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Presentation Hints PDF

The document provides tips for giving presentations. It recommends maintaining eye contact with the audience, using a physical pointer to point to slides rather than a laptop, keeping slides simple with few words and large text, and not reading slides verbatim. It also suggests checking the audiovisual equipment ahead of time and having your presentation on a USB drive in multiple formats in case of issues.

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Daniel Mora
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57 views

Presentation Hints PDF

The document provides tips for giving presentations. It recommends maintaining eye contact with the audience, using a physical pointer to point to slides rather than a laptop, keeping slides simple with few words and large text, and not reading slides verbatim. It also suggests checking the audiovisual equipment ahead of time and having your presentation on a USB drive in multiple formats in case of issues.

Uploaded by

Daniel Mora
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Liz Bradley’s Presentations Hints

• Keep your hands out of your pockets. Project enthusiasm, but stop short of eager-
ness. Move around the front of the room — chaotically.

• Maintain eye contact with the entire room. Identify “indicators” early on: people
whose faces are expressive. You can then watch those faces when you want to know
whether the audience is getting it (or if you get nervous).

• Dress so you’re comfortable (or get comfortable in a suit or dress).

• Indicate things on the screen, not on your laptop. Buy yourself a pointer; you’ll use
it forever and you won’t have to scramble to borrow one right before a talk. Only
use laser pointers in big rooms where you can’t reach the screen with a normal
pointer; they’re distracting and they magnify hand wobbles. You can use a two-
handed grip—one hand supporting the other—to steady hand wobbles; if you’re
using a physical pointer, let its tip touch the screen.

• Don’t read your slides to the audience. In fact, try not to verbalize any combination
of the words on the slide, verbatim. Vary the order, use synonyms, expand, or
distill. (An interesting cultural difference: at philosophy meetings, it’s standard
practice for someone to stand up and read his or her paper.)

• Make sure that the text, drawings, and symbols on your slides are large enough;
set up a projector in the lecture room the day before you give the talk, make sure
that your computer works with it, and go to the back of the room to check whether
the fonts and pictures are visible.

• Keep the amount of information on each slide small and closely related. A well-
selected and -constructed slide should require no more than two–five minutes of
discussion.

• Maintain a high, ongoing ratio of organization/outline/intro/summary to technical


content. Everyone in the audience should, at every point in your talk, know where
the current subtopic came from, what its motivation is, and where it’s going. Using
(and returning to) an outline slide can help with this, as can running footers on
your slides.

• When using PowerPoint and similar tools, don’t go overboard with embellishments,
fonts, fades, animations, etc. It has been shown that the good old-fashioned black-
on-white is the most effective representation for conveying information. Some
people are even put off by glitzy graphics, assuming that you put that much effort
into the presentation because your work was somehow lacking. (This is especially
true in mathematics, where the highest respect is reserved for someone who walks
in without notes, picks up the chalk, and goes for it.)

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• If you’re planning to project from your own laptop, make sure to check out the
A/V setup ahead of time. You can avoid the laptop changeover hassle by asking
the person who’s presenting right before you if you can plug your USB drive into
their computer.

• It’s a good idea to have your presentation stored on a USB drive as well, in multiple
formats (ppt, pptx, pdf, ...); that way you can easily run it from another computer
if there are problems getting yours to work with the projector. If you do this, make
sure that any supporting files (movies, etc.) are on the USB drive too.

• Don’t leave home without the appropriate dongles!!! And don’t ever check the bag
that holds your presentation materials into the belly of an airplane. Keep them in
that overhead bin.

• Consider printing out hardcopies of your slides if you really want people to take
home your message.

• Some people believe in the 1/3–1/3–1/3 ratio: that your whole audience should be
with you for the first third of the talk, people in your field should follow the first
two thirds, and you should lose all but one person for the last third. I think this
is nonsense; it’s really hard to give a clear talk about tough material, and most
people know that. Some junior faculty — and many grad students — don’t think
you’re smart unless they can’t understand you, so there’s a lot of pressure to be
abstruse. One way to compromise is to vastly raise the intellectual level whenever
you’re answering an audience question. Then they’ll know that you can blow them
out of the water but are choosing not to :-)

• A corollary of this is to learn how to say “I don’t know” when you don’t know.
Trying to wing it can be painfully obvious, and will leave people with far less
respect for you than if you’d said “I have absolutely no idea...” and then tried to
reason out the answer.

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