How to give a good talk?
Some advice for oral presentations
A few more or less self-evident but gentle reminders when preparing and executing an oral presentation.
- Prepare the talk to fit the given time slot. If you ruin the timekeeping, you ruin the talk.
- Get to the point. Avoid long introductions and overviews before the take-home message. Bring your results and conclusions upfront, and save the background and justifications for support.
- For a BLAM talk, you are the sole author of the presentation. Advisors and collaborators are acknowledged elsewhere (at the very beginning or at the end of the talk).
- Make a few extra slides for the discussion after the talk, if needed. Perhaps you can anticipate some questions and clarify them with those slides.
- Your last slide should be one with a summary or conclusions. This slide is kept up during the discussion and helps the audience to remember what the talk was about and what you have discovered. One big "Thanks-for-listening"-slide is just decorative at best.
- This last slide can also have a few references or links to websites.
- Avoid packing your slides with too much information. Use keywords instead of long sentences. Corollary: don't tell the audience everything you know and what you have discovered. Some are saved for later, some for the discussion, perhaps.
- Colour-blindness is not too uncommon. Make sure you use colours in figures and graphs in a way that minimises confusion (such as using red and green as contrasting colours).
- Force yourself to talk slowly if you are a fast talker (and a little nervousness often leads to rapid talk). Don't be afraid of a few moments of silence (and thinking).
- Force yourself to speak up, even with a microphone.
- Try to stay in roughly the same place on the floor. Some gentle movements are fine, but dancing or marching around deflects the attention of the audience.
Contact information
Katie Laschanzky
Doctoral Student
Telefon: +46 76 875 77 08
E-post: Katie [dot] Laschanzky [at] biol [dot] lu [dot] se
Stanley Heinze
Senior Lecturer
Telefon: +46 72 323 24 11
E-post: Stanley [dot] Heinze [at] biol [dot] lu [dot] se