Appendix 4: Oral presentations
Nervous? Everybody is nervous at the idea of giving a talk. The good news is that you will undoubtedly get less nervous as you become more experienced and more proficient. The bad news is that nobody ever quite gets over the jitters. This appendix will provide you with a few tips to help you design your first oral presentation and hopefully make it a good one.
A talk is normally divided in much the same way as a scientific paper with an Introduction, Methods, Results, Discussion/Conclusion and Acknowledgements. You don’t need to actually have slides labelled as such but this structure should be evident in your talk. Try to remember the following piece of advice. If you understand its message it will stand you in good stead: “First you tell them what you are going to tell them, then you tell them, then you tell them what you told them”
Tips for public speaking
- Start and end well. You will be most nervous at the beginning of your talk and here is where you must set the talk moving in the right direction to capture people’s attention. It is therefore absolutely critical that you know exactly what you are going to say in the first few minutes. Rehearse your opening lines thoroughly. When you have finished the main part of your talk how do you end? Never, never find yourself having to say “Well that’s it” to a sea of puzzled faces! They need to know when you are going to end, so again this must be prepared in advance. Spend a disproportionate share of your preparation time on starting and finishing well.
- Look at the audience. This is a difficult one for beginners since it really requires you to learn to speak mainly from notes. Most students are so terrified on giving a talk that they seek the security of a written script. Throw your script away. A script, in a single swoop, cuts the speaker off from the audience and bars any interaction between them.
- Practice Like everything else, oral presentation is a skill which improves with practice.
- Enthusiasm. If you appear bored you will automatically convince your audience that what you are talking about is boring.
- Your voice. You need to speak loudly enough so that the person at the back of the room can hear you. Project, don’t shout!
- Humour. Some of the most accomplished speakers entertain while at the same time informing. However, for the beginner the vast majority of jokes, silly drawings etc. can fall flat on their proverbial faces. Introducing humour into a talk is really very difficult and is really best avoided by the beginner. If you are in any doubt leave it out!
- Time keeping. Stick to it. Even experienced speakers often fail to understand that the extra ten minutes taken to display some fascinating new data that just must be shared, is actually an indulgence imposed on a (nearly always) unwilling audience. The only way you will know that your talk is the right time is to practice it beforehand.
- Projectors and props. How many times have you been to a lecture where the speaker wrestles with the visual aids, has no idea how turn down the lights, can’t a find pointer etc ? Before the session in which you are giving your presentation, go to the front and find out how to switch things on or off.Keep them simple. Be scrupulous in removing extraneous detail. Avoid complicated diagrams and putting too much information on a slide.
- Slides should be simple to follow and informative. Mark both axes of every graph and always state the units. Mention in words what each axis shows. Do not expect the audience to be able to read all the detail you have on the slide and listen to you and interpret both. One slide per minute is a good general rule for keeping to time.
- Check your presentation before your talk to determine that the slides convey the information you want them to and that they are legible from the back of the lecture theatre/seminar room.
(Adapted from article by Prof. N. Gow, Aberdeen University)