Presentation Tips

“The best speakers know enough to be scared ... the only difference between the pros and the novices is that the pros have trained the butterflies to fly in formation.”

-- Edward R. Murrow

How to make the most of your 10 minutes of fame at the Symposium

Be a good citizen.

Be considerate of the other speakers and the audience by staying within your allotted time of 15 minutes. This includes 5 minutes for discussion and transition to the next speaker, so you effectively have just 10 minutes to give your talk. Session chairs will hold you to the allotted time!

You gave yourself time to prepare your talk, right?

Following are excerpts from a February 2010 article by Liz Danzico called "Training the Butterflies." Danzico talked with Scott Berkun, trainer and author of many books on making presentations -- the latest of which is Confessions of a Public Speaker. (see short video at right)

It begins with practice. Rehearse your material; in hotel rooms, or at home, do the entire presentation out loud. The goal isn’t memorization—it’s confidence. By the time you give your talk, youre practice has made it possible to improvise and respond to unexpected things—hecklers, tough questions, bored audiences, and equipment failures—all of which will happen. (You’ve been warned.)

Half of your audience is sitting in the middle of the room, and the rest of the room farther away still. How well can they even see you? A speaker has to be a bigger, louder version of who he or she is, and even behave more aggressively. Be a passionate, interested, fully present version of you. That’s who your audience came to hear.

Building your presentation

Jumping head first into PowerPoint or Keynote sets you up to have too many slides and too little thinking. A presentation should be centered on the key things you will say and how you will say them. Slides should help you say those things, but can almost never say them for you.

Count MINUTES, not SLIDES. Thirty slides could take an hour, or ten minutes, who knows? You'd better know. You'd better have practiced at least a few times so you realize how long it takes to hit each major point in your material, pruning where you go long until it fits a natural, strong rhythm the audience can easily follow.

Discuss the same material as reported in your abstract. Address the essential points and leave the details for publication -– remember, you have just ten minutes.

Give an opening statement to acquaint the audience with your study. Don't waffle while you warm up. Keep your introduction short and to the point, never more than one minute.  Practice until you get it right so you don't take time from the important content.

Use active words and short sentences. Words should reinforce your visual material. As tempting as it may be -- especially if you are nervous -- do NOT read your slides to your audience!

Speak slowly and clearly into the microphone and toward the audience. When using a microphone clipped to your lapel, it may be difficult for the audience to hear you if you turn your head away from the microphone. If you need to see what is being shown on the screen, have pictures or copies at the podium.

Devote each graphic to ONE fact, idea, or finding. Each graphic should remain on the screen at least 20 seconds. Illustrate major points or trends, not detailed data. Do not show long or complicated formulas or equations -- save those for your paper.

Edit, edit, edit. And edit again. People came to hear you speak. They didn't come to struggle to read the 15 bullet points you've crammed onto one slide. Use the absolute minimum number of words in the title, subtitle, and captions. Standard abbreviations are acceptable.

Can the audience read your slides?

Presentations are most readable with a dark background and bright lettering. It is often helpful to step 8-10 feet back from your computer screen and make sure that your slides are readable. Stay away from small fonts which will be illegible from the back of the room, and break up a complex slide into a series of slides, to make it more intelligible.

Critically examine every graphic and view each under adverse light conditions before presenting at a meeting. It is sometimes impossible to provide excellent light conditions at meetings.

The presentation system includes basic system fonts. If your presentation contains any special fonts, you must provide a copy of the font to be loaded on the presentation system. To be safe, use standard system fonts such as Arial or Times. Please pay special attention to scientific notation, as this is often written using a non-standard font.

TIP: Use the Slide Master capability of PowerPoint to standardize the look of your presentation. A consistent look to your slides helps viewers follow your talk -- if they have to work too hard, they'll tune you out. Basing the style of each slide on a Master Slide makes it super easy to change styles across the whole presentation. You won’t have to edit each slide individually, saving you a ton of time.

Technical Notes on Presentations

When in doubt, bring the source file too.

PowerPoint is designed to display pictures and text generated within the program or inserted from other sources. If the source is any video file, or a sound file larger than 5KB, the original file must be available on the computer where the presentation is to be run. If in doubt, bring source files along.

Embedded charts, graphs, and object-oriented graphic files can translate in odd ways on a different computer system. Please insert charts or graphics as bitmap files ( .gif, .jpg,.tif). If you embed charts and object graphics in your presentation, bring those source files along too. But you knew that.

Digital images

Try to make your images <100 dpi to keep file sizes small and to help your presentation run faster. To bring an image into your presentation, choose Insert  >  Picture from File. Don’t copy/paste or drag/drop. It may look fine on your computer, but it will not display properly when you transfer the presentation to another computer.

Media clips

PowerPoint allows for playback of a wide variety of media. Unfortunately Apple® and Microsoft® disagree on appropriate media formats, so only a few formats are cross-platform.

For movies created on the Mac and played back on Windows, choose Cinepak®, MPEG-1. Or, if you have access to a Windows machine, use QuickTime® Pro (in Windows) to re-encode the movie to an Indeo® 5.1 AVI which will provide a high quality transfer.

Animation

Animated builds, moves, highlights and transitions can help visually reinforce your message. However, these are often overused and can detract from your the message, so please use sparingly.

Different versions of PowerPoint have different sets of animation features that are not always backwards compatible, it is best to use as little animation as possible to keep your audience focused on your content, and minimize problems in portability.

For More Information ...

Thanks to the good people at ProjectionNet and the American Geophysical Union for advice on giving talks and taming software.

Text in blue (above) was excerpted from a February 2010 article by Liz Danzico called "Training the Butterflies." Danzico talked with Scott Berkun, trainer and author of many books on making presentations -- the latest of which is Confessions of a Public Speaker.