Composing a Presentation

The Purpose of Oral Presentation

In every context, business or academic or social, you will often present your content in several forms. Your graduation research must be presented in three forms: your thesis itself, your oral presentation, and finally an extended abstract that is published by the department. This is because each format has its advantages and disadvantages.

The advantages of an oral presentation are

• it is interactive: the audience can ask questions and get answers

• it is interactive: the presenter can get a sense of how successful the presentation is

• it is bounded in time (8 minutes in the case of an undergraduate thesis)

• it is social: members of the audience can interact with each other.

The disadvantages of a oral presentation are

• it is bounded in time: often the information lacks detail and accuracy

• all members of the audience share the same presentation, they cannot choose their time or the content to focus on.

Thus the oral presentation is suited to giving an introduction to your work to specialists who are often able to fill in the details, and a summary to a more general audience who will be satisfied with just the summary. The former may take it as invitation to read the paper. Depending on the proportion of specialists vs. general audience, as well as your own purpose in giving the talk, you should balance your presentation between the methodology and detailed description of data that interest specialists, and a careful explanation of the scope and usefulness of the results that the general audience will appreciate.

Preparing the Presenter

Appearance is a communication tool. You can use your appearance to focus attention on yourself, to direct attention elsewhere, or to distract your audience. You need to decide which, and then to choose attire, grooming, etc to serve that purpose.

• For final thesis presentations, you want the content of your research to be the focus. While you should be the center of attention, you don't want the audience distracted from what you say by your appearance. You will probably be most comfortable wearing a suit, although it is not required.

• At the beginning of your talk, pay attention to the audience reaction to your voice. Specifically, you don't want to be hard to hear or annoyingly loud, and not speaking too fast (too slow is rarely a problem). Once you are sure the audience is hearing you well, you don't need to worry about it.

• Throughout, try to focus on an individual member of the audience and talk to them. It doesn't need to be the same person throughout, and it's useful to choose people who are important to you (your advisor, the discussants) most of the time. Don't talk to the air above your audience's head, nor to their chests. Brief eye contact is helpful. But you should not try to force someone who doesn't seem to be paying attention to look at you. It doesn't work.

The Printed Handout

For an academic presentation, you should provide a printed handout. Discussants and other audience members frequently like to write comments and questions on paper. It's also useful when they want to refer to parts of the presentation to understand what you are saying at the moment.

The simplest, generally useful handout is a printout of your Powerpoint slides. Unless you have an extremely detailed image that is central to your presentation, you should have at least two and up to six slides per A4 page. It's easy to see that a printout of the slides serves both purposes mentioned above. How many slides per page depends on your style. If your slides are very dense and full of text, or have detailed images, use a small number per page. If you keep most slides to 5 to 8 lines of text, 6-up or even 9-up is quite usable.

In some cases there is other information that you should consider including in your handout. In the on-screen presentation, there is only so much detail that can be included. It's rarely useful to have continued tables, such as long regression output, on several slides. Providing such tables as a printed handout is an excellent way to handle that situation. Some graphics, such are very large network diagrams (eg, the whole Internet, or the social network of a whole gakurui) benefit from a high resolution printout. If you find yourself reducing font size to fit the whole table on a slide, etc., it often is a better strategy to select only the most important parts of the content to present on-screen, and put the whole content in the printed handout.

The page size should be A4 unless there is a specific overriding reason. It shouldn't be smaller unless you have a very small number of pages. In general it should not be larger unless you know that the audience will have sufficient desk space, as larger than A4 is hard to manage by hand. In some cases very detailed images or large squarish tables (eg, correlation coefficient matrices) may benefit from a larger page. However, long tables of data with few columns or regression output are probably better presented as two A5 pages side-by-side.

The Presentation Slides

The most important points about the presentation slides are

• You, not the projector, are the presenter. Wherever possible, you should speak your presentation rather than having the slides speak for you. The main purpose of the slides is to provide the audience with an outline of the talk, and the context of what you were talking about for and what you will talk about next. There are two exceptions:

  • Cases where accurate presentation is important and easier to accomplish with text than speech: foreign names, equations, quotations, tables.

  • Images.

• For the same reason, the slides are not a script for your presentation. Do not read your slides! If you want a script, PowerPoint provides a notes feature that allows you to put notes on the PC screen while the projector has your slides full-screen. Learn to use it.

Copying blocks of text from your thesis is a terrible strategy. Write it from scratch. Maybe you should be looking at your thesis in the first draft, but that's often a bad idea. Usually it's better to do a quick draft with slide titles and one or two of the most important points on each, and then refer to your thesis on a second pass through filling in slides that really should be there that you forgot.

This includes tables of variable definitions and regression output. Include the whole thing as an appendix (both in the slides and in the handout), but put only the most important variables on a very few slides.

It's much better to have too many slides that are light on content than too few slides that are almost black with content. I remember many years ago seeing a video by a Japanese businessman who advocated one word slides. That's extreme, but not insane in a sales presentation! Personally, in class most of my slides end up being a title, about 3 main points, some of which have 1-4 sub-bullets. In a professional presentation, I try to keep it to 3 or 4 main points and avoid sub-bullets. That may feel too light on content to you, but I do advise having more pages with less content on each.

Where possible each slide should be complete and have a single point to make. For example, in the literature review you might have three "theoretical" papers which provide different parts of your model, a paper on the statistical estimation method, and a paper about the data set you are using. That can definitely be three slides, even though the statistics and the data set would fit on one. On the other hand, you often want to combine the statistics paper and the data paper on one slide if the statistics is very straightforward and the data paper uses the same statistical method, so that they are closely related.

If there is too much text on a slide, your audience will read that rather than listen to you. Better to have too little text, then the audience must listen to you for the explanation! There are a few exceptions:

• Images (obviously), including graphs.

• Tables, such as regression output.

• Your list of references.

Timing

Don't flash a slide so quickly the audience can't read the whole thing. For example, presenters often include a slide with a table of contents of the presentation, but display it only for less than 1 second. Don't do that! Delete any slide you display for less than 5 seconds, or move it to an "Appendix" after the planned slides. Consider

If you use PowerPoint rather than a PDF for your slides, be aware that PowerPoint features such as fades between slides and revealing bullet points one by one as you discuss them can cost many seconds, especially in the Q&A period.

Sometimes it is useful to state something such as a result such as regression coefficients, then display an image to illustrate the point, then more discussion of the regression. Do not flip back and forth between the image and the text slides in such a case. It's OK to have duplicate slides so that you can always move forward in the deck.

Practice

For the Q&A period, the discussants will often ask you about a particular slide by number. Practice jumping to that slide as quickly as possible.

Once you have a version of the slides you think is ready for presentation, practice it, timing yourself with a stopwatch that will record "lap times" so you can time each slide separately without stopping to write them down. (iPhone's clock application has such a stopwatch, I suppose Android phones do too, and maybe PowerPoint itself.) If you find yourself consistently spending less than 10 seconds on a slide, consider (a) just deleting it if you don't think anyone would ever ask a question that it answers, or (b) move it to the end of the presentation so you can pull it up if asked. Conversely, if you find yourself spending more than one minute on a slide, you can try to break it up into more than one slide. You should do that if you can.