Larry Lesser
Engaging and Meaningful Connections
Larry Lesser

SPEAKING TIPS

Professor Lesser’s TIPS FOR PRESENTATIONS

VISUAL AIDS

  • Choose the specific presentation technology that best serves the topic, venue, and audience.  Don’t automatically use technology just because you can — a truly engaging and insightful speaker can be quite compelling with no technology at all, and some speakers are quite boring even with plenty of visual aids.  Keep to a minimum the flashier animated “bells and whistles” of PowerPoint unless they directly connect to the content or goal of the talk rather than distract from it.  If you choose to use a particular presentation technology such as PowerPoint, be sure you become familiar with its basic functions (e.g., there are plenty of tutorials on the Net, such as http://www.microsoft.com/education/ppttutorial.mspx).  Be sure to allow enough time to figure out ways to prepare slides with specialized mathematical notation, etc.
  • Even if you are “just using the blackboard/markerboard,” there are things to keep in mind such as:  plan what things need to be kept in view for all/most of the talk so that you can write and erase on the rest of the board accordingly. Be sure you consider whether people at the very back of the room can read what you put on the lower part of the board.  Use of color markers/chalk can add clarity, but make sure it does not exclude people in the room who may have color blindness.
  • Have presentation slides ready in advance (although it can be effective to have a small portion of them completed or highlighted during the presentation as part of an interactive style) and test them out to be sure they will work with the equipment, screen, and room configuration available. If you need to arrange for additional equipment to be set up, make sure you allow plenty of time for this.
  • For text-heavy slides, have generous margins, do not exceed about 10 lines and leave plenty of space between them. Make sure words are dark enough and large enough (e.g., using a bold font with type size at least 18 point, or even larger for bigger rooms). A xeroxed page from a textbook or article almost never meets these conditions (and it’s all the more annoying to hear the speaker say, “I know you can’t read this, but….”).  Stand in the furthest corner or side of the room and make sure you can read your own slides from that distance.  Consider if a picture or diagram could take the place of most of the words – it will be friendlier to your audience!  Make sure there is appropriate color contrast – it’s hard to read dark-colored words against a dark background or light-colored words against a light background.
  • Consider whether certain visual aids need to remain in view the entire time during your talk, even as you show additional charts. If so, figure out a way to do this (e.g., a second overhead projector, a movable blackboard, putting a poster on an easel or against a wall).  Consider whether passing out a “handout” (at the beginning, middle or end of the presentation) may be helpful or just distracting.  If you do give a handout, be sure to bring a sufficient quantity for the room capacity.
  • The first and last slide should include your professional affiliation and basic contact information (e.g., email address).
  • Data displays should be appropriately and meaningfully titled, sized, scaled and labelled. They should be readily interpreted. It is usually easier to recognize patterns from a graph than from a tabulated list of numbers.
  • Usually, less is more.  The fewer details you go into, the better chance the audience has of remembering your details.  On a per-slide level, use essential phrases more than full sentences and don’t try to make too many points on one slide.  Also, if your talk is allotted n minutes and you are planning to show a lot more than n slides, you are probably not being realistic about how much your audience will be able to absorb. An hour-long colloquium talk is different than a conference talk when you have only 15-30 minutes and slides need to be pared down accordingly.  Find out IN ADVANCE exactly how much time you will have and whether that INCLUDES time for questions/discussion.  Sometimes people assume they have, say, 30 minutes only to find that that includes 5 minutes for discussion and 5 minutes for passing time to get to the talks in the next time slot.
  • Consider displaying or giving the audience a written handout that has an outline of the talk.  Or you might want to give them a copy of at least your essential slides (up to 6 to a page) that could help them take notes efficiently.
  • Prepare some additional slides that you are prepared either to show or not show depending on audience interest and remaining time.  Even if you know you probably won’t get to them during the prepared part of the talk, you may find yourself using them to answer questions during the subsequent discussion time allotted.  Also, have some blank slides ready to use when responding to questions that require drawing or writing things out.
  • Be clear on how you will efficiently access and launch your slides so you are not using the first 2 minutes of your allotted presentation time just getting the slides ready to be shown.  Brainstorm “backup plans” in case software or hardware crashes, the Internet is down, a projector light bulb burns out, a marker runs out of ink, etc.  For example, you may have your PowerPoint slides on your laptop, on a flash drive, and also accessible via a web browser.
  • If the presentation is not a formal talk, but a poster, consider ways in which you can make the poster self-contained, interactive, and supplemented by handouts on the table.  Have a sheet of paper for people to give their email address for any fuller paper you may have.  There are tips online for writing up posters, such as:   http://web.grinnell.edu/individuals/kuipers/stat2labs/write%20paper.html

SPEAKING

  • Find out how you will be introduced.  Sometimes you will be expected to introduce yourself and sometimes there will be a presider who will introduce you (and they may appreciate your providing them in advance with a 50-word bio about you so they don’t have to think too hard about it, and so that you make sure they say the most important details with accuracy).
  • At the beginning, mention what kinds of questions, if any, you want to allow or encourage during the prepared part of the presentation. (Some people prefer to take only brief, clarifying questions in midstream, while others are open to any type of question at any time.  By your being upfront about it, participants will feel empowered to really ask the questions you are inviting and are less likely to ask questions that you prefer to defer.) In any case, be sure to allow appropriate amount of time at the end for questions.  (If there is not a specific expectation already in place, I would say to budget about 15% of the total time to be available for questions and discussion.)
  • At the beginning, state whether there are any handouts, whether they will be passed out at the beginning or the end of the talk (“beginning” is nice to allow people to make notes as you go; “end” is nice to keep people’s attention on you and not looking ahead), and whether they include all the slides or just key ideas and references, so that the audience will know what kinds of notes, if any, they may want to be taking.
  • Practice the talk (with any visuals) in advance for a friend and for your mirror. It’s not enough to just write the talk; you need to practice saying it as well. Be sure you are making good eye contact, not “reading” (from your notes or your slides) to the audience, avoiding monotone delivery, maintaining a reasonable speed, and staying within the time limit. Click http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/powerpoint/HA012300801033.aspx?pid=CH062556201033 for very useful information on “rehearsing” the talk in PowerPoint. (After the trial runs, you may need to do some editing or revising for clarity or time purposes.) The more you practice, the more you know you are “ready” and the less you are likely to be “nervous” when you do speak. The audience is more interested in your topic than in how nervous you are, and you will not be serving your audience well if you let your nervousness “get in the way”. Also, it’s amazing how this works, but you will often come up with lots of ideas for improving your talk merely by going through the act of saying it out loud and visualizing the audience, and noticing which parts of the talk you’re practicing feel like parts you want to “rush through” or “spend more time unpacking.”
  • To keep an eye on the time, use a timer (here’s an online stopwatch:   http://www.shodor.org/interactivate/activities/Stopwatch/) or have someone designated to hold up cards or fingers to tell you when there’s “5 minutes left”, and then “1 minute left.”  Be sure to allow yourself a cushion because when you give the talk “for real”, you will often find yourself adding sentences of welcome and explanation and connection you did not rehearse, and this could cause you to exceed the time limit.  One pitfall at conferences is that the presenter talks too long about early stuff like literature and problem statement and ends up with very little time to describe results let alone discuss conclusions. So be sure that the majority of the actual presentation is about the results and conclusions.
  • It is usually more effective and engaging to talk from an outline than a word-for-word speech from a full-length paper.  PowerPoint slides themselves can serve as an outline to ad lib from – don’t just read the slides, but give some added value commentary.
  • Be aware what key terms or background the audience may not have that they will need to follow your talk, and give them this at the beginning.
  • If you’re sharing an excerpt of something (e.g., a single activity from a week-long lesson plan unit), be sure to “set the stage” by telling us who the target audience is and what activities preceded and will follow the excerpt you are sharing.
  • Make sure you can pronounce terms and names used (e.g.,  http://nsm1.nsm.iup.edu/gsstoudt/pronounce.html or http://www.waukesha.uwc.edu/mat/kkromare/main.html, http://www2.onu.edu/~mcaragiu1/bonus_files.html)
  • If using equipment (e.g., overhead projector), make sure it is working properly, that you are used to using it, and that your use of it does not distract from your presentation (e.g., don’t keep turning away from the audience to look at the screen;  if your shoulder is lighted by the projector, then it’s blocking the screen!  when writing on a transparency, hold the marker far enough away from the tip that your hand does not block what you are writing)
  • Consider how you will advance to the next slide.  Will you be running over to a computer table each time, or use a hand-held clicker from where you are, or have a friend hit a button?
  • Consider how you will “point” to things on your slides, when necessary.  Will you physically point with your hand (or a stick), use a laser pointer, lasso it with a computer mouse, etc.
  • Just in case, have handy a cup/bottle of water and even a cough drop.  Coughs can come unexpectedly and cut into your time and concentration.
  • In general, a talk has 3 parts:  “tell them what you’re going to tell them,” “telling them”, and then “telling them what you told them.”  It can be helpful to refer to an advance organizer a couple of times during a longer talk to remind the audience of how the talk is progressing.  These signposts will be especially considerate and helpful to those in the audience who are more visual learners than auditory learners.
  • Maintain a relaxed posture with feet and hands. Try not to chew gum, fidget or lean on furniture.
  • Don’t overly apologize!  It’s normal to be a little nervous (some speakers find it helpful to briefly acknowledge this in a matter-of-fact or even humorous way, and then move on), just rechannel that as enthusiasm and remember that the audience is human, knows what it’s like to “be up there” and wants to learn from you and see you do well.
  • To engage the listener actively, consider optimum places to insert interactive moments that are not in straight lecture mode.  This could include posing concise pair-and-share questions where audience members turn to their immediate neighbors to discuss a question you pose (possibly doing some reporting out to the whole room if time permits).  Or you could facilitate discussion or brainstorming as one huge group on a particular topic or focused question.  You could record and synthesize results on an easel board or PowerPoint slide or use a “poll” from a show of hands or some type of “clicker” system (classroom response system; personal response system).
  • Humor or playfulness can be effective in the right style and dose, but can also be overused or even abused.  Avoid anything that could be perceived as sexist, racist, obscure, etc. Some tips may be found in http://www.amstat.org/publications/jse/v16n3/lesser.html.
  • Allow yourself time at the end to “summarize” and answer an audience question or two (and try to anticipate what those might be and prepare for them).  Elaborate sufficiently and clearly when asked to “explain.”  If you don’t have a very good answer, it sounds more professional to say something like “Thank you for raising this issue.  I will look into this later.”  or “That’s a good question. Do you have any thoughts about this?” rather than just saying “I have no clue”.  If it’s a big room, be sure to repeat or paraphrase the question when you answer it because not everyone in the room may have been able to hear the question.
  • Look at the information in these helpful resources: http://www.maa.org/students/presentation.pdf, http://techspeaking.denison.edu/Technically_Speaking/Home.html, http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~jrs/speaking.html, http://sacnas.org/content/poster-presentation-practice-feedback-phan, http://www.lablit.com/article/401, http://uni.dougshaw.com/greattalks.html, and http://www.growingleaders.com/habitudes/communicators/.