Do's and don'ts for talks
Jan Vandenbrande
This is a collection of notes of things to do or avoid for
your presentation. It's loosely based on many of my own past mistakes
and
similar to Jim
Blinn's talk at SIGGRAPH. The main aim is to present your work as
best as possible, to invoke interest and have your audience follow up
by reading your paper.
Tell us what problem
you are solving and why we should care
It may seem obvious to you what the problem is, and no
doubt, you care for your work a lot, but many of us may not be actively
involved with your area of study and need this introduction. If
possible, provide an intuitive explanation, without jargon or requiring
familiarity with other works, of the problem that motivated your work.
If we don't understand the problem, we certainly will not understand
the significance of your solution.
Think of the following. If you had 30 seconds to tell your
dean, or your future employer,
about the problem you are solving and why it's important, what would
you say? It's called the elevator speech
and it's also very useful as an opening statement for a discussion in
the hall ways.
Focus on the main
points reported in the paper
Your task is not to
cover the entire paper at the same level of detail but to give your
audience a general idea of what you did and to invoke enough interest
for them to read your paper. This means that you should focus on the
main points of the paper. After all, do you really think that your
audience will remember all the small nuances of your work after
listening
to 30 other presentations in a jet lagged induced slumber? Providing
intuitive insight is often more valuable than the minutia of
the approach.
Skip the outline or
overview
Here is the outline of 90% of all talks:
- Introduction
- Relevant literature
- Approach
- Conclusions
- Future Work
- Acknowledgments
Do we really need to see this? Is it worth 30 seconds of your precious
talk time? Usually not, so skip it unless there is a very strong reason
for it. For example, if you are showing 3 different
approaches, you may want to make sure the audience does not get lost.
Skip the literature review
The literature review should be in the paper, but in the talk, we just
want to
hear what you have done.
Compare your work to others only when
presenting your results, and say how they are better.
Keep your backgrounds
simple
Busy backgrounds are an enormous distraction to your
presentation. They add little or no value to getting your point
across, so don't do it. Do choose colors for enough
contrast between the background and the text to be legible. Blue and
yellow contrast well because our eyes are least contrast sensitive for
blue and most for yellow. White and black always works. Magenta and
Cyan on the other hand are bad contrasting colors. Keep in mind
that some of us are color blind and cannot distinguish certain color
combination.
Special effects
Use animation or other special effects sparingly and only if
it helps explain the point. Otherwise it's just annoying and adds nothing to your talk.
Use pictures, some text
Some people are visually oriented, some are textual.
Ideally, you need to cater to both. Keep the pictures simple and the
text to a minimum. Do you really think your audience is capable of
listening to you, looking at the picture and reading the text all at the
same time? Make the text large
enough for everyone to see. If you print out
your slides and cannot read the text at arms length, then your text
size is too small. For complex equations you may need to chop it up
into smaller bits so it's still legible from the rear of the room.
Don't cram too much into
one slide
It's easier to focus on one item per slide than to
focus on several items. Cramming
more into one slide will not make it any clearer nor will your talk go
any faster. Count on 30 seconds to 2 minutes per slide, which means
that for a 20 minute talk you should have fewer than 20 slides on average.
Don't read talks verbatim
You are the expert of your work. Therefore you should have
no problem talking about it. Your slides should capture the main points
of your talk, which you can use as a reminder to yourself
on what to say. If there are points that are important which are not on
the slide, ask yourself why they are not there, and if there are items
on the slides which you don't mention, consider removing them. The
slides and your talk should be well coordinated. This also helps those
in the audience who have difficulty understanding you and revert to
reading the text. If what you say is different from what is on the
slides, ask yourself why and correct it.
Whatever you do, don't read or memorize your talk
because it will make for a very stilted presentation. We all have
different techniques that work best. For example, just remember the
main points you
want to bring across and present it like a story you are telling your
friends. Don't get side tracked into minor details. Alternatively,
explain the pictures on each slide. The only
exception is if you have difficulty speaking English, in which case it
may be better to read out the talk