by Dick Woodward » Thu Feb 01, 2018 5:03 pm
This has all been good advice, but one key thing has been left out. Be sure to give yourself time to practice and time your talk. While most academic venues are at least somewhat flexible with time, you may run into the moderator who believes that a 10-minute talk should last 10 minutes - period. (As a side note, the vast majority of talks that I have given in the last decade or so have been at venture capital conferences where I was looking for money. At many of these things, if you are given 7 minutes to present your company, they will turn the microphone off at 7 minutes and one second. Timing is critical.)
Practice also has other benefits. It will help you to find areas where you may be struggling to explain a concept and will give you a chance to modify your presentation accordingly. It can also help you rid yourself of an annoying habit that many academics have - they stand with their backs to the audience and, using the laser pointer, read the slide aloud while pointing at the words - sort of like "follow the bouncing ball" in karaoke. I can assure you that in any conference where you will be presenting, 100% of the audience is literate and can read your slides! Normally, your slides contain information (e.g., a graph) that you verbally describe to your audience. I do recommend, however, that if you are at an international conference, it can be useful to put more verbiage on the slides. Many people read English better than they understand the spoken language.
As long as I am at it, please look out for something that happens frequently. A presenter will put a huge spreadsheet on a slide, outline a few cells in red, point to them and say "I know you can't see this, but the cells in red show....". Make certain that every slide says something important and is visible to the audience.
There is a book that you should read that I think will help you a great deal in giving presentations. It's called "You've got to be believed to be heard" by Bert Decker, and it is the single best book on giving presentations that I have ever read.
I wish you much success, and leave you with one last thought. When I was in graduate school, I attended a seminar where the presenter discussed his work on cellular signalling - a subject in which I had zero interest. His presentation was so lucid that I actually enjoyed it. After the seminar, my fellow graduate students generally agreed that the gentleman could not be much of a scientist - "he's too slick" was one comment. That was in the 1970's. Fast forward to 1999. The presenter, Gunter Blobel by name, goes to Stockholm in December to shake hands with the King. (If any of you miss the reference, he won the Nobel Prize.) The lesson from this is that good science, presented well, will take you much farther than good science alone.
Regards,
Dick