A lot of science happens behind closed doors, in sometimes cold and/or dark spaces. When you do see the light of day and have to communicate your research to the greater community (scientific or otherwise), you should be able to do so effectively.
effectively?
Seems obvious, right? Well, let’s first explore what that means. Thinking you do a good or good enough job is great (and I admire the confidence!), but your idea of “good” and your audience’s reception of your presentation can be quite different. So, let’s take a step back and outline the goals of “effectively” so we know what boxes to check off when we build and ultimately give these presentations.
With an effective presentation, everyone:
- understands why you’re doing the work
- understands the basics or specifics of the work you’re doing
- is able to follow along with you throughout the entire presentation
- isn’t hoping someone pulls a fire alarm or calls in a bomb threat just so they can be freed from the torture they eagerly and foolishly walked into
Pretty simple, I think. But, how we do we do that?
I’m so glad you asked! After seeing many presentations in many different styles, I’ve settled on a style that works best for me. The way I present is an amalgam of things I liked from other presentations and improvements on (or avoidance of) things that I hated (I have strong opinions about lackluster talks).
The advice I give here, like all things, is subjective. Some folks think the dress is blue and black, others think it’s white and gold. That’s just the world we live in. Moving on:
Appeal to everyone
In a nut shell, that’s pretty much it. That’s my short-hand way of saying “explain everything in the most basic ways possible” which in and of itself is a polite way of saying “don’t wave around your smarts because of your insecurities.” Let that sink in for a moment and we’ll unpack what that means.
Be simple
- explain everything in the simplest ways possible
Scenario: you find yourself in a room full of researchers, there are people in the audience who you cite regularly, there are those who you look up to as role models or institutional “rock stars.” Your audience ranges from undergraduates to the silverest of foxes enjoying their days as emeritus faculty. At no point should you assume everyone in the room is fully versed in all the stuff you’re talking about. And no, by discussing the fundamentals of your work are you are not insulting anyone in the room.
Your audience won’t be just people who do the exact work you do, sometimes folks are curious, or your work is interdisciplinary and your audience has people from those disciplines. Be generous to the audience you may attract and present your work to them humbly. As an example, my work is essentially studying historical movement of highly migratory fishes and I use genetics as the tool to do so. When presenting, I have to discuss the fact I use specific genetic tools, a whole slew of wacky statistical and computational tools, I have to give basic information about the species, but I also have to make inferences that cover ecology/geology/oceanography later on. That’s a lot of stuff, and it’s entirely impractical for me to assume everyone already has exposure to all of these things to be able to follow along effectively. So, just give people a break and spend 15 seconds explaining the absolute basics of what a Monte Carlo Chain Markov is, or what the hell leptocephalus larvae are. Don’t assume. Your audience will be thankful for it.
Be confident in yourself
- don’t wave around your smarts because of your insecurities
This one sounds way more personal, doesn’t it? Well, it is. Like I said before, you will have a mixed bag of people seeing your presentations, and you need not be intimidated by anyone there! Do a bit of reflection and think about how jargon-heavy your presentations are. At conferences, you are surrounded by future job competition, potential employers, collaborators, etc., so the motivation for being at your “most marketable” is there. But, you’re human. Be human. Waving around fancy terms and leaving everyone in the dark is alienating to your audience. If you’re an intelligent person, that will come across a lot better when you casually explain the gist of Coalescent Theory within 15 seconds to a room full of people. When was the last time you were truly impressed by a person speaking in fancy jargon and you just blankly nodding?
Presentation Structure
Presentations are pretty much how you would write a publication:
Title & Authors » Intro » Methods » Results » Discussion
The difference here is that you usually have ~15 minutes to cover all of that material, except you don’t really, because good etiquette is to leave a few minutes for questions, so you really have 12 minutes of presentation and 3 minutes of an anything-can-happen emotional gauntlet (questions). Your first instinct might be to ignore the Title (10-30sec tops) and divvy out those 12 precious minutes as 3min per section, which is totally ok. If you would like your presentation to be a bit more specialized, then here’s my biggest piece of advice:
ask yourself what’s the most important thing you want your audience to know (because you really don’t have enough time to cover everything effectively)
I regularly have a tough time deciding this myself. Science has a lot of parts to it, and you might feel like you are short changing people by not telling them “all of the things.” But, take a breath and understand that the audience doesn’t know the details you aren’t telling them. I very regularly have to remind myself of this because I’m prone to wanting to talk about every little detail. I think it’s important to make the distinction that I’m not saying “withhold information” so much as I’m saying “there isn’t enough time for all of this.”
so…
What’s the important part? Is it important to you that everyone leaves the room understanding your novel methods, like the way you sampled, or maybe what statistics/models you used? Are the results most important? Are the inferences and implications from your results most important? Whichever it is you pick, I suggest you shave off time from the other 3 categories to give you more time to be thorough with that thing and don’t bore yourself or others by over-explaining the other parts.
Miscellaneous advice
- your presentation should look good, as discussed in the design guidelines
- presentations should be in either 4:3 or 16:9 aspect ratio to maximize real estate. find out ahead of time what the A/V team will be using and adapt to it
- bullet points should be summary-esque, not the words you are literally saying out loud as they appear on screen
- avoid “uh” and “um.” Taking pauses is totally fine.
- don’t lock eyes with a single person in the audience for the entire presentation
- don’t trust anyone who tells you otherwise
- let your presentation slides emphasize the important content on the screen
- i.e. don’t start frantically using a laser pointer or mouse and give the impression you only now realized you should be highlighting something onscreen
- allow your voice to modulate, you aren’t a robot (be human, remember!)
- repeating a question aloud before answering it is a good courtesy for the audience
- you’re absolutely allowed to use your hands when you speak
- don’t have that forced “camp counselor” energy- people hate that
Pro tips
- antiperspirants should be applied the night before after you take a shower
- use an exfoliating facial scrub the night before or morning of your presentation
- do not… do not give your talks a stupid comical theme that’s just saturated in awful word play, like Doctor Who or Smurfs. The world will thank you for it