Improving Academic Presentation Style
Submitted by matt on October 1, 2007 - 8:34pm.
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?
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I agree with Artie’s suggestion. In the soft sciences and law, where I do most of my presentations, data is important, but audiences seem to be more open to the story-telling side.
In law, especially, where there are diverse backgrounds, a good mix of detailed paper or web backup and story-telling (story-showing?) slides seems to engage the heterogeneous audience pretty well. Perhaps there’s an analogy there to your situation?
I will note that doing these “good” presentations is much more time consuming (no surprise there). Tufte and Beyond Bullet Points are good resources.