Giving a talk can open doors to new collaborations, increase your chances of funding success and make it more likely that other people will respond to your ideas. But scientific presentations are too often confusing, boring and overstuffed. Here are some suggestions, based on our experience as speakers, audience members and presentation trainers, that could make your next conference talk or seminar more enjoyable, engaging and effective.
Read the Room
People who turn up to a departmental lecture have different levels of interest and expertise compared with colleagues who attend specialist conferences in your field. If you treat all audiences as if they were the same, many people will leave dissatisfied.
Prepare an ‘advance scouting’ report: before you start work on your talk, make a short appraisal of your audience. What’s the setting of your presentation and how many people are likely to attend? What do they already know about the topic? Do they hold any preconceptions about your research that you’ll need to work against? The more you know about that particular group, the better your chances of crafting a presentation that will stay with them afterwards.
Be Clear about Your Main Message
Getting the subject of your work across is usually easy. Homing in on one central point and making certain the audience will remember it afterwards is vastly harder.
Before working on your slides, write down the main message you want to communicate in one or two sentences. Then, be ruthless: include only slides that support your central thread.