How-To prepare a talk - Advice for students

This document is a work in progress that intends to provide students with the key points that make a good talk. Please see it as an HOWTO, make it yours and use it to review or improve the content of your talk BEFORE the presentation.

Key points to pass onto the audience

Your talk must convey technical content but your talk should also highlight that the problem you work on and your solution are of high quality. You want the audience to remember you and your talk, so before your seminar check the following points.

Significance and Impact

Do you have a slide ...

• that explains why the problem you work on is important?
• that shows the possible applications of your work?
• that tells you developed new theoretical tools that can be used by others?
• that tells why the audience should be interested in, or at lease aware of your work?

Contribution

Do you have a slide ...

• that tells you are working on a new and exciting problem?
• that tells your problem is well-known but you have a completely novel way of solving it?
• that explains why your work is better or more interesting?
• that tries to quantify objectively your contribution?

Talk content and structure

• Aim for a 40 minute talk with 20-30 slides. You will never be able to tell everything you put in your paper or thesis. Your goal is to be clear and interesting so that the audience will read your paper to learn the details.
• Don't assume that the audience knows everything. Keep in mind the diverse backgrounds and interests of the CUBIN audience.
• Spend a significant part of the talk setting up the problem you are studying and explain why it is interesting and important. This could take up half of the talk, even more.
• Build a story first to make it enjoyable. You can surely do something less boring than:
  1. Introduction
  2. Problem
  3. Resolution
  4. Simulation
  5. Conclusion
  There are, however, three key things to do in your talk:
  1. Tell people what you are going to tell them (i.e. the introduction)
  2. Tell them (i.e. the body of the talk)
  3. Tell them what you told them (i.e. the conclusions)
• Any audience will remember only 5% of your talk. You can surely extract the 5 main points of your talk. Make sure you create the story around them.
• Show the big picture only, do not waste your time in details. People will ask you questions if they need the details. Put details into backup slides you can pop up to answer a specific question.
• If your story is a bit complex or composed of several parts, add slides that summarise each part of the talk. Repeat the key message(s) that help link the story together. Imagine someone in the audience did not understand part C of your talk, what are the key things this person should know about part C to be able to catch up and understand the rest of the talk?

Presentation

Creating the slides

• To help motivate the audience, illustrate your work with a real practical example. If you can, show a picture of a real engineering system and show how your work can be applied to that system. Remember CUBIN is an Engineering research centre.
• Do not have too much information on any one slide. Often a slide with a good title, a single figure, and 1 or 2 dot point punch lines under the figure, is very effective.
• Each slide must tell a single dominant message, which is preferably reflected in the title.
• Do plan or rehearse what you want to say about a slide. Its easy to get yourself sidetracked if you've not thought through the message you want for the slide and the words to use.
• Make sure the slides help you tell a story instead of enslaving you to discuss details. Remember that you will never be able to tell everything, avoid the details.
• Don't be satisfied unless the slide is elegant - uncrowded, suitable font size, use very short 'pseudo sentences' to keep dot point lines and others to a single line.
• Do rehearse your timing for the talk, especially, how much time do you spend on a slide, and does its importance justify that time?

Equations, mathematical tools

• Try to avoid using equations. Diagrams, pictures, or flow charts are always much better than equations. Equations should be avoided at all costs.
• Only show equations if they support the story telling. If you must use equations make sure that you define all symbols. Keep the number of symbols to an absolute minimum. Limit the number of equations per slide.
• If needed, create backup slides at the end of your presentation that contain specific equations if one asks a question.
• Do not present a set of equations to describe how you solved the problem. Instead, give a high level description of how you did it. Save the equations for back-up slides.

Graphs, plots, figures and animations

Graphs should be compelling evidence of the work and the result. It is usually a good opportunity to show your contribution. Show the reference / prior work / status-quo solution. This will help the audience get a reference of what should be expected and help show your solution performs better. Think not only in terms of the performance of your solution but also the cost associated to it. Show trade-off between cost and performance if it exists (it usually does).

• Figures are great to represent a model, the context etc. Clear simple block diagrams help.
• Figures must be easy to read. Colour coding the lines is good, but explicit and large legend is essential. Directly label the lines/curves if possible.
• Use big fonts and label the axes, they have to have three things:
  1. a label
  2. a scale
  3. units
• Split result across different figures if there are many plots. Add plots by small groups over several slides if needed.
• Animations usually help support the story or explain a complex system, but use them parsimoniously !! Keep them simple, you do not want to spend your time clicking your mouse. Remember, what if you have to go backward and show a previous slide to answer a question?

Conclusion

• Use different slides to draw different conclusions rather than presenting them all on the same slide
• Mention the future directions of your research. This is important particularly to a PhD conversion talk so as to convince the audience and commitee members alike that there is more exciting work ahead that warrants investigation.
• Remind the audience of the key points you want them to leave with. So your last slide should not be "Thank You" ... that is useless, it should rather be the last punch line you want the audience to leave with.

During the talk

• Relax. Easy to say, but not that hard to do! Remember that the audience has come to hear you, because you are the expert in your topic area.
• Tell the audience why you are enthusiastic about this work.
• On a new slide, remember the key message (you did prepare it when creating the slide, didn't you?). Have an introductory sentence prepared in your head for when that slide first comes up - hit the key message first, tell them what this slide is really about.
• Talk TO the audience, don't look behind you at the slides. If necessary, focus on and wake up the somnolent.
• Talk loudly, clearly and a little slower than you would in conversation. Speak as if to someone in the back row. You should have the impression you are almost shouting, if not, you in fact won't be heard at the back.
• Don't read out the slides, your job for each slide is to explain, and to drive home one key message per slide. Let the slide contents help you not hinder you.
• When in doubt or if confused, look at the audience and just tell them straight what it is about, ignore the slide contents.
• If totally confused, reiterate where are we now and what we are hoping to do, and just move to the next slide.
• If running out of time, don't panically skip slides. Just focus even more on key messages and only use a subset of the slide (you will save time!). Just ignore any bits that slow you down.
• Listen carefully to the questions before trying to answer. If necessary rephrase the question and confirm you understood it right.
• Be careful with laser pointers - they can be very distracting. Hold the pointer steady, or move in tight circle around a key point on a graph or diagram. Never whirl the spot around the slide. Only rarely point to words on a text slide - emphasise these as you discuss the point they make.

Links

Beamer User Guide - Guidelines for Creating Presentations (Chapter 5)