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Improving Academic Presentation Style
Matt | Oct 1 2007
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? 31 Comments
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 Aim a little lowerSubmitted by piminnowcheez on October 3, 2007 - 11:38am.
I make no claims to being a great presenter, but after sitting through many colloquia in an academic department with several rather different subfields squished into one program, I had several thoughts: • When you're getting up in front of a room of smart people to give a presentation, unless you're reeeeeeeeally secure, somewhere in there is some anxiety about looking like a dumbass. The tendency, often, is to err on the side of aiming high; assuming your audience is well-versed in all but the specifics of your area of research. I think this mostly isn't true - all of those smart people are also insecure humans trying to look smart for the other smart people, and whether they'd admit it or not, they'd probably get more out of your talk if you lowered your estimation of what they already know. Even if they're brilliant, they're still sitting in the dark listening to a projector fan whirl, trying to stay awake, and they might secretly appreciate a little hand-holding. • When you show graphs of your data, walk the audience through what they're seeing. They'll have to divert attention away from you anyway just to read the axis labels and make sense of what they're seeing, so you might as well go there with them - describe how the graph works (axis labels, etc) and the story you're claiming it tells. • I'm sure not everyone will agree with this, but: I HATE text on slides. If you're talking about data and at the same time putting up bullet points that say the same thing, then the visual presentation is competing with the oral presentation. If you supply the text with your mouth, and the pictures with your slides, then you're not competing with yourself for your audience's attention. • If your data doesn't supply a knock-out narrative all by itself, making it a personal narrative often works. A la, we were trying to find out this, so we did that, and we got this answer, but wait, we went down a garden path because then this other thing happened, and whattya know, it all comes together when you add this last little piece... etc. Being able to include a wrong conclusion you made helps throw a little plot twist into your narrative. » POSTED IN:
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