells the audience what you concluded from the data

Preparing the slides

  • If you don’t explain it, don’t put it on the slide.
  • Give slides titles that state the conclusion of the data
  • Add animations!
  • Convince the audience what you plan to tell them is worth the effort of listening VERY early in the talk. And one “idea” per slide (this doesn’t mean Fig1A-H copy pasted from your manuscript).
  • Make sure figures (and their axes labels) are big enough (don’t make me squint)
  • Physically point to the diagram during explanations
  • More visuals than text!
  • Statements to avoid:
    • “I know there’s a lot of data here, but I’m only going to talk about some of it” - don’t put data there if you don’t talk about it
    • “Um” - try to speak clearly
    • “You may not be able to see this, but…” - make the figure bigger
  • And if it’s for you to show things, don’t put any words. People CANNOT READ AND LISTEN at the same time. So many people can’t understand this simple fact.
  • Have a conclusion slide that summarizes the key takeaways from the presentation. During Q&A, stay on this conclusion slide (allowing it to sink in to the audience) instead of a slide that simply says “Thank you”, or “Questions?” or something like that.
  • Don’t overestimate the background knowledge of your audience. Spend a few extra minutes explaining the background of your research, why it’s interesting, and defining any special terms you use. As long as you’re not patronizing, everyone will appreciate it.
  • Don’t say “bear with me” or “this looks complicated but…” or anything that implies that your audience is not good, smart, quick enough to get you…
  • Have backup slides. You can anticipate or will experience common questions or follow-on detail/data that audiences will ask.
  • Describe both axes of a graph on every single slide. You know the data. Your audience doesn’t. Orient them.
  • I TRY to maintain one idea per slide. New idea or piece of data? New slide.
  • Bullet points are for suckers. Use an image, and talk over it. This is my “spray and pray marketing” slide.