I have talked before about how important it is for scientists to express themselves well, and the most important aspect of that is to give good talks. I am far from being a good speaker, but I am a little obsessed with learning what makes one.
So I recently went to a workshop on presentation, and came away with some good tips:
use dark background. It is much easier on the eyes of your audience, broadens your screen estate, and prevents you from casting weird shadows when you stand in front of it (some people dislike it, though, because it’s so dark)
shape your talk like a glass: start broad and then narrow to the details (the cup of the glass), stay on them for a while (the stem), and end broadly (the foot)
maximize the axis space of graphs to fill as much of the screen as possible. Push the legend and title into the graph area, in blank spaces
do not use a laser pointer. If you want to point something out, circle it on the slide
One of the best ways to get better is to watch good presentations and note what they do. Here are a few presentations I particularly enjoyed, and what I think makes them interesting:
Dick C. Hardt on “Identity 2.0”. I have no idea what “Identity 2.0” is, and I don’t think it caught on, but the rapid-fire presentation style is fascinating and easy to prepare. Though hard to pull off…
Guy Kawasaki’s talk for entrepreneurs uses minimal slides, and a lot of great lines. Some of what he says is even relevant for presentations, but mostly, it is fun to watch and easy to follow.
Chip Kidd talks about book covers, but he drives home an important point: show or tell, but not both―your audience is not stupid. “And they deserve better.”
The previous talks are about big ideas, and thus a bit abstract. Hans Rosling shows how you can take hard data and make its presentation palatable and fun. This takes a lot of work in preparation, but it shows you that you don’t always need the same old boring graphs.
Similarly, David McCandless shows how information can be conveyed in interesting and appealing ways. Maybe not always achievable for the average scientist, but worth thinking about, and looking at.
What comes through for me in all the good talks is this: keep it simple. Use pictures more than words. Your slides should be secondary to your talk. They do not need to be interpretable without you. That’s what a paper or a handout is for.
I recently tried cutting text as much as possible in my proposal talk, and got very positive feedback about the slides. It is harder for scientific presentations than for general talks, since you want to convey a lot of detail and nuances, but it helps to focus the attention. I plan to reduce to the max.