*** Working Draft ***

Most Important Tip: Practice, practice, practice, and then practice some more. Giving a good presentation takes a lot of work.  Even people who have a natural ability, need to practice to do a good job. Ideally you should video tape yourself during a practice run. Find a friend to be your audience, and if that is not possible, give the presentation to the wall. Yes, I am serious. It is not enough to walk through it in your head. You need to say it out loud to hear it. I have given many many presentations to many walls.

Content coverage, structure and flow

• Cover too little material. Effect: short presentation, without sufficient depth.

• Try to cover too much material. Effect: far too many slides that presenter cannot get through them and runs out of time, or goes through the slides too quickly and the audience cannot digest the material.

• Insufficient depth on research topics. Effect: audience unclear about the contribution being made by the research that is described.

• Lack of coherence. Effect: audience unclear how different parts of presentation relate to each other (e.g., relationship between research topics presented)

• Tips:

  • General rule of thumb is to have approximately one slide per minute of presentation. Interactivity with the audience will likely reduce the slide count.

  • Provide a brief overview at the outset of the presentation, explaining roughly what your presentation is about and what you intend to cover (you do not necessarily need a slide for this, it can be done orally).

  • To cover five or more research papers in 20 minutes is a challenge. They cannot all be covered in depth. Make a decision of whether you are going to take a breadth approach or depth approach: cover all papers approximately equally, giving each at most a few minutes, or alternatively, selectively covering some in more depth, and others much more cursorly.

  • Think about what you want audience to learn from each subtopic (paper) you present, and the overall topic. Is the structure of your presentation going to help them learn that? Using a summary slide at the end, and sometimes slides throughout the presentation with clear "Take Away Messages" can help.

  • Think about how the subtopics relate to each other and the overall topic. This is synthesis. Make that synthesis clear to the audience.

Visuals (slide content appearance + other media)

• Slides with too much text. Effect:  audience is forced to spend a lot of time reading, and often the presenter is saying something slighty different than what is written, forcing the audience to try and listen and read at the same time which causes a disconnect 

• Slides with text fonts that are too small to read. Effect: audience struggles to read.

• Failure to attribute images/figures/video. Effect: audience unclear where a particular image/figure/video came from. (Audience might wonder or assume, for example, that the presenter created it)

• Tips:

  • Use images/sounds/video wherever possible to make your point.

  • Use text sparingly, using large font sizes, and short crips phases. (NOTE: there is a difference between slides that are intended as lecture notes, which typically require more text, and slides that are used for a presentation)

  • If it is important to include a longer passage of text, either read it out to the audience, or pause and give them time to read it.

  • Attribute images/figures/video by providing URL or abreviated citation, e.g., "Card et al., CHI 2003". This helps audience know when and where material was published.

Engagement of classmates / interactivity

• No/little interactivity. Effect: audience can become disengaged unless presenter is highly skilled.

• Too much interactivity. Effect: difficult for presenter to get through material.

• Tips:

  • Aim to get the audience engaged right at the outset, by asking a question to get them thinking. Showing a video or vividly describing a scenario to set the context for the presentation can also work well.

  • Be prepared to move on, even if your interaction with the audience is going well, so that you can get through all your material. Saying something to the effect "others still have something to say about this issue, but I need to move on, and if there is time at the end, we will come back to it" is perfectly acceptable. Remember, you are responsible for your time constraints.

Communication skills

• Poor eye contact, either looking over audience or spending too much time looking at the screen. Effect: loss of engagement of audience, who may spend much of presentation looking at presenter's back.

• Poor voice projection. Effect: audience cannot hear and therefore loses engagment.

• Talking with hands. Effect: distracting for audience.

• Annoying habits, such as fiddling with something, like coins in pocket. Effect: also distracting.

• Tips:

  • The best thing to do is to tape yourself giving the presentation to see what you look like. If you cannot to this, give the presentation to yourself in front of a mirror.

Handling questions

• Don't answer the question, but perhaps a different question. Effect: audience feels disconnected.

• Long winded answer. Effect: gives impression that presenter is searching for the answer.

• Tips:

  • Before you start to answer, ask yourself if you have clearly understood the question. If you have not, ask for clarification, e.g., "Are you asking X....?", "I'm not sure that I have understood, can you ask again..."

  • If you need a bit of time to think about your response, just say so; e.g., "How shall I respond to that... hmmm <pause>. The best answer I can give is..."