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Improving Academic Presentation Style

I give a lot of talks, and I've been trying to improve my presentation style, but I'm not sure how to do it in the context of my field. I am in a fairly quantitative science. I have to give presentations where I present results; I am 'selling' the result to the audience, but not in the same way, I think, that one would sell a product, or an idea, or a concept. I'm attempting to convince them that it's right, and that I was diligent in pursuing the result.

One common technique is to simply overwhelm the audience with lots of facts and charts and bullet points. Obviously this is a bad idea -- but on the other hand, if you don't give enough 'serious-looking' plots, you run the risk of being dismissed by members of the audience.

So how do I strike a balance? How do I keep my presentations in the manner of a good narrative, with appropriate display methods, when constrained by an audience that has a certain expectation of a larger number of quantitative figures and numbers?

dbtodd's picture

Scientific presentations

Craig is spot on, "But it is all about framing your text so that your audience will care." I'm a Developmental Biologist so I'm fortunate to be able to tie things up into a bit of a story with less quantitative data. When I do need to include such data, such as statistics generated from microarray data, I always tell the audience how genes they know already are behaving in the statistical data. This gives them a comfortable framework on which to base a judgment on the new information I want to give them next. When I see someone try to bulldoze the audience with too much data and jargon, I come away with the idea that they don't know what the hell they are talking about. If they can't distill the data into knowledge, then they are not contributing to the field. It is just noisy chatter. Best of luck to you!!

 
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