Tips for Seminar Presenters

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Presentation skills can make or break a presentation! Your seminar grade is based on the quality of your presentation, and great presentation skills can make even a project you wish you'd done differently into a first-rate seminar. Below are some tips that will help you avoid common pitfalls and create a sparkling presentation.

Go to: Organization Speaking style Visuals PowerPoint tips

Organization

• Make the "big picture" clear. In the first few minutes of your talk, your audience--even those that know nothing about your research area--should have a very clear understanding of the big question your research addresses, your specific objectives and hypotheses, how you will accomplish your objectives and the significance of your research. A lengthy introduction before you get to your research question leaves your audience feeling unsure of what they will need to remember.
• "Package" each experiment. A rigid intro-methods-results-discussion format is required for a scientific paper, but a presentation needs to be more flexible! In a presentation, your audience can't flip back to a previous page, so you have to organize your presentation to help them. If you are presenting several experiments, a good format is to give some general background, then introduce the purpose of each experiment, how the experiment was done, the results and their meaning. Once you've delivered this "package" to your audience, go on to the next experiment. At the end, summarize the results of each experiment again before wrapping up with general conclusions.

• Show me the data! Don't have one slide where you show the results and then a text slide where you talk about them. The audience wants to see what you're talking about, so put a little text right on the result slide, or leave out the text completely and just show the results as you talk about them. Spend enough time on the actual graphs, gels, spectra or other data that the audience can clearly see how your results lead to your conclusions. Take the audience through the data step-by-step. Where appropriate, talk about how many times you've repeated the experiment or show standard deviations, t-tests or other statistics to provide support for your conclusions.
• Keep methods brief. Listeners can easily get lost in a long list of methods. Instead, list only the key steps of the method and tell why each step was important. Anyone who wants to know the details can ask.
• Give enough background. Anyone in your audience who has taken 200-level courses in your major should be able to understand your entire talk clearly. And anyone in your audience should be able to understand the significance of your research, the hypotheses you were investigating and the take-home message.
• Be persuasive. As you design your presentation, ask yourself what you want to convince your audience of. A good scientific presentation should build a case for whatever conclusion you want your audience to believe. Don't worry about keeping them in suspense--it's perfectly OK to tell them the conclusion up front, then build up the evidence in support of it piece by piece.
• Less is more. Your audience does not have to hear about every experiment you ever did, including the one you totally screwed up. Focus your talk on clearly presenting a limited number of ideas and experiments that really make your point.
• Give credit where it's due. All scientific research builds on and connects with the work of others. Tell how your work fits into the context of what is already known. Show how others' work leads to or supports your hypotheses, or where your results might disagree with others'. Demonstrate that you have a good grasp of the scientific literature in your field. And of course give appropriate credit! Often, students will put a bibliography slide at the end, but it's unlikely that the audience will get much out of this, so it might be more useful to put a condensed reference in small type at the bottom of the slide where the information is given--something like Smith et al., J. Biol. Chem. 53:11417 (2002).
  

Speaking style

• Know your stuff. To engage your audience, you have to be making eye contact and talking directly to them. If you're reading directly from your slides or relying heavily on your notes, your audience will get bored and think you don't know your material well. Practice your talk until you know it well, so you won't stumble or wonder what slide is coming next. Then you can look at your audience when you deliver it. Knowing your material well will also help you get over any nervousness.
• But, notes are OK. There's nothing wrong with having some notes to refer to in case you get stuck, or a list of slides, etc. Just don't use 'em as a crutch. It's a very good idea to write down any details you think you might forget: a chemical structure that someone might ask a question about, or a long chemical name that you might blank on.
• Be natural. It's a seminar, not a campaign speech. The people in the audience are your colleagues, so talk to them as a fellow scientist explaining what you think are important results that need to be shared.
• Be enthusiastic. Hey, this is great research you spent all summer on! If you sound bored with it, for sure your audience will be, too. Show them with your voice and manner how excited you are about the work you did.
• Make yourself heard. It could be the greatest presentation on earth, but your audience will never know that if they can't hear you. If you tend to speak quietly, practice with a friend sitting in the back row and have him or her stop you every time you're not loud enough. Breathing from your diaphragm and pitching your voice a little lower than normal can help.
• Know the vocabulary. If you mis-pronounce a key term, your audience automatically assumes you don't really know your material. Be sure you know how every term is pronounced! And what they mean--someone may ask you.
• Practice your talk. Don't just prepare the slides: prepare yourself. Go through the whole talk and figure out how you're going to say what you need to say. Where will you need to spend the most time? Where would an example be helpful? In addition to practicing on your own, it is helpful to practice in front of friends and your research mentor.
• Dress nicely. A suit and tie or dressy dress isn't necessary, but cutoffs and a torn shirt don't make much of an impression. Your dress helps let your audicence know you're in charge.
• Avoid jargon. Scientists use lots of lab slang, but in a formal presentation, you need to be sure you're using terms precisely and that your audience understands them. Don't say "I Geneclean-ed the DNA," say "I purified this DNA fragment from my gel using the Geneclean kit." Instead of "we PCR'd up the gene," try "we used PCR to amplify the lacZ gene from the E. coli chromosome."

Visuals

• Keep it simple. Flashy backrounds or fancy animations don't work well in a formal presentation. Use simple clear fonts and plain backgrounds. Black or dark blue on white, light gray or light tan or else white on dark blue work best. Avoid glaring or clashy colors. Use animation only if needed for emphasis, not for entertainment.
• Minimize text. If there are a lot of words on your slide, your audience will spend its time reading them instead of listening to what you're saying. Plus, you will be tempted to read them instead of making eye contact. Just a few key words will help your audience get the message without distracting them.

Who's going to read all this text??

Much easier for the audience to grasp!

• Use pictures. Wouldn't it be easier to explain that complicated experiment if you had a diagram? Plus, photos and drawings add life to your presentation. You can take photos (ask to borrow a digital camera), find appropriate images on the Web (try Google image search) or just draw your own--remember, PowerPoint is also a drawing program!
• Be sure text is clearly readable even from the back of the room.
• Portray results appropriately. No one wants to squint at tiny numbers in a table when a nice, visual graph would show them better. Consider whether a bar graph is appropriate for your data, or whether a line graph is called for. Label all graphs and axes, and add titles to graphs and captions to photos where appropriate. Don't forget units! Add labels or arrows to a photo or NMR spectrum to help make your point.
• Don't accidentally "squash" photos or graphs. When you resize an illustration, be sure you shrink or stretch both its width and height at the same time. Your audience will notice if you flatten or stretch it by changing its size only in one dimension.

Original image

Squashed

Resized proportionately

• Proofread carefully. Use the spell checker built into PowerPoint, but also read through every slide carefully before the presentation. You don't want a typographical error to appear in 48-point bold text for your audience to focus on!
• Make your visuals look professional. If you need to show a chemical structure, use ISIS Draw. In an Excel graph, change colors, fonts, sizes, backgrounds, etc. to make your graph as clear as possible and remove unnecessary legends, equations, etc. Learn how to insert subscripts, superscripts, greek letters, and so on. Use standard scientific notation: 1.3 x 10⁴ looks a lot better than the computer shorthand 1.3E04. Watch your signficant figures, and don't let your figures get cluttered with numbers like 147.021341112.
  

PowerPoint tips

• Test your presentation in the seminar room at least the day before you give it! Be sure your images look right, your text shows up, any videos or animations work, your fonts look right, etc. Be sure to go through the actual slides so you don't get surprised by animated text you didn't realize was animated, etc.
• Keep your file size small. PowerPoint presentations with lots of images get big fast. To keep your file to a reasonable size (so it loads and saves quickly and can be e-mailed if necessary), reduce the size of your images. An image that is 1000 pixels wide at a resolution of 96 dpi will fill a PowerPoint slide (and higher resolutions are not needed unless you need high-quality print-outs of your slides), but most digital cameras give you images that are much, much larger than this. Crop your images to include just what you want to show, and then shrink them to an appropriate size before moving them into PowerPoint. A great freeware program for working with images is IrfanView. Another way to reduce file size is to use File | Save As | Tools | Compress Pictures when you save your presentation. Set the resolution to "Web/Screen" and check both of the options at the bottom.
• Use standard fonts. If you use a font that's on your computer but not the computer you use for your presentation, it won't display properly. If you must use an unusual font, then use File | Save As | Tools | Save Options | Embed TrueType Fonts to save the font information with the presentation.
• Know how to run your show. A little playing with PowerPoint will pay off in making your slide show smooth. Did you know that either the space bar or the left mouse button will advance to the next slide? Did you know that the backspace key goes back one slide? Did you know you can hit the "B" key to temporarily black out the slide (for example, so that you can write on the board or while you're waiting to be introduced?).
• Be sure your movies will play. If you have a movie, video clip or animation inserted into your PowerPoint, keep it in the same folder as the presentation and move the whole folder at once. Otherwise, PowerPoint will lose track of where the movie is and won't play it. Not all computers (even classroom computers) have exactly the same software installed, and some will play some kinds of movies but not others, so be especially certain to test your presentation on the seminar room computer if you have multimedia.