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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Give just enough for them to want more
This is the same back and fourth we went through when designing the yearly systems update presentation for staff. Do you demo and show everything ala Steve Jobs Keynote, or do you tell them and show them nothing.
The balance was to show screen grabs of some general stuff. Enough for them to see what is new, but not enough to actually train them. The staff goes away wanting to know more and they paid attention.
While your data is important you should consider the teaser approach. You show just enough for them to get the point and want more. You don’t bore with data but you show a couple graphs, refer to where more data is.
The technique is the same goal a car ad should have. You see why you want the new car, you know it gets better gas mileage and has these new features but you still want to come in for a test drive.