How to give successful oral and poster presentations J.W. Niemantsverdriet Schuit Institute of Catalysis, Eindhoven University of Technology Eindhoven, The Netherlands See also: http:// www.efcats.org
How to give a successful oral presentation develop your own presentation style… … but try to avoid commonly made mistakes Introduction How often have you been listening to oral presentations that dealt with interesting science while you nevertheless had difficulty to pay attention till the end? How often did you lose your interest before the speaker had even come halfway? Was it because of the subject of the talk or was it the way the speaker presented it? Many presentations concern interesting work, but are nevertheless difficult to follow because the speaker unknowingly makes a number of presentation errors. By far the largest mistake is that a speaker does not realize how an audience listens. If you are well aware of what errors you should avoid, the chances are high that you will be able to greatly improve the effectiveness of your presentations. The Attention Curve The average attendee of a conference is by all means willing to listen to you, but he is also Audience Attention easily distracted. You should realize that only a minor part of the people have come specifically to listen to your talk. The rest is there for a variety of reasons, to wait for the Conclusion next speaker, or to get a general impression of the field, or whatever. Tim e Figure 1 illustrates how the average audience Figure 1 Typical attention the audience pays attention during a typical presentation of, pays to an average presentation let’s say, 30 minutes. Almost everyone listens in the beginning, but halfway the attention may well have dropped to around 10-20% of what it was at the start. At the end, many people start to listen again, particularly if you announce your conclusions, because they hope to take something away from the presentation. What can you do to catch the audience’s attention for the whole duration of your talk? The attention curve immediately gives a few recipes: • Almost everyone listens in the beginning. This is THE moment to make clear that you will present work that the audience cannot afford to miss. • If you want to get your message through, you should state it loud and clear in the beginning, and repeat it at the end. • The best approach, however, is to divide your presentation in several parts, each ended by an intermediate conclusion, see Figure 2. People in the audience who got distracted can always easily catch up with you, particularly if you outline the structure of your talk in the beginning. 1
Various Themes Introduction Audience Attention Efficient Presentation e t a i n d e o i m s e u r s e l t c a n l a t n i o n d n n o i I e o s e i C F i u m t s a l u c r i d n e l n c e o t o n n i C m o s I C u r e l c t n n o I C Average Presentation Time Figure 2 Ideal attention curve of an audience when the speaker divides his talk in recognizable parts, each summarized by intermediate conclusions. If people loose their attention for some reason, they can easily catch up with the speaker in one of his intermediate summaries. The big advantage of this approach is that every important item is said several times. Repeating the essentials is the key to getting your message across Why does an audience get distracted? AUDIENCES LOVE BACKGROUND There are many reasons why this may happen, INFORMATION! some may be outside your control, such as You can raise the interest of attendees who are not per definition interested in inadequate sound systems, poor overhead your subject, by giving them the projectors, or noisy conference centers with impression that they will learn cardboard walls between two sessions running something from your talk. Note that this in parallel. What you can do, is avoid anything part of the audience is more interested that may encourage the audience to stop in general aspects than in the details. You certainly need to give them a good listening. Such mistakes fall in two classes: introduction into the background of your speaker’s errors and presentation errors. We subject, before they can fully appreciate list a couple of the most common ones, most the subtleties of your work. Hence, you are self explanatory. should spend at least some 30% of your 1) The speaker lives in his own little world of time on general themes, e.g. what is known about the catalytic reaction and research, he believes that all the the catalysts and how it is applied in background information needed to industry, or perhaps a less known appreciate the meaning of his work is method of research that is more common knowledge. This is seldom the generally applicable, etc. A large part of case! the audience may find this very useful to 2) The structure of the presentation is unclear, know. But what is even more important, with sufficient background information and consequently the line of reasoning is they will understand a lot more about hard to follow. Important matters as your specific results, i.e. that part of the problem identification, aims, or motivation talk you are most proud of. are insufficiently clear. 2
3) Visual aids (transparencies, slides) are inadequate, confusing, unreadable, too small, too crowded, etc. Some speakers show too many in a too short time (one per minute is not bad as a rule of thumb). 4) The speaker uses long, complicated sentences; he uses unnecessary jargon, abbreviations or difficult words. Passive sentences (“ From this figure it was deduced that …” or ”It was therefore concluded that …… ) are more difficult to follow than active ones ( ”This figure implies that …” or ”Therefore, we conclude that …” ). 5) Even worse is when the speaker reads his Not too fast, please….! speech from paper and forgets that Many speakers have rehearsed their a) written language is usually more formal talk so often that they speak too fast. and complicated than language used in Others simply have so much to cover, that the only way to stay within the everyday conversations, and allotted time is to speed up. Of course, b) reading written text goes a lot faster than this is not in the interest of the audience, impromptu speaking. particularly not at an international In such cases the audience will definitely meeting. experience information overload. Of course … and try to vary your pace we sympathize with the speaker who feels As a rule of thumb, speaking at 150 insufficiently confident in English. However, words per minute is all right. However, reading a text is almost always an try to vary your rate. Key ideas, unsatisfactory solution. And after all, nobody complicated points, or concluding in the audience will blame you for a couple of remarks (you may want to use one at the end of every slide you show) are mistakes in the language, English will be a best presented at a slower pace. foreign language for the majority of the participants. 6) Monotonous sentences, spoken either too fast or too slowly, lack of emphasis, unclear pronunciation, all make it difficult for the listeners to stay attentive. Some speakers turn their back to the audience and watch the projection screen while they are talking, in stead of trying to make visual contact with the audience. How to organize your presentation You should be aware of fundamental differences between an oral presentation and a written report. In the presentation the listener by necessity has to follow the order in which the speaker presents his material. The reader of an article can skip parts, go back to the materials section, take a preview at the conclusions when he reads the results, etc. Exactly because of this reason, all scientific reports follow the generally adopted structure of Abstract – Introduction – Experimental Methods – Results – Discussion – Conclusions – References . However, this structure is totally UNSUITABLE for an oral presentation. Nevertheless, the majority of contributed talks at a conference adheres to it. Why is this generally accepted structure unsuitable for lectures? Because the listener will have to remember details about the experimental methods until the results are presented, and he must recall the various results when the speaker deals with the discussion. In other words, details that should be combined (the why, how, what and what does it mean of a particular experiment) are treated separately. You ask a lot from the audience if they need to remember all these facts and figures until at the end you explain how these bits and pieces fit in a larger picture. Grouping together what belongs together is a much better way to organize your talk. Hence, if you discuss characterization by e.g. XPS, you start this part of the presentation with a few introductory remarks of what you want to learn about your catalyst, how XPS may help you 3
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