scholarly presentation meaning

Loading metrics

Open Access

Ten simple rules for effective presentation slides

* E-mail: [email protected]

Affiliation Biomedical Engineering and the Center for Public Health Genomics, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia, United States of America

• Kristen M. Naegle

Published: December 2, 2021

• https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1009554
• Reader Comments

Citation: Naegle KM (2021) Ten simple rules for effective presentation slides. PLoS Comput Biol 17(12): e1009554. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1009554

Copyright: © 2021 Kristen M. Naegle. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Funding: The author received no specific funding for this work.

Competing interests: The author has declared no competing interests exist.

Introduction

The “presentation slide” is the building block of all academic presentations, whether they are journal clubs, thesis committee meetings, short conference talks, or hour-long seminars. A slide is a single page projected on a screen, usually built on the premise of a title, body, and figures or tables and includes both what is shown and what is spoken about that slide. Multiple slides are strung together to tell the larger story of the presentation. While there have been excellent 10 simple rules on giving entire presentations [ 1 , 2 ], there was an absence in the fine details of how to design a slide for optimal effect—such as the design elements that allow slides to convey meaningful information, to keep the audience engaged and informed, and to deliver the information intended and in the time frame allowed. As all research presentations seek to teach, effective slide design borrows from the same principles as effective teaching, including the consideration of cognitive processing your audience is relying on to organize, process, and retain information. This is written for anyone who needs to prepare slides from any length scale and for most purposes of conveying research to broad audiences. The rules are broken into 3 primary areas. Rules 1 to 5 are about optimizing the scope of each slide. Rules 6 to 8 are about principles around designing elements of the slide. Rules 9 to 10 are about preparing for your presentation, with the slides as the central focus of that preparation.

Rule 1: Include only one idea per slide

Each slide should have one central objective to deliver—the main idea or question [ 3 – 5 ]. Often, this means breaking complex ideas down into manageable pieces (see Fig 1 , where “background” information has been split into 2 key concepts). In another example, if you are presenting a complex computational approach in a large flow diagram, introduce it in smaller units, building it up until you finish with the entire diagram. The progressive buildup of complex information means that audiences are prepared to understand the whole picture, once you have dedicated time to each of the parts. You can accomplish the buildup of components in several ways—for example, using presentation software to cover/uncover information. Personally, I choose to create separate slides for each piece of information content I introduce—where the final slide has the entire diagram, and I use cropping or a cover on duplicated slides that come before to hide what I’m not yet ready to include. I use this method in order to ensure that each slide in my deck truly presents one specific idea (the new content) and the amount of the new information on that slide can be described in 1 minute (Rule 2), but it comes with the trade-off—a change to the format of one of the slides in the series often means changes to all slides.

• PPT PowerPoint slide
• PNG larger image
• TIFF original image

Top left: A background slide that describes the background material on a project from my lab. The slide was created using a PowerPoint Design Template, which had to be modified to increase default text sizes for this figure (i.e., the default text sizes are even worse than shown here). Bottom row: The 2 new slides that break up the content into 2 explicit ideas about the background, using a central graphic. In the first slide, the graphic is an explicit example of the SH2 domain of PI3-kinase interacting with a phosphorylation site (Y754) on the PDGFR to describe the important details of what an SH2 domain and phosphotyrosine ligand are and how they interact. I use that same graphic in the second slide to generalize all binding events and include redundant text to drive home the central message (a lot of possible interactions might occur in the human proteome, more than we can currently measure). Top right highlights which rules were used to move from the original slide to the new slide. Specific changes as highlighted by Rule 7 include increasing contrast by changing the background color, increasing font size, changing to sans serif fonts, and removing all capital text and underlining (using bold to draw attention). PDGFR, platelet-derived growth factor receptor.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1009554.g001

Rule 2: Spend only 1 minute per slide

When you present your slide in the talk, it should take 1 minute or less to discuss. This rule is really helpful for planning purposes—a 20-minute presentation should have somewhere around 20 slides. Also, frequently giving your audience new information to feast on helps keep them engaged. During practice, if you find yourself spending more than a minute on a slide, there’s too much for that one slide—it’s time to break up the content into multiple slides or even remove information that is not wholly central to the story you are trying to tell. Reduce, reduce, reduce, until you get to a single message, clearly described, which takes less than 1 minute to present.

Rule 3: Make use of your heading

When each slide conveys only one message, use the heading of that slide to write exactly the message you are trying to deliver. Instead of titling the slide “Results,” try “CTNND1 is central to metastasis” or “False-positive rates are highly sample specific.” Use this landmark signpost to ensure that all the content on that slide is related exactly to the heading and only the heading. Think of the slide heading as the introductory or concluding sentence of a paragraph and the slide content the rest of the paragraph that supports the main point of the paragraph. An audience member should be able to follow along with you in the “paragraph” and come to the same conclusion sentence as your header at the end of the slide.

Rule 4: Include only essential points

While you are speaking, audience members’ eyes and minds will be wandering over your slide. If you have a comment, detail, or figure on a slide, have a plan to explicitly identify and talk about it. If you don’t think it’s important enough to spend time on, then don’t have it on your slide. This is especially important when faculty are present. I often tell students that thesis committee members are like cats: If you put a shiny bauble in front of them, they’ll go after it. Be sure to only put the shiny baubles on slides that you want them to focus on. Putting together a thesis meeting for only faculty is really an exercise in herding cats (if you have cats, you know this is no easy feat). Clear and concise slide design will go a long way in helping you corral those easily distracted faculty members.

Rule 5: Give credit, where credit is due

An exception to Rule 4 is to include proper citations or references to work on your slide. When adding citations, names of other researchers, or other types of credit, use a consistent style and method for adding this information to your slides. Your audience will then be able to easily partition this information from the other content. A common mistake people make is to think “I’ll add that reference later,” but I highly recommend you put the proper reference on the slide at the time you make it, before you forget where it came from. Finally, in certain kinds of presentations, credits can make it clear who did the work. For the faculty members heading labs, it is an effective way to connect your audience with the personnel in the lab who did the work, which is a great career booster for that person. For graduate students, it is an effective way to delineate your contribution to the work, especially in meetings where the goal is to establish your credentials for meeting the rigors of a PhD checkpoint.

Rule 6: Use graphics effectively

As a rule, you should almost never have slides that only contain text. Build your slides around good visualizations. It is a visual presentation after all, and as they say, a picture is worth a thousand words. However, on the flip side, don’t muddy the point of the slide by putting too many complex graphics on a single slide. A multipanel figure that you might include in a manuscript should often be broken into 1 panel per slide (see Rule 1 ). One way to ensure that you use the graphics effectively is to make a point to introduce the figure and its elements to the audience verbally, especially for data figures. For example, you might say the following: “This graph here shows the measured false-positive rate for an experiment and each point is a replicate of the experiment, the graph demonstrates …” If you have put too much on one slide to present in 1 minute (see Rule 2 ), then the complexity or number of the visualizations is too much for just one slide.

Rule 7: Design to avoid cognitive overload

The type of slide elements, the number of them, and how you present them all impact the ability for the audience to intake, organize, and remember the content. For example, a frequent mistake in slide design is to include full sentences, but reading and verbal processing use the same cognitive channels—therefore, an audience member can either read the slide, listen to you, or do some part of both (each poorly), as a result of cognitive overload [ 4 ]. The visual channel is separate, allowing images/videos to be processed with auditory information without cognitive overload [ 6 ] (Rule 6). As presentations are an exercise in listening, and not reading, do what you can to optimize the ability of the audience to listen. Use words sparingly as “guide posts” to you and the audience about major points of the slide. In fact, you can add short text fragments, redundant with the verbal component of the presentation, which has been shown to improve retention [ 7 ] (see Fig 1 for an example of redundant text that avoids cognitive overload). Be careful in the selection of a slide template to minimize accidentally adding elements that the audience must process, but are unimportant. David JP Phillips argues (and effectively demonstrates in his TEDx talk [ 5 ]) that the human brain can easily interpret 6 elements and more than that requires a 500% increase in human cognition load—so keep the total number of elements on the slide to 6 or less. Finally, in addition to the use of short text, white space, and the effective use of graphics/images, you can improve ease of cognitive processing further by considering color choices and font type and size. Here are a few suggestions for improving the experience for your audience, highlighting the importance of these elements for some specific groups:

• Use high contrast colors and simple backgrounds with low to no color—for persons with dyslexia or visual impairment.
• Use sans serif fonts and large font sizes (including figure legends), avoid italics, underlining (use bold font instead for emphasis), and all capital letters—for persons with dyslexia or visual impairment [ 8 ].
• Use color combinations and palettes that can be understood by those with different forms of color blindness [ 9 ]. There are excellent tools available to identify colors to use and ways to simulate your presentation or figures as they might be seen by a person with color blindness (easily found by a web search).
• In this increasing world of virtual presentation tools, consider practicing your talk with a closed captioning system capture your words. Use this to identify how to improve your speaking pace, volume, and annunciation to improve understanding by all members of your audience, but especially those with a hearing impairment.

Rule 8: Design the slide so that a distracted person gets the main takeaway

It is very difficult to stay focused on a presentation, especially if it is long or if it is part of a longer series of talks at a conference. Audience members may get distracted by an important email, or they may start dreaming of lunch. So, it’s important to look at your slide and ask “If they heard nothing I said, will they understand the key concept of this slide?” The other rules are set up to help with this, including clarity of the single point of the slide (Rule 1), titling it with a major conclusion (Rule 3), and the use of figures (Rule 6) and short text redundant to your verbal description (Rule 7). However, with each slide, step back and ask whether its main conclusion is conveyed, even if someone didn’t hear your accompanying dialog. Importantly, ask if the information on the slide is at the right level of abstraction. For example, do you have too many details about the experiment, which hides the conclusion of the experiment (i.e., breaking Rule 1)? If you are worried about not having enough details, keep a slide at the end of your slide deck (after your conclusions and acknowledgments) with the more detailed information that you can refer to during a question and answer period.

Rule 9: Iteratively improve slide design through practice

Well-designed slides that follow the first 8 rules are intended to help you deliver the message you intend and in the amount of time you intend to deliver it in. The best way to ensure that you nailed slide design for your presentation is to practice, typically a lot. The most important aspects of practicing a new presentation, with an eye toward slide design, are the following 2 key points: (1) practice to ensure that you hit, each time through, the most important points (for example, the text guide posts you left yourself and the title of the slide); and (2) practice to ensure that as you conclude the end of one slide, it leads directly to the next slide. Slide transitions, what you say as you end one slide and begin the next, are important to keeping the flow of the “story.” Practice is when I discover that the order of my presentation is poor or that I left myself too few guideposts to remember what was coming next. Additionally, during practice, the most frequent things I have to improve relate to Rule 2 (the slide takes too long to present, usually because I broke Rule 1, and I’m delivering too much information for one slide), Rule 4 (I have a nonessential detail on the slide), and Rule 5 (I forgot to give a key reference). The very best type of practice is in front of an audience (for example, your lab or peers), where, with fresh perspectives, they can help you identify places for improving slide content, design, and connections across the entirety of your talk.

Rule 10: Design to mitigate the impact of technical disasters

The real presentation almost never goes as we planned in our heads or during our practice. Maybe the speaker before you went over time and now you need to adjust. Maybe the computer the organizer is having you use won’t show your video. Maybe your internet is poor on the day you are giving a virtual presentation at a conference. Technical problems are routinely part of the practice of sharing your work through presentations. Hence, you can design your slides to limit the impact certain kinds of technical disasters create and also prepare alternate approaches. Here are just a few examples of the preparation you can do that will take you a long way toward avoiding a complete fiasco:

• Save your presentation as a PDF—if the version of Keynote or PowerPoint on a host computer cause issues, you still have a functional copy that has a higher guarantee of compatibility.
• In using videos, create a backup slide with screen shots of key results. For example, if I have a video of cell migration, I’ll be sure to have a copy of the start and end of the video, in case the video doesn’t play. Even if the video worked, you can pause on this backup slide and take the time to highlight the key results in words if someone could not see or understand the video.
• Avoid animations, such as figures or text that flash/fly-in/etc. Surveys suggest that no one likes movement in presentations [ 3 , 4 ]. There is likely a cognitive underpinning to the almost universal distaste of pointless animations that relates to the idea proposed by Kosslyn and colleagues that animations are salient perceptual units that captures direct attention [ 4 ]. Although perceptual salience can be used to draw attention to and improve retention of specific points, if you use this approach for unnecessary/unimportant things (like animation of your bullet point text, fly-ins of figures, etc.), then you will distract your audience from the important content. Finally, animations cause additional processing burdens for people with visual impairments [ 10 ] and create opportunities for technical disasters if the software on the host system is not compatible with your planned animation.

Conclusions

These rules are just a start in creating more engaging presentations that increase audience retention of your material. However, there are wonderful resources on continuing on the journey of becoming an amazing public speaker, which includes understanding the psychology and neuroscience behind human perception and learning. For example, as highlighted in Rule 7, David JP Phillips has a wonderful TEDx talk on the subject [ 5 ], and “PowerPoint presentation flaws and failures: A psychological analysis,” by Kosslyn and colleagues is deeply detailed about a number of aspects of human cognition and presentation style [ 4 ]. There are many books on the topic, including the popular “Presentation Zen” by Garr Reynolds [ 11 ]. Finally, although briefly touched on here, the visualization of data is an entire topic of its own that is worth perfecting for both written and oral presentations of work, with fantastic resources like Edward Tufte’s “The Visual Display of Quantitative Information” [ 12 ] or the article “Visualization of Biomedical Data” by O’Donoghue and colleagues [ 13 ].

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the countless presenters, colleagues, students, and mentors from which I have learned a great deal from on effective presentations. Also, a thank you to the wonderful resources published by organizations on how to increase inclusivity. A special thanks to Dr. Jason Papin and Dr. Michael Guertin on early feedback of this editorial.

• View Article
• PubMed/NCBI
• Google Scholar
• 3. Teaching VUC for Making Better PowerPoint Presentations. n.d. Available from: https://cft.vanderbilt.edu/guides-sub-pages/making-better-powerpoint-presentations/#baddeley .
• 8. Creating a dyslexia friendly workplace. Dyslexia friendly style guide. nd. Available from: https://www.bdadyslexia.org.uk/advice/employers/creating-a-dyslexia-friendly-workplace/dyslexia-friendly-style-guide .
• 9. Cravit R. How to Use Color Blind Friendly Palettes to Make Your Charts Accessible. 2019. Available from: https://venngage.com/blog/color-blind-friendly-palette/ .
• 10. Making your conference presentation more accessible to blind and partially sighted people. n.d. Available from: https://vocaleyes.co.uk/services/resources/guidelines-for-making-your-conference-presentation-more-accessible-to-blind-and-partially-sighted-people/ .
• 11. Reynolds G. Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery. 2nd ed. New Riders Pub; 2011.
• 12. Tufte ER. The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. 2nd ed. Graphics Press; 2001.

Princeton Correspondents on Undergraduate Research

How to Make a Successful Research Presentation

Turning a research paper into a visual presentation is difficult; there are pitfalls, and navigating the path to a brief, informative presentation takes time and practice. As a TA for  GEO/WRI 201: Methods in Data Analysis & Scientific Writing this past fall, I saw how this process works from an instructor’s standpoint. I’ve presented my own research before, but helping others present theirs taught me a bit more about the process. Here are some tips I learned that may help you with your next research presentation:

More is more

In general, your presentation will always benefit from more practice, more feedback, and more revision. By practicing in front of friends, you can get comfortable with presenting your work while receiving feedback. It is hard to know how to revise your presentation if you never practice. If you are presenting to a general audience, getting feedback from someone outside of your discipline is crucial. Terms and ideas that seem intuitive to you may be completely foreign to someone else, and your well-crafted presentation could fall flat.

Less is more

Limit the scope of your presentation, the number of slides, and the text on each slide. In my experience, text works well for organizing slides, orienting the audience to key terms, and annotating important figures–not for explaining complex ideas. Having fewer slides is usually better as well. In general, about one slide per minute of presentation is an appropriate budget. Too many slides is usually a sign that your topic is too broad.

Limit the scope of your presentation

Don’t present your paper. Presentations are usually around 10 min long. You will not have time to explain all of the research you did in a semester (or a year!) in such a short span of time. Instead, focus on the highlight(s). Identify a single compelling research question which your work addressed, and craft a succinct but complete narrative around it.

You will not have time to explain all of the research you did. Instead, focus on the highlights. Identify a single compelling research question which your work addressed, and craft a succinct but complete narrative around it.

Craft a compelling research narrative

After identifying the focused research question, walk your audience through your research as if it were a story. Presentations with strong narrative arcs are clear, captivating, and compelling.

• Introduction (exposition — rising action)

Orient the audience and draw them in by demonstrating the relevance and importance of your research story with strong global motive. Provide them with the necessary vocabulary and background knowledge to understand the plot of your story. Introduce the key studies (characters) relevant in your story and build tension and conflict with scholarly and data motive. By the end of your introduction, your audience should clearly understand your research question and be dying to know how you resolve the tension built through motive.

• Methods (rising action)

The methods section should transition smoothly and logically from the introduction. Beware of presenting your methods in a boring, arc-killing, ‘this is what I did.’ Focus on the details that set your story apart from the stories other people have already told. Keep the audience interested by clearly motivating your decisions based on your original research question or the tension built in your introduction.

• Results (climax)

Less is usually more here. Only present results which are clearly related to the focused research question you are presenting. Make sure you explain the results clearly so that your audience understands what your research found. This is the peak of tension in your narrative arc, so don’t undercut it by quickly clicking through to your discussion.

• Discussion (falling action)

By now your audience should be dying for a satisfying resolution. Here is where you contextualize your results and begin resolving the tension between past research. Be thorough. If you have too many conflicts left unresolved, or you don’t have enough time to present all of the resolutions, you probably need to further narrow the scope of your presentation.

• Conclusion (denouement)

Return back to your initial research question and motive, resolving any final conflicts and tying up loose ends. Leave the audience with a clear resolution of your focus research question, and use unresolved tension to set up potential sequels (i.e. further research).

Use your medium to enhance the narrative

Visual presentations should be dominated by clear, intentional graphics. Subtle animation in key moments (usually during the results or discussion) can add drama to the narrative arc and make conflict resolutions more satisfying. You are narrating a story written in images, videos, cartoons, and graphs. While your paper is mostly text, with graphics to highlight crucial points, your slides should be the opposite. Adapting to the new medium may require you to create or acquire far more graphics than you included in your paper, but it is necessary to create an engaging presentation.

The most important thing you can do for your presentation is to practice and revise. Bother your friends, your roommates, TAs–anybody who will sit down and listen to your work. Beyond that, think about presentations you have found compelling and try to incorporate some of those elements into your own. Remember you want your work to be comprehensible; you aren’t creating experts in 10 minutes. Above all, try to stay passionate about what you did and why. You put the time in, so show your audience that it’s worth it.

For more insight into research presentations, check out these past PCUR posts written by Emma and Ellie .

— Alec Getraer, Natural Sciences Correspondent

Share this:

• Share on Tumblr

• - Google Chrome

Intended for healthcare professionals

• My email alerts
• BMA member login
• Username * Password * Forgot your log in details? Need to activate BMA Member Log In Log in via OpenAthens Log in via your institution

Search form

• Advanced search
• Search responses
• Search blogs
• How to prepare and...

How to prepare and deliver an effective oral presentation

• Related content
• Peer review
• Lucia Hartigan , registrar 1 ,
• Fionnuala Mone , fellow in maternal fetal medicine 1 ,
• Mary Higgins , consultant obstetrician 2
• 1 National Maternity Hospital, Dublin, Ireland
• 2 National Maternity Hospital, Dublin; Obstetrics and Gynaecology, Medicine and Medical Sciences, University College Dublin
• luciahartigan{at}hotmail.com

The success of an oral presentation lies in the speaker’s ability to transmit information to the audience. Lucia Hartigan and colleagues describe what they have learnt about delivering an effective scientific oral presentation from their own experiences, and their mistakes

The objective of an oral presentation is to portray large amounts of often complex information in a clear, bite sized fashion. Although some of the success lies in the content, the rest lies in the speaker’s skills in transmitting the information to the audience. 1

Preparation

It is important to be as well prepared as possible. Look at the venue in person, and find out the time allowed for your presentation and for questions, and the size of the audience and their backgrounds, which will allow the presentation to be pitched at the appropriate level.

See what the ambience and temperature are like and check that the format of your presentation is compatible with the available computer. This is particularly important when embedding videos. Before you begin, look at the video on stand-by and make sure the lights are dimmed and the speakers are functioning.

For visual aids, Microsoft PowerPoint or Apple Mac Keynote programmes are usual, although Prezi is increasing in popularity. Save the presentation on a USB stick, with email or cloud storage backup to avoid last minute disasters.

When preparing the presentation, start with an opening slide containing the title of the study, your name, and the date. Begin by addressing and thanking the audience and the organisation that has invited you to speak. Typically, the format includes background, study aims, methodology, results, strengths and weaknesses of the study, and conclusions.

If the study takes a lecturing format, consider including “any questions?” on a slide before you conclude, which will allow the audience to remember the take home messages. Ideally, the audience should remember three of the main points from the presentation. 2

Have a maximum of four short points per slide. If you can display something as a diagram, video, or a graph, use this instead of text and talk around it.

Animation is available in both Microsoft PowerPoint and the Apple Mac Keynote programme, and its use in presentations has been demonstrated to assist in the retention and recall of facts. 3 Do not overuse it, though, as it could make you appear unprofessional. If you show a video or diagram don’t just sit back—use a laser pointer to explain what is happening.

Rehearse your presentation in front of at least one person. Request feedback and amend accordingly. If possible, practise in the venue itself so things will not be unfamiliar on the day. If you appear comfortable, the audience will feel comfortable. Ask colleagues and seniors what questions they would ask and prepare responses to these questions.

It is important to dress appropriately, stand up straight, and project your voice towards the back of the room. Practise using a microphone, or any other presentation aids, in advance. If you don’t have your own presenting style, think of the style of inspirational scientific speakers you have seen and imitate it.

Try to present slides at the rate of around one slide a minute. If you talk too much, you will lose your audience’s attention. The slides or videos should be an adjunct to your presentation, so do not hide behind them, and be proud of the work you are presenting. You should avoid reading the wording on the slides, but instead talk around the content on them.

Maintain eye contact with the audience and remember to smile and pause after each comment, giving your nerves time to settle. Speak slowly and concisely, highlighting key points.

Do not assume that the audience is completely familiar with the topic you are passionate about, but don’t patronise them either. Use every presentation as an opportunity to teach, even your seniors. The information you are presenting may be new to them, but it is always important to know your audience’s background. You can then ensure you do not patronise world experts.

To maintain the audience’s attention, vary the tone and inflection of your voice. If appropriate, use humour, though you should run any comments or jokes past others beforehand and make sure they are culturally appropriate. Check every now and again that the audience is following and offer them the opportunity to ask questions.

Finishing up is the most important part, as this is when you send your take home message with the audience. Slow down, even though time is important at this stage. Conclude with the three key points from the study and leave the slide up for a further few seconds. Do not ramble on. Give the audience a chance to digest the presentation. Conclude by acknowledging those who assisted you in the study, and thank the audience and organisation. If you are presenting in North America, it is usual practice to conclude with an image of the team. If you wish to show references, insert a text box on the appropriate slide with the primary author, year, and paper, although this is not always required.

Answering questions can often feel like the most daunting part, but don’t look upon this as negative. Assume that the audience has listened and is interested in your research. Listen carefully, and if you are unsure about what someone is saying, ask for the question to be rephrased. Thank the audience member for asking the question and keep responses brief and concise. If you are unsure of the answer you can say that the questioner has raised an interesting point that you will have to investigate further. Have someone in the audience who will write down the questions for you, and remember that this is effectively free peer review.

Be proud of your achievements and try to do justice to the work that you and the rest of your group have done. You deserve to be up on that stage, so show off what you have achieved.

Competing interests: We have read and understood the BMJ Group policy on declaration of interests and declare the following interests: None.

• ↵ Rovira A, Auger C, Naidich TP. How to prepare an oral presentation and a conference. Radiologica 2013 ; 55 (suppl 1): 2 -7S. OpenUrl
• ↵ Bourne PE. Ten simple rules for making good oral presentations. PLos Comput Biol 2007 ; 3 : e77 . OpenUrl PubMed
• ↵ Naqvi SH, Mobasher F, Afzal MA, Umair M, Kohli AN, Bukhari MH. Effectiveness of teaching methods in a medical institute: perceptions of medical students to teaching aids. J Pak Med Assoc 2013 ; 63 : 859 -64. OpenUrl

• Contact AAPS
• Get the Newsletter

What is a "scholarly" presentation?

Citizen science allows everyone to contribute to a deeper understanding of the world around us. Likewise, multiple perspectives are necessary for understanding citizen science practice — how to build and run projects, how to support participation, how to grow project impacts. We want to address concerns about the phrase “spaces reserved for scholarly presentations” in the Call for Proposals for CSA2017 — specifically what this phrase means and who it includes. Just as citizen science opens up understandings about who can do science, we hope CSA2017 can open up understandings of who can advance meaningful scholarship in this field. What makes a presentation “scholarly” is an intentional effort to reflect on practice, research, or innovative ideas in a way that helps others see new possibilities and/or improve their own work. Such presentations help other practitioners understand citizen science more completely, and can improve their knowledge or their ability to organize, manage, research, evaluate, increase diversity of participants, or otherwise improve citizen science practice. Ideas shared in such presentations should help bring our membership and this field of science forward. Everyone is welcome and encouraged to submit such a “scholarly” presentation. These presentations might be based on formal research or evaluation, but can be just as powerful when they emerge from lessons learned in practice. In either case a presentation might be conceptual in nature, or be informed by experiences or problems encountered in the field.  Scholarship can meaningfully be advanced by practitioners, researchers, evaluators, participants, and many others involved in citizen science. Please join us in taking this bi-annual opportunity to reflect on our work, to ask questions of ourselves and our methods that we don’t often have time to ask as we rush through the day-to-day of our projects, and to do so in a way that intentionally helps others learn from our experiences.

Related Posts

CAPS 2025 Calls for Symposia and Workshops Now Open

Make your mark on caps 2025.

Biodiversity Strand Engages Collaborative Conversations for Impact at All Scales

📊   Data Ethics  – Refers to trustworthy data practices for citizen science.

Get involved » Join the Data Ethics Topic Room on CSA Connect!

📰   Publication Ethics  – Refers to the best practice in the ethics of scholarly publishing.

Get involved » Join the Publication Ethics Topic Room on CSA Connect!

⚖️  Social Justice Ethics  – Refers to fair and just relations between the individual and society as measured by the distribution of wealth, opportunities for personal activity, and social privileges. Social justice also encompasses inclusiveness and diversity.

Get involved » Join the Social Justice Topic Room on CSA Connect!

👤   Human Subject Ethics  – Refers to rules of conduct in any research involving humans including biomedical research, social studies. Note that this goes beyond human subject ethics regulations as much of what goes on isn’t covered.

Get involved » Join the Human Subject Ethics Topic Room on CSA Connect!

🍃  Biodiversity & Environmental Ethics – Refers to the improvement of the dynamics between humans and the myriad of species that combine to create the biosphere, which will ultimately benefit both humans and non-humans alike [UNESCO 2011 white paper on Ethics and Biodiversity ]. This is a kind of ethics that is advancing rapidly in light of the current global crisis as many stakeholders know how critical biodiversity is to the human species (e.g., public health, women’s rights, social and environmental justice).

⚠ UNESCO also affirms that respect for biological diversity implies respect for societal and cultural diversity, as both elements are intimately interconnected and fundamental to global well-being and peace. ( Source ).

Get involved » Join the Biodiversity & Environmental Ethics Topic Room on CSA Connect!

🤝  Community Partnership Ethics – Refers to rules of engagement and respect of community members directly or directly involved or affected by any research study/project.

Get involved » Join the Community Partnership Ethics Topic Room on CSA Connect!

Reference management. Clean and simple.

How to make a scientific presentation

Scientific presentation outlines

Questions to ask yourself before you write your talk, 1. how much time do you have, 2. who will you speak to, 3. what do you want the audience to learn from your talk, step 1: outline your presentation, step 2: plan your presentation slides, step 3: make the presentation slides, slide design, text elements, animations and transitions, step 4: practice your presentation, final thoughts, frequently asked questions about preparing scientific presentations, related articles.

A good scientific presentation achieves three things: you communicate the science clearly, your research leaves a lasting impression on your audience, and you enhance your reputation as a scientist.

But, what is the best way to prepare for a scientific presentation? How do you start writing a talk? What details do you include, and what do you leave out?

It’s tempting to launch into making lots of slides. But, starting with the slides can mean you neglect the narrative of your presentation, resulting in an overly detailed, boring talk.

The key to making an engaging scientific presentation is to prepare the narrative of your talk before beginning to construct your presentation slides. Planning your talk will ensure that you tell a clear, compelling scientific story that will engage the audience.

In this guide, you’ll find everything you need to know to make a good oral scientific presentation, including:

• The different types of oral scientific presentations and how they are delivered;
• How to outline a scientific presentation;
• How to make slides for a scientific presentation.

Our advice results from delving into the literature on writing scientific talks and from our own experiences as scientists in giving and listening to presentations. We provide tips and best practices for giving scientific talks in a separate post.

There are two main types of scientific talks:

• Your talk focuses on a single study . Typically, you tell the story of a single scientific paper. This format is common for short talks at contributed sessions in conferences.
• Your talk describes multiple studies. You tell the story of multiple scientific papers. It is crucial to have a theme that unites the studies, for example, an overarching question or problem statement, with each study representing specific but different variations of the same theme. Typically, PhD defenses, invited seminars, lectures, or talks for a prospective employer (i.e., “job talks”) fall into this category.

➡️ Learn how to prepare an excellent thesis defense

The length of time you are allotted for your talk will determine whether you will discuss a single study or multiple studies, and which details to include in your story.

The background and interests of your audience will determine the narrative direction of your talk, and what devices you will use to get their attention. Will you be speaking to people specializing in your field, or will the audience also contain people from disciplines other than your own? To reach non-specialists, you will need to discuss the broader implications of your study outside your field.

The needs of the audience will also determine what technical details you will include, and the language you will use. For example, an undergraduate audience will have different needs than an audience of seasoned academics. Students will require a more comprehensive overview of background information and explanations of jargon but will need less technical methodological details.

Your goal is to speak to the majority. But, make your talk accessible to the least knowledgeable person in the room.

This is called the thesis statement, or simply the “take-home message”. Having listened to your talk, what message do you want the audience to take away from your presentation? Describe the main idea in one or two sentences. You want this theme to be present throughout your presentation. Again, the thesis statement will depend on the audience and the type of talk you are giving.

Your thesis statement will drive the narrative for your talk. By deciding the take-home message you want to convince the audience of as a result of listening to your talk, you decide how the story of your talk will flow and how you will navigate its twists and turns. The thesis statement tells you the results you need to show, which subsequently tells you the methods or studies you need to describe, which decides the angle you take in your introduction.

➡️ Learn how to write a thesis statement

The goal of your talk is that the audience leaves afterward with a clear understanding of the key take-away message of your research. To achieve that goal, you need to tell a coherent, logical story that conveys your thesis statement throughout the presentation. You can tell your story through careful preparation of your talk.

Preparation of a scientific presentation involves three separate stages: outlining the scientific narrative, preparing slides, and practicing your delivery. Making the slides of your talk without first planning what you are going to say is inefficient.

Here, we provide a 4 step guide to writing your scientific presentation:

• Outline your presentation
• Plan your presentation slides
• Make the presentation slides
• Practice your presentation

Writing an outline helps you consider the key pieces of your talk and how they fit together from the beginning, preventing you from forgetting any important details. It also means you avoid changing the order of your slides multiple times, saving you time.

Plan your talk as discrete sections. In the table below, we describe the sections for a single study talk vs. a talk discussing multiple studies:

The following tips apply when writing the outline of a single study talk. You can easily adapt this framework if you are writing a talk discussing multiple studies.

Introduction: Writing the introduction can be the hardest part of writing a talk. And when giving it, it’s the point where you might be at your most nervous. But preparing a good, concise introduction will settle your nerves.

The introduction tells the audience the story of why you studied your topic. A good introduction succinctly achieves four things, in the following order.

• It gives a broad perspective on the problem or topic for people in the audience who may be outside your discipline (i.e., it explains the big-picture problem motivating your study).
• It describes why you did the study, and why the audience should care.
• It gives a brief indication of how your study addressed the problem and provides the necessary background information that the audience needs to understand your work.
• It indicates what the audience will learn from the talk, and prepares them for what will come next.

A good introduction not only gives the big picture and motivations behind your study but also concisely sets the stage for what the audience will learn from the talk (e.g., the questions your work answers, and/or the hypotheses that your work tests). The end of the introduction will lead to a natural transition to the methods.

Give a broad perspective on the problem. The easiest way to start with the big picture is to think of a hook for the first slide of your presentation. A hook is an opening that gets the audience’s attention and gets them interested in your story. In science, this might take the form of a why, or a how question, or it could be a statement about a major problem or open question in your field. Other examples of hooks include quotes, short anecdotes, or interesting statistics.

Why should the audience care? Next, decide on the angle you are going to take on your hook that links to the thesis of your talk. In other words, you need to set the context, i.e., explain why the audience should care. For example, you may introduce an observation from nature, a pattern in experimental data, or a theory that you want to test. The audience must understand your motivations for the study.

Supplementary details. Once you have established the hook and angle, you need to include supplementary details to support them. For example, you might state your hypothesis. Then go into previous work and the current state of knowledge. Include citations of these studies. If you need to introduce some technical methodological details, theory, or jargon, do it here.

Conclude your introduction. The motivation for the work and background information should set the stage for the conclusion of the introduction, where you describe the goals of your study, and any hypotheses or predictions. Let the audience know what they are going to learn.

Methods: The audience will use your description of the methods to assess the approach you took in your study and to decide whether your findings are credible. Tell the story of your methods in chronological order. Use visuals to describe your methods as much as possible. If you have equations, make sure to take the time to explain them. Decide what methods to include and how you will show them. You need enough detail so that your audience will understand what you did and therefore can evaluate your approach, but avoid including superfluous details that do not support your main idea. You want to avoid the common mistake of including too much data, as the audience can read the paper(s) later.

Results: This is the evidence you present for your thesis. The audience will use the results to evaluate the support for your main idea. Choose the most important and interesting results—those that support your thesis. You don’t need to present all the results from your study (indeed, you most likely won’t have time to present them all). Break down complex results into digestible pieces, e.g., comparisons over multiple slides (more tips in the next section).

Summary: Summarize your main findings. Displaying your main findings through visuals can be effective. Emphasize the new contributions to scientific knowledge that your work makes.

Conclusion: Complete the circle by relating your conclusions to the big picture topic in your introduction—and your hook, if possible. It’s important to describe any alternative explanations for your findings. You might also speculate on future directions arising from your research. The slides that comprise your conclusion do not need to state “conclusion”. Rather, the concluding slide title should be a declarative sentence linking back to the big picture problem and your main idea.

It’s important to end well by planning a strong closure to your talk, after which you will thank the audience. Your closing statement should relate to your thesis, perhaps by stating it differently or memorably. Avoid ending awkwardly by memorizing your closing sentence.

By now, you have an outline of the story of your talk, which you can use to plan your slides. Your slides should complement and enhance what you will say. Use the following steps to prepare your slides.

• Write the slide titles to match your talk outline. These should be clear and informative declarative sentences that succinctly give the main idea of the slide (e.g., don’t use “Methods” as a slide title). Have one major idea per slide. In a YouTube talk on designing effective slides , researcher Michael Alley shows examples of instructive slide titles.
• Decide how you will convey the main idea of the slide (e.g., what figures, photographs, equations, statistics, references, or other elements you will need). The body of the slide should support the slide’s main idea.
• Under each slide title, outline what you want to say, in bullet points.

In sum, for each slide, prepare a title that summarizes its major idea, a list of visual elements, and a summary of the points you will make. Ensure each slide connects to your thesis. If it doesn’t, then you don’t need the slide.

Slides for scientific presentations have three major components: text (including labels and legends), graphics, and equations. Here, we give tips on how to present each of these components.

• Have an informative title slide. Include the names of all coauthors and their affiliations. Include an attractive image relating to your study.
• Make the foreground content of your slides “pop” by using an appropriate background. Slides that have white backgrounds with black text work well for small rooms, whereas slides with black backgrounds and white text are suitable for large rooms.
• The layout of your slides should be simple. Pay attention to how and where you lay the visual and text elements on each slide. It’s tempting to cram information, but you need lots of empty space. Retain space at the sides and bottom of your slides.
• Use sans serif fonts with a font size of at least 20 for text, and up to 40 for slide titles. Citations can be in 14 font and should be included at the bottom of the slide.
• Use bold or italics to emphasize words, not underlines or caps. Keep these effects to a minimum.
• Use concise text . You don’t need full sentences. Convey the essence of your message in as few words as possible. Write down what you’d like to say, and then shorten it for the slide. Remove unnecessary filler words.
• Text blocks should be limited to two lines. This will prevent you from crowding too much information on the slide.
• Include names of technical terms in your talk slides, especially if they are not familiar to everyone in the audience.
• Proofread your slides. Typos and grammatical errors are distracting for your audience.
• Include citations for the hypotheses or observations of other scientists.
• Good figures and graphics are essential to sustain audience interest. Use graphics and photographs to show the experiment or study system in action and to explain abstract concepts.
• Don’t use figures straight from your paper as they may be too detailed for your talk, and details like axes may be too small. Make new versions if necessary. Make them large enough to be visible from the back of the room.
• Use graphs to show your results, not tables. Tables are difficult for your audience to digest! If you must present a table, keep it simple.
• Label the axes of graphs and indicate the units. Label important components of graphics and photographs and include captions. Include sources for graphics that are not your own.
• Explain all the elements of a graph. This includes the axes, what the colors and markers mean, and patterns in the data.
• Use colors in figures and text in a meaningful, not random, way. For example, contrasting colors can be effective for pointing out comparisons and/or differences. Don’t use neon colors or pastels.
• Use thick lines in figures, and use color to create contrasts in the figures you present. Don’t use red/green or red/blue combinations, as color-blind audience members can’t distinguish between them.
• Arrows or circles can be effective for drawing attention to key details in graphs and equations. Add some text annotations along with them.
• Write your summary and conclusion slides using graphics, rather than showing a slide with a list of bullet points. Showing some of your results again can be helpful to remind the audience of your message.
• If your talk has equations, take time to explain them. Include text boxes to explain variables and mathematical terms, and put them under each term in the equation.
• Combine equations with a graphic that shows the scientific principle, or include a diagram of the mathematical model.
• Use animations judiciously. They are helpful to reveal complex ideas gradually, for example, if you need to make a comparison or contrast or to build a complicated argument or figure. For lists, reveal one bullet point at a time. New ideas appearing sequentially will help your audience follow your logic.
• Slide transitions should be simple. Silly ones distract from your message.
• Decide how you will make the transition as you move from one section of your talk to the next. For example, if you spend time talking through details, provide a summary afterward, especially in a long talk. Another common tactic is to have a “home slide” that you return to multiple times during the talk that reinforces your main idea or message. In her YouTube talk on designing effective scientific presentations , Stanford biologist Susan McConnell suggests using the approach of home slides to build a cohesive narrative.

To deliver a polished presentation, it is essential to practice it. Here are some tips.

• For your first run-through, practice alone. Pay attention to your narrative. Does your story flow naturally? Do you know how you will start and end? Are there any awkward transitions? Do animations help you tell your story? Do your slides help to convey what you are saying or are they missing components?
• Next, practice in front of your advisor, and/or your peers (e.g., your lab group). Ask someone to time your talk. Take note of their feedback and the questions that they ask you (you might be asked similar questions during your real talk).
• Edit your talk, taking into account the feedback you’ve received. Eliminate superfluous slides that don’t contribute to your takeaway message.
• Practice as many times as needed to memorize the order of your slides and the key transition points of your talk. However, don’t try to learn your talk word for word. Instead, memorize opening and closing statements, and sentences at key junctures in the presentation. Your presentation should resemble a serious but spontaneous conversation with the audience.
• Practicing multiple times also helps you hone the delivery of your talk. While rehearsing, pay attention to your vocal intonations and speed. Make sure to take pauses while you speak, and make eye contact with your imaginary audience.
• Make sure your talk finishes within the allotted time, and remember to leave time for questions. Conferences are particularly strict on run time.
• Anticipate questions and challenges from the audience, and clarify ambiguities within your slides and/or speech in response.
• If you anticipate that you could be asked questions about details but you don’t have time to include them, or they detract from the main message of your talk, you can prepare slides that address these questions and place them after the final slide of your talk.

➡️ More tips for giving scientific presentations

An organized presentation with a clear narrative will help you communicate your ideas effectively, which is essential for engaging your audience and conveying the importance of your work. Taking time to plan and outline your scientific presentation before writing the slides will help you manage your nerves and feel more confident during the presentation, which will improve your overall performance.

A good scientific presentation has an engaging scientific narrative with a memorable take-home message. It has clear, informative slides that enhance what the speaker says. You need to practice your talk many times to ensure you deliver a polished presentation.

First, consider who will attend your presentation, and what you want the audience to learn about your research. Tailor your content to their level of knowledge and interests. Second, create an outline for your presentation, including the key points you want to make and the evidence you will use to support those points. Finally, practice your presentation several times to ensure that it flows smoothly and that you are comfortable with the material.

Prepare an opening that immediately gets the audience’s attention. A common device is a why or a how question, or a statement of a major open problem in your field, but you could also start with a quote, interesting statistic, or case study from your field.

Scientific presentations typically either focus on a single study (e.g., a 15-minute conference presentation) or tell the story of multiple studies (e.g., a PhD defense or 50-minute conference keynote talk). For a single study talk, the structure follows the scientific paper format: Introduction, Methods, Results, Summary, and Conclusion, whereas the format of a talk discussing multiple studies is more complex, but a theme unifies the studies.

Ensure you have one major idea per slide, and convey that idea clearly (through images, equations, statistics, citations, video, etc.). The slide should include a title that summarizes the major point of the slide, should not contain too much text or too many graphics, and color should be used meaningfully.

• Testimonials
• Privacy Policy
• Better Data Visualizations
• Book Materials
• Presentation Resources
• Elevate the Debate
• Data Visualization Design Services
• How It Works
• Submit a Visualization
• Infographics Design
• Presentation Slides
• Report Design
• Books About the Brain
• Collaboration Tools
• Color Contrast Tools
• Color Tools
• DataViz Blogs
• DataViz Books
• DataViz Resources
• DataViz Tools
• Design Inspiration
• Design Resources
• Icon Collections
• Image Collections
• PolicyViz Data Visualization Catalog
• Powerpoint and Slide Sharing Tools
• PowerPoint Templates
• Presentation Blogs
• Presentation Books
• Presentation Tools
• Slide Sharing Sites
• Story Books
• Video Editing Tools
• Consulting Services
• Public Workshops
• Virtual Webinars
• Sponsorship Opportunities at PolicyViz
• Terms of Service
• DataViz Design
• Infographics
• Presentations
• Downloads from the Book
• Data Visualization in Excel
• DataViz Catalog

Three Principles of Effective Scholarly Presentations

We’ve all sat through boring presentations where the presenter reads the slides, shows barely-legible tables and graphs, and goes over time—many of us have probably given bad, boring presentations. In research and academic circles, we tend to excuse bad presentations by pointing out that we’re not designers and that making a “pretty” presentation takes time away from the important work of conducting the research and writing the paper. But presentations are a unique opportunity to share our findings, in which we have a captive audience ready to hear what we’re working on. We should not squander this opportunity—and in reality, marginally more time spent thinking through a presentation can have an outsized payoff in terms of audience engagement and excitement about your work.

In my new book, Better Presentations: A Guide for Scholars, Researchers and Wonks , I explain how to create, design, and deliver an effective presentation. In it, I define three guiding principles that you can use to design and deliver better presentations.

These three principles all aim to facilitate the audience’s quick and easy acquisition of information. By designing high-quality slides and pairing your spoken word with those visuals, your audience can focus on what’s really important—your content and your message— rather than using their energy and attention trying to decipher what’s on the screen and how it relates to what you are trying to say.

Want to learn more about presenting effectively? Pick up my new book  Better Presentations: A Guide for Scholars, Researchers and Wonks , and check out the Better Presentations website where you can download PowerPoint files, icons, and learn more from a host of great resources.

Share this:

• Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window)
• Click to email a link to a friend (Opens in new window)

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Notify me of follow-up comments by email.

Notify me of new posts by email.

Upload image

Guests are limited to images that are no larger than 2MB, and to only jpeg, pjpeg, png file types.

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed .

• Data Accuracy
• Data Journalism
• Data Projects
• DataViz Community
• Presentation Skills

This page has been archived and is no longer updated

Oral Presentation Structure

Finally, presentations normally include interaction in the form of questions and answers. This is a great opportunity to provide whatever additional information the audience desires. For fear of omitting something important, most speakers try to say too much in their presentations. A better approach is to be selective in the presentation itself and to allow enough time for questions and answers and, of course, to prepare well by anticipating the questions the audience might have.

As a consequence, and even more strongly than papers, presentations can usefully break the chronology typically used for reporting research. Instead of presenting everything that was done in the order in which it was done, a presentation should focus on getting a main message across in theorem-proof fashion — that is, by stating this message early and then presenting evidence to support it. Identifying this main message early in the preparation process is the key to being selective in your presentation. For example, when reporting on materials and methods, include only those details you think will help convince the audience of your main message — usually little, and sometimes nothing at all.

The opening

• The context as such is best replaced by an attention getter , which is a way to both get everyone's attention fast and link the topic with what the audience already knows (this link provides a more audience-specific form of context).
• The object of the document is here best called the preview because it outlines the body of the presentation. Still, the aim of this element is unchanged — namely, preparing the audience for the structure of the body.
• The opening of a presentation can best state the presentation's main message , just before the preview. The main message is the one sentence you want your audience to remember, if they remember only one. It is your main conclusion, perhaps stated in slightly less technical detail than at the end of your presentation.

In other words, include the following five items in your opening: attention getter , need , task , main message , and preview .

Even if you think of your presentation's body as a tree, you will still deliver the body as a sequence in time — unavoidably, one of your main points will come first, one will come second, and so on. Organize your main points and subpoints into a logical sequence, and reveal this sequence and its logic to your audience with transitions between points and between subpoints. As a rule, place your strongest arguments first and last, and place any weaker arguments between these stronger ones.

The closing

After supporting your main message with evidence in the body, wrap up your oral presentation in three steps: a review , a conclusion , and a close . First, review the main points in your body to help the audience remember them and to prepare the audience for your conclusion. Next, conclude by restating your main message (in more detail now that the audience has heard the body) and complementing it with any other interpretations of your findings. Finally, close the presentation by indicating elegantly and unambiguously to your audience that these are your last words.

Starting and ending forcefully

Revealing your presentation's structure.

To be able to give their full attention to content, audience members need structure — in other words, they need a map of some sort (a table of contents, an object of the document, a preview), and they need to know at any time where they are on that map. A written document includes many visual clues to its structure: section headings, blank lines or indentations indicating paragraphs, and so on. In contrast, an oral presentation has few visual clues. Therefore, even when it is well structured, attendees may easily get lost because they do not see this structure. As a speaker, make sure you reveal your presentation's structure to the audience, with a preview , transitions , and a review .

The preview provides the audience with a map. As in a paper, it usefully comes at the end of the opening (not too early, that is) and outlines the body, not the entire presentation. In other words, it needs to include neither the introduction (which has already been delivered) nor the conclusion (which is obvious). In a presentation with slides, it can usefully show the structure of the body on screen. A slide alone is not enough, however: You must also verbally explain the logic of the body. In addition, the preview should be limited to the main points of the presentation; subpoints can be previewed, if needed, at the beginning of each main point.

Transitions are crucial elements for revealing a presentation's structure, yet they are often underestimated. As a speaker, you obviously know when you are moving from one main point of a presentation to another — but for attendees, these shifts are never obvious. Often, attendees are so involved with a presentation's content that they have no mental attention left to guess at its structure. Tell them where you are in the course of a presentation, while linking the points. One way to do so is to wrap up one point then announce the next by creating a need for it: "So, this is the microstructure we observe consistently in the absence of annealing. But how does it change if we anneal the sample at 450°C for an hour or more? That's my next point. Here is . . . "

Similarly, a review of the body plays an important double role. First, while a good body helps attendees understand the evidence, a review helps them remember it. Second, by recapitulating all the evidence, the review effectively prepares attendees for the conclusion. Accordingly, make time for a review: Resist the temptation to try to say too much, so that you are forced to rush — and to sacrifice the review — at the end.

Ideally, your preview, transitions, and review are well integrated into the presentation. As a counterexample, a preview that says, "First, I am going to talk about . . . , then I will say a few words about . . . and finally . . . " is self-centered and mechanical: It does not tell a story. Instead, include your audience (perhaps with a collective we ) and show the logic of your structure in view of your main message.

This page appears in the following eBook

Topic rooms within Scientific Communication

Within this Subject (22)

• Communicating as a Scientist (3)
• Papers (4)
• Correspondence (5)
• Presentations (4)
• Conferences (3)
• Classrooms (3)

Other Topic Rooms

• Gene Inheritance and Transmission
• Gene Expression and Regulation
• Nucleic Acid Structure and Function
• Chromosomes and Cytogenetics
• Evolutionary Genetics
• Population and Quantitative Genetics
• Genes and Disease
• Genetics and Society
• Cell Origins and Metabolism
• Proteins and Gene Expression
• Subcellular Compartments
• Cell Communication
• Cell Cycle and Cell Division

© 2014 Nature Education

• Press Room |
• Terms of Use |
• Privacy Notice |

Visual Browse

• Memberships
• Institutional Members
• Teacher Members

RESOURCES: Reading / Writing / Listening / Speaking / Argument / SPSE / Reading Tests / Summary / Dictogloss / Grammar / Vocab / Critical Thinking / Instant Lessons / Medical English / Graphs / New 2024 /

 Academic Presentations

Academic presentations are an integral part of university study and assessment. Academic presentations may be presented individually or as a group activity but both require the key skills of planning and structuring key information. The key difference between an academic presentation and a general presentation is that it is usually quite formal and includes academic research to evidence the ideas presented. The presentation will include references to credible sources and demonstrate clearly your knowledge and familiarity of the topic.

Presentation lessons / worksheets

Click on any link to be taken to the download

Presentation Information

Intro to presentations, academic presentations, presentation phrases , what is an academic presentation , presentation ppt slides, improve your ppt slides, create effective ppt slides, a basic ppt presentation  , graphs & charts, presentation feedback,  marking criteria, teacher feedback form, peer feedback form, peer-to-peer feedback form, terms & conditions of use, academic  presentation information.

• Good Presentations
• Structure / organisation
• Signposting Language

Giving a good academic presentation

• Think about the aim of your presentation and what you want to achieve.
• Concentrate on your audience: who   they are and  what   they (want to) know.
• Choose the topic that interests you: involvement and motivation are key to confidence.
• Give your presentation a  clear   and  logical   organization so that everyone can follow.
• Present information  visually : this adds interest to your talk and makes it easier to follow.
• Practise giving your presentation until you are familiar with the key points; this way you may discover any potential problems and check the timing. Besides, practice will also make you feel more confident.

Basic outline / structure

• Introduction: introduce the topic, some basic background, thesis (your stance or argument).
• Outline: provide basic bullet points on the key parts of the presentation.
• Main body: divide the main body into sections.
• Evaluation: always include evaluation. This can be a separate section or part of the main body.
• Conclusion: summarise key points, restate the thesis and make a recommendation / suggestion / prediction.
• Reference list: create one slide with all your sources.
• Questions : be prepared to answer questions.
• Cope with nerves: breathe deeply; it calms you down and stops you from talking too quickly.
• Control your voice: speak clearly and try to sound interesting by changing intonation and rhythm.
• Watch your body language: try to give the impression that you are relaxed and confident.
• Maintain eye contact with your audience: it keeps them interested in what you are saying. For this reason, you should not read.
• Provide visual information, but do not give too many facts at a time. Give your audience enough time to take them in.
• Keep attention by asking rhetorical questions.

 Advanced Signposting Language –

key language phrases for presentation

Presentation Speaking Criteria

This i s a basic criteria to assess presentation speaking skills. It has three key criteria: Language accuracy & language range,  fluency &  pronunciation, and   presentation & engagement.    Example  /   Level: ** *** [B1/B2/C1]   TEACHER MEMBERSHIP

An Introduction to Academic Presentations

  introduction to presentations (new 2023).

This lesson is designed to introduce students to academic presentations. It contains information on how to plan, structure, and deliver an academic presentation. It includes a listening worksheet, presentation signposting phrases and a mini-presentation activity. Example . Level: ** * ** [B1/B2/C1] TEACHER MEMBERSHIP / INSTITUTIONAL MEMBERSHIP

£4.50 – Add to cart Checkout Added to cart

Presentation Phrases (Signposting Language)

  presentation phrases sheet : a range of standard english phrases .

Suitable phrases to use for greeting, structuring, examples, transitions summarising and  concluding .

Free Download

What is an Academic Presentation?

If you can’t access this YouTube video in your country, go here

Presentation Worksheet

 This lecture discusses the key ideas of giving an academic presentation including referencing, signposting, delivery and rehearsal.  2-page listening worksheet with answers. A great introduction to giving a presentation.   Example.  Level *** ** [ B1/B2/C1]   Video [7:00]  / MP3 /   TEACHER MEMBERSHIP  / INSTITUTIONAL MEMBERSHIP

Improve your PPT Slides

Improve your Presentation PowerPoint Slides

These are PPT slides from the above video or  go here . It’s a great way to explain how to present effective slides by using the correct fonts, focusing on key points and using animation to help audience engagement. The slides can be adapted to sort your style and method of teaching.   Video  [12:00]   Level *** ** [B1/B2/C1]  / TEACHER MEMBERSHIP / INSTITUTIONAL MEMBERSHIP

£4.00 – Add to cart Checkout Added to cart

Create PPT slides people will remember – Duarte Inc [CEO]

Harvard Business Review: How to plan an informed presentation and what is needed to create really effective slides that keep an audience engaged. More HBR listening worksheets are   Example   Video  [03:08]   Level: ** * * * [B2/C1]  / TEACHER MEMBERSHIP  / INSTITUTIONAL MEMBERSHIP

A Basic PPT Presentation

This is a video example of a ‘basic’ presentation on Domestic Violence using signposting language and a basic structure

      Memberships (Teacher / Institutional)

      Full access to everything -  £100 /  £200 /   £550

  Join today * x

Academic  Presentation Marking Criteria

A basic criteria that can be used to assess and grade a students’s presentation – full criteria in paid version (below).

online resources

Medical English

New for 2024

DropBox Files

Members only

Instant Lessons

Marking Criteria

OneDrive Files

Critical Thinking

Topic-lessons

Feedback Forms

6-Week Course

SPSE Essays

Free Resources

Charts and graphs

AEUK The Blog

12-Week Course

Advertisement:.

Want to create or adapt books like this? Learn more about how Pressbooks supports open publishing practices.

Academic Module 3: Giving Academic Presentations

17 Giving Academic Presentations: Talks, Power Points, and Posters

As mentioned earlier, students enrolled in college courses, especially in the U.S., are often required to demonstrate their knowledge and perspectives on a given topic in the form of oral presentations. Before we look at the different formats these presentations may occur in, let’s first look at the tasks of preparing and giving presentations through the lens of audience, purpose, and parameters, or APP.

Audience, Purpose, and Parameters (APP)

Let’s start with the first criterion–the audience.

• When you present information orally, whether informally (e.g. while participating in a discussion in the class) or formally (e.g. a graded individual or group presentation on a topic assigned by the professor), who is the target audience? Generally, students present ideas and information to the members of the classroom community, which include both the professor and other students. In this case, you would again need to decide about the language(s) and the appropriate tone or register you would need to use. In other words, who your audience is informs what you say and what you write in a college course. Therefore, it is very helpful to identify clearly who the target audience is for any academic assignment, especially presentations.

Now, let’s look at the second criterion–the purpose.

• The purpose of a presentation, individual or group, may vary. Some presentations are informative, others are descriptive, and some tend to be persuasive. Some presentations combine all of these elements. The patterns that are used in composing an essay are used in oral presentations as well. To ensure that the presentation matches the assignment, read the assignment guidelines carefully to gauge what the purpose of the presentation is and then ensure that the information is appropriately crafted.

The final criterion of a good presentation is the parameters.

• As you read the guidelines of the presentation, make sure to note what the parameters are: what format are you required to use (speech, Power Point, poster, and so forth); what is the length allowed (how many minutes, for instance); what language(s) and register are you expected to use (e.g. academic English); and so on. In some presentations, there may be time set aside for questions and answers (Q&A) or discussion. Make sure to prepare for that as well, if required.

Common Presentation Formats

The three most common ways in which students formally present information in college courses are as talks/speeches, through Power Points, and with posters.

Talks and Speeches

Many students find the idea of giving a speech or a talk intimidating. That is understandable, but know that all good orators use certain skills and strategies to give interesting and relevant oral presentations. These skills and strategies may vary from one country/culture/context to another. As you adapt your presentation styles to the U.S. college context, think about how a ‘good talk’ is perceived as here.

Watch this video of Chris Anderson, the founder of TedTalk, as he explains how to give great talks. As you watch, try to take notes about strategies that you could use in your talks and presentations in this course and beyond.

Power Points

Students have to often given presentations using such tools as Power Point in college courses. Montgomery College’s Digital Learning Centers offer a helpful workshop titled ‘Power Point Basics’ multiple times in a year. [1]

Another format that is often used to give a presentation is with posters. In academic conferences, for instance, special times and spaces are regularly set aside for poster presentations. In college courses, students may have to work individually or in groups to create and present posters. Some workplaces, as well, may require these skills.  A well-organized poster presentation showcases the presenter’s deep understanding of the topic. Convincing facts are provided, and there are many details and explanations — both in the poster and in the presentation itself. A good poster also contains the right balance of graphics and text, and the presenter remains mindful of the audience, purpose, and parameters provided by the instructor.

• There are many other similar or more interactive formats available for giving presentations, such as Google Slides and Prezi. Explore these formats in your free time and become more familiar with them. They may come in handy in your future academic and professional presentations. ↵

Demystifying Academic English Copyright © by Rashi Jain is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

Share This Book

• Locations and Hours
• UCLA Library
• Research Guides
• Research Tips and Tools

Advanced Research Methods

• Presenting the Research Paper
• What Is Research?
• Library Research
• Writing a Research Proposal
• Writing the Research Paper

Writing an Abstract

Oral presentation, compiling a powerpoint.

Abstract : a short statement that describes a longer work.

• Indicate the subject.
• Describe the purpose of the investigation.
• Briefly discuss the method used.
• Make a statement about the result.

Oral presentations usually introduce a discussion of a topic or research paper. A good oral presentation is focused, concise, and interesting in order to trigger a discussion.

• Be well prepared; write a detailed outline.
• Introduce the subject.
• Talk about the sources and the method.
• Indicate if there are conflicting views about the subject (conflicting views trigger discussion).
• Make a statement about your new results (if this is your research paper).
• Use visual aids or handouts if appropriate.

An effective PowerPoint presentation is just an aid to the presentation, not the presentation itself .

• Be brief and concise.
• Focus on the subject.
• Attract attention; indicate interesting details.
• If possible, use relevant visual illustrations (pictures, maps, charts graphs, etc.).
• Use bullet points or numbers to structure the text.
• Make clear statements about the essence/results of the topic/research.
• Don't write down the whole outline of your paper and nothing else.
• Don't write long full sentences on the slides.
• Don't use distracting colors, patterns, pictures, decorations on the slides.
• Don't use too complicated charts, graphs; only those that are relatively easy to understand.
• << Previous: Writing the Research Paper
• Last Updated: Aug 22, 2024 3:43 PM
• URL: https://guides.library.ucla.edu/research-methods

An official website of the United States government

The .gov means it’s official. Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

The site is secure. The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

• Publications
• Account settings

The PMC website is updating on October 15, 2024. Learn More or Try it out now .

• Advanced Search
• Journal List
• J Undergrad Neurosci Educ
• v.12(1); Fall 2013

Engaging the Audience: Developing Presentation Skills in Science Students

This article describes a graduate class in presentation skills (“PClass”) as a model for how a class with similar objectives, expectations and culture might be mounted for undergraduates. The required class is given for students in neuroscience and physiology programs at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; I describe the class in the years I led it, from 2003–2012. The class structure centered on peer rehearsal, critiquing of PowerPoint, and chalk talks by the students; video-recording of student talks for later review by the student with the instructor; and presentation of polished talks in a formal setting. A different faculty visitor to the class each week gave the students a variety of perspectives. The students also gained insight into their own evolving skills by discussing the strengths and weaknesses of seminars given by visitors to the campus. A unique feature of the class was collaboration with a professional actor from the University’s Department of Dramatic Arts, who helped the students develop techniques for keeping the attention of an audience, for speaking with confidence, and for controlling nervousness. The undergraduate campus would be expected to lend itself to this sort of interdisciplinary faculty cooperation. In addition, students worked on becoming adept at designing and presenting posters, introducing speakers graciously and taking charge of the speaker’s question session, and speaking to a lay audience.

INTRODUCTION

In any university such as The University of North Carolina, in any given week, there are perhaps a dozen or more seminars on scientific topics. The seminar is an important part of the scientific research enterprise: the speaker typically delivers a broad, up-to-date overview of a topic, followed by new, unpublished, hot-off-the-press data. Researchers keep up with one another and students glimpse possible mentors for their future as postdocs.

Unfortunately, for too many of these seminars the audience will have lost the thread early on. Indeed, an amusing but pathetically accurate graph of audience attention versus time in a scientific talk shows audience attention falling over the first 20 minutes of the seminar, never to recover until the summary at the seminar’s end (see Kenney, 1982 ). For any seminar in which the audience’s interest has clearly been lost, a quick assessment of the number of faculty, postdocs and students present, who are politely waiting for the end, gives a sense of the lost productivity.

Numerous books and articles proffer advice on how to communicate scientific results in a way that will keep, rather than lose, audience attention (e.g., Kenney, 1982 ; Noonan, 1999 ; Alley, 2003 ; Anholt, 2005 ). Yet books do not seem to have solved the problem and it persists. An excellent iBio seminar by Susan McConnell, a Stanford neuroscientist ( http://www.ibioseminars.org/lectures/bio-techniques/susan-mcconnell.html ) attempts to educate speakers through a presentation – on presentations. She points out that many of the issues are actually well known: PowerPoint slides have driven speakers to speak much too quickly for the audience to follow; speakers want to show that their lab is productive and exciting so they cram all of the lab’s projects into their hour (which used to be 50 minutes), leaving the audience bored or exhausted; speakers do not take the time to design truly effective slides. Many speakers would seem to have no clue as to their effectiveness.

And no wonder: the training in audience engagement is not part of the typical education of a scientist. The rare speakers who can truly hold an audience in the palm of their hand have usually learned their skills through having been mentored at some point and then by rehearsing their talks, often with colleagues. They have taken the time to fashion an elegant set of slides rather than simply throwing together a talk from a series of figures imported from their own manuscripts or from the literature.

The irony is that so many scientific seminars (and indeed so many science classes) are so boring when the subjects are so inherently exciting! The scientists giving the talks find their work so compelling that they are willing to work for lower salaries than in other professions, and often to stay in the lab until the wee hours getting the data! Why the boring talks? The answer must lie in part in human nature – in the discrepancy between the world of the non-threatening lab, where thinking, observing and discussing predominate, and that of the stage, where the command of an audience is essentially a performing art. But being able to communicate what one is discovering in the lab inescapably means becoming as skilled in that art as in the technique of thinking through a problem.

Why don’t we make it a priority to give our science students skills in speaking, in exciting an audience, from the earliest point in their trajectory – as undergraduates? The rest of this article describes the efforts of myself and my colleagues to change this culture with a serious, intense class in presentation skills to graduate students, the “Presentation Class” (fondly called “PClass” by the students). We were convinced that our future scientists must be empowered to bring science alive for any audience they might have to address – for the specialists they would encounter at a meeting where they would be judged as they entered the profession, for the broad audience at their job talk when their future would be on the line, and especially for the lay audience, where the understanding of science by the electorate is of great importance. We wanted them to be able to communicate the excitement of research, and what it entails, to the stranger sitting beside them in a chance encounter, or to a life-long learning class at an institution, or to a TV or radio audience they might be selected to address. While this class was for graduate students, we argue that its fundamental approaches could and should be adapted to the undergraduate experience.

THE ORIGIN OF THE PCLASS IDEA: THE HARVARD NEUROBIOLOGY DEPARTMENT OF THE 1960s

The PClass had its roots in the culture of the Neurobiology Department at Harvard Medical School, the first department of its kind. Founded in 1966 by Steve Kuffler ( McMahan, 1990 ), an exceptional and perspicacious neurophysiologist, the department brought together those anatomists, biochemists and electrophysiologists whose interests focused on the nervous system – an early and highly successful multidisciplinary experiment.

Three members of the faculty in particular – Ed Furshpan, David Potter, and Ed Kravitz – initiated a culture of high expectations for departmental talks through their own example. Furshpan and Potter, and then Kravitz when he joined the department, had retreated to the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) in Woods Hole to prepare their lectures for medical students on the new and exciting field of neurobiology. They rehearsed one another until the lectures were outstanding, learning each lecture so that it could be delivered without notes. Their efforts initiated a culture. If you were a member of the Neurobiology Department – faculty, postdoc or student – you were expected to plan your slides and blackboard drawings carefully, rehearse your lecture or seminar talk, and speak from memory. Many of the offspring of the department soon developed reputations as terrific speakers. They knew how to do it through rehearsals, collegial critiquing, and simply investing time.

Many of us who were privileged to be immersed in this culture attempted to take it with us when we left. It was not an easy job. In academic settings other than that of Harvard Neurobiology, rehearsing was often viewed as a waste of time of the speaker and the listener. I myself tried a number of different approaches when I joined the faculty of the Department of Physiology (now Cell Biology and Physiology) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNCCH). When a new Chair (James Anderson) arrived in 2002, and was clearly interested in supporting faculty experiments, I had formulated an audacious plan – and he supported it.

THE STRUCTURE OF THE CLASS

The evolution of the unc pclass.

Often faculty do not think it is important for students to take time away from the bench to work on developing their abilities to give talks. Sometimes this is with good reason, as working on PowerPoint animations in a presentation can be a seductive time sink. But just as often it is because the faculty member has not spent that time developing his or her own abilities so they do not understand what is involved in turning a student into a first-rate speaker.

Our wise Chair did understand this. He made it a priority to have the department’s students become outstanding speakers and agreed to my proposal that they be required to attend PClass every week of their first three graduate years to practice both oral and written communication and explore other professional skills. While this amount of time might have seemed outrageous, it was astonishingly successful in ways unimagined at its beginning, particularly in building collegiality amongst the students. Many students in this group became such confident speakers that they began winning awards. Through the peer mentoring in the class, they absorbed an instinctive collegiality that made it possible for them to give criticism with diplomacy and accept it without defensiveness.

The class began with the Physiology students, later adding students from the Neurobiology Curriculum. The size of the class in any year ranged from 12 to 24 students. With time, the three-year requirement was reduced to adapt to an umbrella-based admission system since the students did not join programs until their second year. The essential, successful elements of the class did not change, however, and the class continues at this writing in the hands of another faculty member. I describe the class during the decade that I was the “coach.”

Two rules and high expectations centered the class

Rule #1: Respect for the audience should guide every detail of preparation and delivery of the talk. We insisted that the students know if the audience was specialized in their area or more diverse. We insisted that they design slides carefully, reducing text and bullets to a minimum, making sure every line of text (including axes) could be seen from the back of the auditorium, and choosing contrasting colors, especially those that color-blind people can see. We told them how important it was to time their talks, and that speaking overtime conveys the worst disrespect for the audience. It says that the speaker’s fabulous talk is more important than the time of the captive audience.

Rule #2: Talks should be carefully prepared, practiced, critiqued and refined. For most speakers, engaging the interest of an audience for an hour is a learned skill. Conveying enthusiasm for the subject to the audience is essential; it requires overcoming nervousness and building the confidence derived from thoughtfully-prepared slides and choice of words, composed transitions and practice. The class was structured around rehearsals and feedback from peers, faculty visitors to the class, and myself. A student could earn a low grade only by not taking seriously the rehearsal of their own talk or the pre-class rehearsals of the talks of their peers.

Diplomatic peer critiquing was a key element

The class was (and continues to be) structured around peer, self, and faculty critiquing. Peer critiquing began even before class. I divided the class into “rehearsal pods” of three to four students. When a member of the pod was “on the spot” to give a talk in class that week, the other pod students rehearsed him or her beforehand. After the talk in class, there was a brief period for feedback from the students and visiting faculty member, followed by a moment when all of the students wrote more extensive comments for the student to review later. With time the students learned that “Good job” was a useless comment compared to “You went much too quickly through slide 3 for me to follow – perhaps you could make two slides at this point to slow yourself down,” or “Please always tell us the axes of each graph before you describe the results.”

At the undergraduate level, students often are assigned to present talks of various lengths to a class or in a lab. Why not begin even at this level with serious professional expectations of the talks, perhaps by assigning a buddy to rehearse the student beforehand and pointing out guidelines such as those found on the website of the Burroughs-Welcome Fund? ( http://www.scribd.com/doc/34887738/Communicating-Science-Giving-Talks-Second-Edition )

The PClass united faculty and students

So that my viewpoints (and, admittedly, prejudices) would not dominate the PClass, each week I invited a second faculty member to sit in, watch and question the presenters, and contribute their experience and advice to the group. The faculty generally were happy to make this very small time commitment of one session per semester. The students gained a more personal view of faculty members whom they might not have encountered in a class, and the faculty acquired more knowledge of, and respect for, the students in this different setting.

It was important for the students to feel that the questions from the visiting faculty were intended to help them prepare for what they might be asked in a talk setting, not those they might encounter in a qualifying exam! I warned each faculty member about this before class.

Beyond talk mechanics, discussions in the class were revealing of the students’ struggles as they tried to think about the research process at a more sophisticated level than they ever had before. I was happy to have a faculty colleague enter the fray. I sensed perplexity over a number of issues – for example, what constituted a hypothesis versus what was simply a plan. The visiting faculty member and I often found we were participating in a discussion of fundamental matters of research.

Food can help bonding and add an air of importance to an endeavor. At the end of the semester I hosted a reasonably fancy lunch (not pizza!) for the students and the twelve faculty visitors from that semester. Our continually-supportive Chair realized the benefits of this social time and funded the lunch.

Movies of the presentation provided vital feedback

An essential part of the class was having the students watch themselves in action. I recorded each presentation, then reviewed the movie with the student afterwards in detail (slide by slide, sometimes sentence by sentence). Chairman Anderson gave the class a budget that allowed me to purchase a video camera, chosen for its ability to record in low light, and a low-end MacBook. It was easy to lead the camera directly into the computer and use Apple’s iMovie software to record.

I then made a DVD for the student. Watching the movie together gave the student and me a chance to discuss his or her research in more detail as well as talk improvement. Robert Rosenberg at Earlham College is currently using the video-recording approach with his undergraduates (see below) and YouTube rather than DVDs.

Speaking skills take time to develop

It is rare that students perform at a high level when “thrown into the deep end” – that is, when required to fill 50 minutes or even 30 minutes with their first talk. So, in PClass, first-year students were tasked with giving a timed 5-minute (yes, 5-minute) talk on their first rotation with a maximum of five slides. They had to define four things: the big question, their more focused question, the approach and technique to be used, and plausible results. I encouraged them to present imagined observations or graphs as a way of thinking through the possibilities. For undergraduates beginning an independent project, a five-minute presentation, rehearsed and carefully prepared, would force them to plan their project before they began the work.

As the first-year students in PClass began to obtain experimental results, we increased the length of their talks to the standard 10 minutes of a meeting talk. At the end of the semester all of the students gave their now-polished, 10-minute talks to the members of the department in an auditorium. I rejected more informal rooms so that they could become familiar with the nerve-wracking elements of a formal setting: being on a stage with a huge screen; using the sometimes-testy technology of the lectern; controlling the lighting, microphones and sound levels; and knowing how to deal with the possible lurking disasters such as movies not playing. The students became quite confident and able to deal with trouble. In one instance the “help phone” on the side of the lectern rang in the middle of the student’s presentation and (impressing the audience) she answered it, dealt with the issue, then resumed her talk without missing a beat!

Then there was the dreaded question period to be mastered. In class, the time devoted to questions – from the other students, myself, and the visiting faculty member – was equal to the time for the presentation itself, since dealing with questions is often the most unnerving part of giving a talk. As well, the questions could help the presenters think more carefully about their projects.

Learning ALWAYS to repeat the question

We required the students to repeat the question, even though the room was small, and to give a brief, formal answer. Indeed we would stop them from answering until they had repeated or rephrased the question. So many speakers do not train themselves to repeat the question, which is all too often not heard by many in the audience. Thus the question period, supposedly a time for intellectual discourse, is lost on much of the audience as speaker and questioner have their private chat. Rephrasing the question also gives the speaker a moment to think and, most importantly, to make sure they actually understand what has been asked.

This small, important speaking skill would be so easy to implement for any talk at the undergraduate level. Thinking of it as rephrasing the question is perhaps the key so that the repetition leads somewhere. But this skill requires vigilance by the faculty member to stop the student from launching into the answer: I would wave my hands vigorously in the back of the room. In retaliation I received a present from the class ( Fig.1 )!

The PClass mantra, immortalized on a shirt presented to the ”coach.” Also immortalized is the coach’s admonition not to use red text on a blue background, as the text will not project well; further, color-blind persons will not be able to read it.

Learning the skills of the introducer

Students in the PClass also learned to be skilled introducers. At the formal talks they were to give a gracious, interesting, notes-free introduction of their fellow student, manage the microphone and audio level, preside over the questions, keep the talk and question period precisely on time, help solve any technical problems arising, and thank the audience at the end of the session. I instituted the “Student Introducer” plan when one faculty visitor to the class, a prominent faculty member who had won teaching awards, admitted that she was more nervous having to introduce a speaker than when giving a talk! Certainly being introducers (even in class in rehearsals) raised the students’ awareness of the duties of this important position. It also made them appreciate, and learn from, those faculty who carried out these responsibilities adroitly for visiting seminar speakers.

Critiquing the seminars of visiting speakers

As an important part of the class, the students criticized the department seminar of the week. When the class comprised only the physiology students, all students had attended (or should have attended) the same seminar. They were expected to form opinions on the slides and on the style of presentation as well as to follow the science. When we added neurobiology students, who had attended a different seminar that week, each group had to brief the other on the main point of their seminar. (This class requirement for discussion of the seminars had the additional benefit of increasing seminar attendance.)

With their awareness heightened by the expectations of the class, students began to notice the things that doom an audience to boredom: the speaker staring at the screen or computer the whole time instead of engaging the audience, fonts too small to be seen except from the front of the room, a blistering pace topped by introduction of new material in the last 10 minutes, imported graphs from the literature with unreadable axes, the speaker never repeating the question. This exercise also was comforting to new students who realized that getting lost in a seminar could be a shared experience and that it was not their fault but the fault of the speaker!

One week the class was paid a compliment by the speaker, a prominent faculty member from another department (someone who was well known to be an excellent speaker): “I know that the PClass is here so I am sort of nervous and have taken special care with this talk!”

Mastering the chalk talk

While students must be facile with PowerPoint nowadays, there are many settings that require equal skill at the white board. Often a job interview demands a “chalk talk” in which the candidate outlines plans for future research. Even if prepared slides are allowed, the questioning can bring up matters best explained on the board. And students choosing a teaching path certainly need board skills. Consequently, students of PClass worked on PowerPoint talks in the fall semester and chalk talks in the spring.

The challenges of speaking at the white board are many: learning how to write legibly, straight, and at a size appropriate for the room; how not to turn one’s back to the audience while writing; how to organize the talk on the board; how to use the colored markers cleverly so that one color is always associated with one idea or entity. Indeed even how to manage a set of markers of different colors in the hand takes practice. Any undergraduate having to explain something at a white board could certainly be encouraged to master these skills early on rather than simply allowed to write illegibly and without a plan.

Students wondered how to represent data in a chalk talk. My advice was: draw it. A graph? A current or voltage recording versus time? Learn to label the axes and draw the data accurately. It might give you even more insight to what you have observed.

Learning how to design, present, and even visit posters

Both the Physiology Department and Neurobiology Curriculum had an annual “Research Day” where the students in that program were supposed to prepare posters. While lab groups tend to focus on the design of posters, the actual presentation and visiting of posters tends to be a neglected skill. Typically the making of posters is such a last-minute, intense activity that there is no time to rehearse how to “go through” the poster with a visitor. Even in the design, students still seemed puzzled about how much text to display and in what font, whom to acknowledge, how much space to devote to the methods, etc. Several sessions of PClass were devoted to poster skills for the Research Days, where posters were judged.

Students prepared 2-minute and 8-minute run-throughs so they were ready for either, as requested by visitors or the judges. Students who did not have a poster were assigned to visit the posters of students who did. As usual, they were expected to complete a feedback sheet on how the poster and its delivery could be improved. An amusing article in the Journal of Cell Biology by “Dear Labby” was comforting and useful in this exercise. Labby responds to a student terrified by the ordeal of presenting a poster at a meeting for the first time, giving tips on how to deal with the different ways in which people visit posters ( http://www.ascb.org/files/0611dearlabby.pdf ).

At the undergraduate level, practicing the skills of poster design and presentation may depend on the resources available for poster printing. The Biology Department at Swarthmore College has a poster printer and makes good use of it for training students. In preparation for an Honors Thesis Poster Session, for example, students put up poster drafts for their peers and faculty to critique by leaving post-it feedback notes on the posters. The poster is then revised and printed again.

Engaging a lay audience

One goal of the class was to have the students be able to summarize their work for a lay person, jargon-free and without slides. We called this “The NPR speech,” imagining that Diane Rehm had called them from her radio show and asked about their research. We aimed for a brief, lively and understandable explanation of their research and its importance for the pretend radio audience.

The jargon-free assignment is not so easy! I called on students by surprise (because who knows when they will be asked to do this?) and video-recorded their effort for later review. The rest of the class was to be alert for any jargon in the brief speech. Understandably, these sessions often led to discussions about what was jargon and what was not.

A marvelous opportunity arose outside of the PClass structure for students who wished more experience in speaking to a lay audience. Two students were invited to prepare hour-long talks for a class in the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute associated with Duke University. The audience for these talks is typically older, intelligent and educated, hungry to learn new things, and extremely diverse. The students who took on this challenge were amazed at the amount of time they had to spend preparing, even after they had been through the PClass. An hour-long talk about a scientific topic, jargon-free or at least jargon-explained, is truly new territory for a student. Both students received rave reviews from the audience and were thrilled that they had taken the challenge and triumphed.

CAPTURING AN AUDIENCE IS A DRAMATIC ART

An experiment with an actor at unc.

Although scientists hate to admit it, giving a good talk requires skills akin to acting. Students in drama programs are taught techniques for overcoming nervousness, for speaking loudly, slowly and confidently, and for generally engaging the attention of an audience. Why not make our students aware of these techniques?

I approached UNC’s Department of Dramatic Art where Jeffrey Meanza, the Associate Artistic Director of the Playmaker’s Repertory Company and a professional actor, became intrigued with the idea of coaching students who were giving scientific talks. We formed a collaboration with two parts: an acting class in one of the large rooms of the theater building, and a “Master Class,” where Meanza visited our classroom and critiqued student talks. Our efforts led to an article in a campus newspaper ( Shoaf, 2010 ) that inspired inquiries from other science departments about this unique collaboration.

In time I realized that the acting class was a great way to start the fall semester. Meanza involved the students in body exercises of all sorts, particularly those involving the voice and breathing; they were fun as well as useful, so that by the end of the class inhibitions had broken down. The students entered the acting class strangers and emerged sudden friends, united by their reaction to these non-scientific, playful exercises.

As the master of the Master Class, Meanza stopped a student’s talk after a slide or two to comment or give advice, similar to the tradition in a music Master Class. He helped them envision a better way to engage his interest and then had them try again. Acting tricks such as learning when to breathe or how to annunciate more clearly the long and difficult words of scientific jargon (try saying it several times with your tongue out!) instantly improved that portion of the presentation.

When the idea of the acting class was initially broached to the skeptical students, one student said, “We are scientists, not actors.” The faculty member visiting class that day took exception. “You are wrong,” she said. “You must be both if you want people to pay attention to your work.”

A PClass theater experiment at the University of Wisconsin

While versions of PClass undoubtedly exist at other universities, I know of only one other involving the drama department. At the University of Wisconsin, Donata Oertel (Department of Neuroscience) has collaborated with Patricia Boyette, a Professor of Acting at the institution, to work with the neuroscience graduate students on their talks. Exercises included having the students bring to class 6–8 lines of text, something the student thought was interesting and important, that they would then practice speaking. Oertel reported that the choices, in one case a poem written for the occasion, were amazingly varied. The chosen text enabled the students to quickly know one another better while it trained their speaking voice.

Oertel and I entered into these collaborations as an adventure, hoping to help the students learn strategies that would enable them to relax at the podium, overcome nervousness, project confidence, and better command audience attention. We were not sure what to expect. To our delight, as an unexpected benefit in both cases, the drama exercises made the students more comfortable with one another. We felt that the increased esprit de corps might have made it easier for them to give and accept criticism, a central goal of the PClass that we hope will persist in their scientific lives.

MEASURES OF PCLASS SUCCESS

The success of a presentation class is difficult to measure except anecdotally. Prize-winning is certainly one indication, although it is usually difficult to know whether the research itself or the presentation has factored more in the prize. To my knowledge there is currently no competition where each student prepares a talk on the same results so that only the presentation differs amongst the students. Perhaps there should be! Competition is an effective driving force for encouraging perfection and creativity.

Nevertheless, I was deeply pleased when PClass students started winning awards after the class had been in place for several years. One student was the only graduate student to win an award in a local presentation contest open to both postdocs and students. Five more students won awards for their posters and talks over the next four years. An alumna won two presentation awards as a postdoc at a different university. This past summer an alumna of the class, Sarah Street, was selected by the UNC medical students to give the 2012 Whitehead Lecture, an honor highly coveted by the medical faculty. And then there is Jennifer Morgan, who joined an earlier form of the class as an undergraduate in my lab and then, when she became faculty at the University of Texas Austin, mounted her own PClass based on the UNC model. This past summer Morgan received a University of Texas Regent’s Outstanding Teaching Award, earning a hefty monetary prize.

CAN THE PCLASS WORK FOR UNDERGRADUATES?

My prejudiced answer to this question is that it is important to teach presentation skills to undergraduates who are seriously interested in pursing a scientific career. A full course such as the UNC PClass would clearly need the support of the department chair and other faculty. But the skills of PClass could be incorporated into regular classes as well. The essential factor is for both students and faculty to approach learning these skills seriously. The grading of a student would be expected to reflect their seriousness: how thoroughly they prepared their talk, their participation in rehearsing their peers as well as asking questions of the speaker and providing feedback in class, and their willingness to evaluate their own performance.

For example, at Earlham College Robert Rosenberg (who is familiar with UNC PClass methods from his time on the UNC faculty) has instituted rehearsed presentations, video-recording, and mandatory student self-evaluations in a class that he teaches in neuroscience. The class aims to build a neuroscience community at Earlham by targeting neuroscience majors from sophomores through seniors as well as students with other majors who have an interest in neuroscience. His students view their recorded talks on YouTube where he uploads the video files with an unlisted setting and gives the URL to the student.

At the Mount Desert Island Biological Laboratory (MDIBL) in Maine in the past three summers, a lucky cadre of about 20 undergraduates and high school graduates heading to college have been able to take a PClass from Susan Fellner, a faculty member in physiology at UNC and MDIBL adjunct professor. As one of the faculty visitors to the UNC PClass, Fellner became determined to provide a PClass opportunity to the MDIBL students.

Fellner’s class was the only formal instruction at the MDIBL, where students are assigned to research labs for the summer. The class met each week and was modeled on the UNC PClass in several fundamental ways: the students were expected to critique the seminars of visitors to the MDIBL (and as a result, Fellner says, they paid much more attention to the seminars); the student talks were short, at 8 minutes, were timed, and were followed by a question period where the students had to repeat the question; Fellner made herself available for rehearsing; and the students were expected to critique one another in a respectful but helpful manner after each talk. Fellner reports that the pride the students took in their talks was obvious as they dressed up to present their talks at the Lab’s end-of-summer Student Research Day.

For her efforts Fellner received an award from the director and scientists at the Lab, who were struck by the obvious, enormous improvement in the talks and posters presented by students compared to those in years prior to her class. Fellner says that a common comment from faculty after Research Day was, “These kids are better than I am!”

When Jennifer Morgan (now an Assistant Scientist at the MBL) crafted her own PClass at the UT Austin, she and I shared effective techniques as our classes evolved at the separate institutions. While her class, like mine, was for graduate students, she reported, first of all that her students wished they had been able to take this class much earlier in their careers and, second, that after they had moved on to postdocs, they felt that the PClass was one of the most (or THE most) valuable classes they had in graduate school. I had heard the same comments from the UNC PClass alums.

In the neurobiology/physiology Presentation Class at UNC Chapel Hill we have endeavored to empower the students with the self confidence that would enable them to enjoy, rather than fear, the moment of standing before their colleagues to show their results and defend their ideas. We have aspired to foster collegiality by encouraging these nascent scientists to develop thoughtfulness and diplomacy when discussing ideas with peers or giving them feedback. In the process, we faculty have derived great pleasure from seeing the students evolve and flourish. Anecdotal evidence and the spread of the PClass concept to other institutions argue that this type of formal instruction is successful and should be a part of the training of future scientists. Indeed it is imperative if we want science to be more understood by the general public.

Serious students mature in their speaking skills through thoughtful observation of other presentations – those of peers or visiting seminar speakers – as well as through taking the time to prepare and rehearse their own talks. The growth in confidence and mastery that eventually results in a first-rate speaker is unlikely to come from simply reading books and articles, or even attending a oneday “how to” session on public speaking. Making a bench scientist into someone who can grab and hold the attention of an audience is a slow process. Why not begin this process at the undergraduate level?

Acknowledgments

I thank the colleagues who have taken the time to tell me about their versions of the UNC Presentation Class and to critique this manuscript: Susan Fellner, Jennifer Morgan, Donata Oertel and Bob Rosenberg. I also thank Kathleen Siwicki who provided information about poster critiquing at Swarthmore College. A special thanks to Jeffrey Meanza who entered this unusual collaboration with enthusiasm and won over the students’ with his charm, playful sense of humor, and useful advice.

• Alley M. The craft of scientific presentations: critical steps to succeed and critical steps to avoid. New York, NY: Springer-Verlag Inc; 2003. [ Google Scholar ]
• Anholt RRH. Dazzle’em with style: the art of oral scientific presentation. 2nd Ed. Boston, MA: Elsevier Academic Press; 2005. [ Google Scholar ]
• Kenney P. A handbook of public speaking for scientists and engineers. CRC Press; 1982. [ Google Scholar ]
• McMahan UJ. Steve: remembrances of Stephen W. Kuffler. Sunderland, MA: Sinauer Associates; 1990. [ Google Scholar ]
• Noonan P. On speaking well: how to give a speech with style, substance, and clarity. New York, NY: Regan Books; 1999. [ Google Scholar ]
• Communicating Science: Giving Talks. 2nd Ed. Burroughs Wellcome Fund; 2012. http://www.bwfund.org/pages/361/Career-Development-Guide---Communicating-Science:--Giving-Talks/ . [ Google Scholar ]
• Shoaf L. Meanza and Stuart teach graduate students how to present their science; University Gazette, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. April 14.2010. [ Google Scholar ]

What are professional and academic presentations?

This is the first of three chapters about Presentations . To complete this reader, read each chapter carefully and then unlock and complete our materials to check your understanding.   

– Distinguish professional and academic presentations

– Explore the different types of assessed presentation

– Introduce the basic presentation skills that may be useful for EAP students and tutors

Chapter 1: What are professional and academic presentations?

Chapter 2: What are the key elements of EAP presentations?

Chapter 3: What are 10 tips for successful presentations?

Most people will have to present in front of an audience at some point during their life, and doing so can be a nervous and challenging experience. When having to simultaneously consider what you say, how you say it and who you’re saying it to, it’s no wonder that people appear anxious on stage or forget their words from time to time. Focusing particularly on academic contexts, this short, three-chapter reader aims to introduce the basics of presentations (Chapter 1), the key elements of a presentation (Chapter 2) and the top ten tips for success (Chapter 3). Anyone that wishes to learn more deeply about this topic should also visit our library of readers on presentation skills , such as body language and using visual aids .

What is a presentation?

Most commonly, a presentation  is when somebody stands in front of an audience and attempts to verbally and visually inform that audience about a particular topic. Such a presentation could be conducted in order to sell something to that audience, to convince them of something, or to educate them in some way. While most presentations are done by a single person, with a little extra practice, pair and group presentations may also be successfully delivered.

What is a professional presentation?

In the business world, there are a number of reasons that employees may be asked by their employers to create professional presentations . Such presentations are therefore quite varied and may be required to complete job interviews , to deliver sales pitches to potential clients or to present project proposals to senior management. In such presentations, the presenter will usually take their role quite seriously, and may be rewarded with financial incentives or with the opportunity to impress their bosses. 

How do academic presentations differ?

Like professional presentations , academic performances are also quite varied. Students might be asked to create a successful presentation in order to be accepted onto a course for example, and tutors might have to do the same to be hired for a job, to receive a promotion or to represent their academic institution at professional conferences. Most common, however, is that presentations are assigned to students as assessed pieces of work in which the student must research, prepare, memorise and deliver on a topic, receiving a grade on aspects such as body language , presentation language and the use of visual aids .

While most academic presentations are a formally assessed aspect of a course, sometimes this type of assignment may also be used somewhat informally by the tutor as a way of flipping the classroom. In a flipped classroom , students are encouraged to present on an aspect of that day’s seminar , taking the role of the teacher so as to guarantee better engagement with the class materials. In such informal presentations, it is uncommon for the tutor to assess the students at all but to merely encourage them to participate and practise presentation skills .

Which skills create successful presentations?

As will be explained in more detail in Chapter 2, there are a number of key skills  that presenters should master if they wish to present confidently and clearly. Whether it’s paying attention to the development of research skills , the careful use of body language and gesture or the inclusion of visual aids , the key elements of a presentation normally fall into five categories: content, display, organisation, language and delivery .

Before learning more about how to improve on these five key presentation elements in Chapter 2, students should first consider checking their progress and understanding by completing our Chapter 1 activities.

To reference this reader:

Academic Marker (2022) Presentations . Available at: https://academicmarker.com/academic-guidance/assignments/presentations/ (Accessed: Date Month Year).

• Hull University Library
• Kent State University Libraries
• University of Warwick

Once you’ve completed all three chapters in this short reader about Presentations , you might then wish to download our Chapter Worksheets to check your progress or print for your students. These professional PDF worksheets can be easily accessed for only a few Academic Marks .

Chapter 1 explores the topic: What are professional and academic presentations? Our Chapter 1 Worksheet (containing guidance, activities and answer keys) can be accessed here at the click of a button. 

Chapter 2 explores the topic: What are the key elements of EAP presentations? Our Chapter 2 Worksheet (containing guidance, activities and answer keys) can be accessed here at the click of a button. 

Chapter 3 explores the topic: What are 10 tips for successful presentations? Our Chapter 3 Worksheet (containing guidance, activities and answer keys) can be accessed here at the click of a button. 

To save yourself 2 Marks , click on the button below to gain unlimited access to all of our Presentations Chapter Worksheets. This  All-in-1 Pack includes every chapter, activity and answer key related this topic in one handy and professional PDF.

Collect Academic Marks

• 100 Marks for joining
• 25 Marks for daily e-learning
• 100-200 for feedback/testimonials
• 100-500 for referring your colleages/friends

How to Prepare and Give a Scholarly Oral Presentation

• First Online: 01 January 2013

Cite this chapter

• Cheryl Gore-Felton Ph.D. 2  

3402 Accesses

An important function of being an academic faculty member is building an academic reputation, and one of the best ways to build a reputation is by giving scholarly presentations, particularly those that are oral. Earning the reputation of someone who can give an excellent talk often results in being invited to give keynote addresses at regional and national conferences, which increases a faculty member’s visibility along with his or her area of research. Given the importance of oral presentations, it is surprising that few graduate or medical programs provide courses on how to give a talk. This is unfortunate because there are skills that can be learned and strategies that can be used to improve one’s ability to give an interesting, well-received oral presentation. To that end, the aim of this chapter is to provide faculty with best practices and tips on preparing and giving an academic oral presentation.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Subscribe and save.

• Get 10 units per month
• Download Article/Chapter or eBook
• 1 Unit = 1 Article or 1 Chapter
• Cancel anytime
• Available as PDF
• Read on any device
• Instant download
• Own it forever
• Available as EPUB and PDF

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

Strategies for the Preparation and Delivery of Oral Presentation

Graduate Students and Learning How to Get Published

Pashler H, McDaniel M, Rohrer D, Bjork R. Learning styles: concepts and evidence. Psychol Sci Publ Interest. 2009;9:105–19.

Google Scholar  

Ericsson AK, Krampe RT, Tesch-Romer C. The role of deliberate practice in the acquisition of expert performance. Psychol Rev. 1993;100:363–406.

Article   Google Scholar  

Seaward BL. Managing stress: principles and strategies for health and well-being. 7th ed. Burlington, MA: Jones & Bartlett Learning, LLC; 2012.

Download references

Author information

Authors and affiliations.

Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University School of Medicine, 401 Quarry Road, Stanford, CA, USA

Cheryl Gore-Felton Ph.D.

You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Cheryl Gore-Felton Ph.D. .

Editor information

Editors and affiliations.

, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral, Stanford University School of Medicine, 450 Serra Mall, Stanford, 94305, California, USA

Laura Weiss Roberts

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2013 Springer Science+Business Media New York

About this chapter

Gore-Felton, C. (2013). How to Prepare and Give a Scholarly Oral Presentation. In: Roberts, L. (eds) The Academic Medicine Handbook. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-5693-3_37

Download citation

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-5693-3_37

Published : 22 February 2013

Publisher Name : Springer, New York, NY

Print ISBN : 978-1-4614-5692-6

Online ISBN : 978-1-4614-5693-3

eBook Packages : Medicine Medicine (R0)

Share this chapter

Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:

Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article.

Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative

• Publish with us

Policies and ethics

• Find a journal
• Track your research

This page has been archived and is no longer being updated regularly.

Presenting your research effectively

Here's how to home in on your key message and present it in a clear, engaging way.

By Richard Chambers

Print version: page 28

For many graduate students, presenting their research is a daunting task. How do you cram your months' worth of data collection and analysis into a 10- to 20-minute presentation? Deciding what information to include and how to organize it can be more stressful than actually giving the presentation.

But anyone filled with presentation anxiety should remember that the difficult part is already over once it comes time to present. No one knows your research better than you, and those who come to listen to your presentation are probably there because they are interested in your research, not because they are required to be there. Taking this perspective can make presenting your research much less stressful because the focus of the task is no longer to engage an uninterested audience: It is to keep an already interested audience engaged.

Here are some suggestions for constructing a presentation using various multimedia tools, such as PowerPoint, Keynote and Prezi.

Planning: What should be included?

First, it is always important to refer to the APA Publication Manual as well as to your specific conference's guidelines. Second, before you start building any presentation, consider your audience. Will it be scientists who are familiar with your research area or will it be people who may never have had a class in psychology? Based on the answer, you will want to make sure you structure your presentation with the appropriate depth and terminology.

Determining the main messages you want to communicate in your presentation is often the next step in organizing your thoughts. As you create your presentation, sometimes it is difficult to determine whether a particular piece of information is important or necessary. Consider the value added by each piece of content as you determine whether to include it or not. Often, the background and theory for your research must be presented concisely so that you have time to present your study and findings. Ten minutes is not much time, so emphasize the main points so that your audience has a clear understanding of your take-home messages. When you start planning, writing out content on individual Post-it Notes can be a great way to visually organize your thoughts and, ultimately, your presentation.

Building slides: The do's and don'ts

After you've decided on your content, the real fun begins: designing slides. There are no rules for how to build a slide, but here are a few suggestions to keep in mind:

Tell your story simply

Remember that you want to tell a story, not lecture people. The oral presentation as a whole should be the work of art, and the slides should be supplementary to the story you are trying to convey. When laying out content and designing slides, remember that less is more. Having more slides with less content on each will help keep your audience focused more on what you are saying and prevent them from staring blankly at your slides.

Consider the billboard

Marketers try to use only three seconds' worth of content, the same amount of time a driver has to view a billboard. Your audience may not be driving cars, but you want them to stay engaged with your story, and this makes the three-seconds rule a good one to apply when building a slide. If it takes more than three seconds to read the slide, consider revising it.

Keep it clean

White space will help the slide appear cleaner and more aesthetically appealing. It is important to note that white space may not always be white. Each presentation should have its own color palette that consists of approximately three complementary colors. Try not to use more than three colors, and be aware of the emotion certain colors may evoke. For example, blue is the color of the sky and the ocean and is typically a soothing and relaxing color; red, on the other hand, is a bold, passionate color that may evoke more aggressive feelings.

Don't get too lively

Animation is another customizable option of presentations, but it may not be worth the effort. Animation can be distracting, making it difficult for the audience to stay with the story being told. When in doubt about animation, remember to ask what value is being added. There may be times when you really want to add emphasis to a specific word or phrase. If this is the case, and you deem it necessary, animation may be an acceptable choice. For example, the "grow" feature may be useful for adding emphasis to a word or phrase.

It is important to have highly readable slides with good contrast between the words and background. Choose a font that is easy to read, and be aware that each font has a different personality and sends a different message. The personality of some fonts may even be considered inappropriate for certain settings. For example, the font Comic Sans is a "lighter" font and would most likely not be a wise choice for a presentation at a conference.

Other important considerations include typesetting and the spacing of letters, words and lines. These all affect readability but can also be used as a way to add emphasis. Sometimes you may feel a need to use bullet points. Do not. Typesetting can replace bullet points and add extra distinction to each line of content without cluttering the slide with bullets. For example, consider bolding and increasing the font size of parent lines and indenting child lines.

If you find that your slides contain mainly words, remember that a picture, chart or diagram can augment the text. People often depend on vision as their primary sense; this means your audience has a potential preference for visual information other than just words on the screen.

Presenting data: Think about what kind of graph is best

When you share information, specifically about data, bar graphs should usually be your first choice, with scatter plots a close second because they are simple. The same suggestion about having more slides with less content on each applies to charts and graphs. If the graph or chart will look cleaner as two graphs instead of one, use two graphs.

Accuracy of a graph is, of course, important. For example, it is easy to convey the wrong message simply by altering the range of the y-axis. A restricted y-axis can make the differences between groups look much larger than they actually are to those audience members who do not look closely. It is always important to be ethical and to ensure that information, especially about data, is not being misrepresented. Strive to make charts and graphs easily interpretable, and try not to clutter them with additional numbers.

Building presentations does not need to be a challenge. Presenting should be an opportunity to share with others something very important to you — your research. These suggestions can be used as a starting point to guide the development of future research presentations and to help relieve some of the stress surrounding them.

Richard Chambers is the industrial/organizational psychology representative on the APA Student Science Council. He is a doctoral student at Louisiana Tech University. 

Letters to the Editor

What It Takes to Give a Great Presentation

by Carmine Gallo

Summary .   

Never underestimate the power of great communication. It can help you land the job of your dreams, attract investors to back your idea, or elevate your stature within your organization. But while there are plenty of good speakers in the world, you can set yourself apart out by being the person who can deliver something great over and over. Here are a few tips for business professionals who want to move from being good speakers to great ones: be concise (the fewer words, the better); never use bullet points (photos and images paired together are more memorable); don’t underestimate the power of your voice (raise and lower it for emphasis); give your audience something extra (unexpected moments will grab their attention); rehearse (the best speakers are the best because they practice — a lot).

I was sitting across the table from a Silicon Valley CEO who had pioneered a technology that touches many of our lives — the flash memory that stores data on smartphones, digital cameras, and computers. He was a frequent guest on CNBC and had been delivering business presentations for at least 20 years before we met. And yet, the CEO wanted to sharpen his public speaking skills.

Partner Center