How to give (and make) a presentation

These are my notes from a quick workshop at Stony Brook University given by Professor Michael Bender and Professor Rob Johnson in May 2012.

How to make the presentation

Explain your problem (most likely to do bad on).
Explain why your problem is important.
Why do existing solutions not solve the problem?
Explain your contribution (most likely to do bad on).
- Make clear what you did.
- Make clear what other people did.
Talk about your solution.
Put results pretty early on in the presentation.

If you have a title and you don’t know how to begin, begin by explaining your title.

Put your work in context:

No more than 40 (or 20?) words per slide.

Include pictures/examples.

If it’s a 10 minute talk, you don’t have time to explain how you solved the problem, but more interesting than how you solved the problem:

Don’t take information away.

Have more than one graph per slide
- Graphs are complex to understand for your audience.
- (They may not be so for you. But that’s irrelevant.)
Use units that are too small: e.g., 120000 ms instead of 2 minutes.
Use units inconsistently: e.g., 1024 bytes on one slide, 1 KiB on the other.

Giving a good talk has a lot more to do with following rules than being naturally gifted.

First, slides have to be very fast.
Memorize your first sentence(s).
- Say it confidently.
- Likely to be nervous, so it’s good to be prepared in the beginning
- Begin the talk quickly.
- A student actually put the title slide about a third into the talk.

Hardest thing, most of you will fail on:

Conclude your slides (individually).
- Each slide must be introduced and concluded.
- Concluding slides is really relaxing, everyone will feel great when you do that.
- Conclusion of your slide should be on the slide.
- Know the conclusions for each slide.
- Basically your “topic sentence” now becomes your ending concluding sentence (opposite to normal writing).
Pause after conclusions, let yourself and the audience breathe.
- One reason you don’t do this is because you’re concerned about time, or you can’t wait to move on to the next slide.
- If you can’t say in a single sentence: “Why is this slide here?” then it’s a bad slide.

Stand next to the screen, point with your fingers, the screen is not made of sulfuric acid.

Refer to everything on the slides.

Do not apologize, ever.

Make jokes, smile.

Follow with something self-referential.
Maybe add some silly pictures (strawberry, hamsters). Use this with caution.
Smile while giving talk.
- If you’re not enjoying yourself, then everyone else will feel awkward.

Should you read your slide, or should you just summarize your slide?

Do not read your slides in a monotone.
People can only focus on one thing at a time: don’t have a paragraph on the slide and say something different.
- People will have to choose between you and the paragraph.

Make your talk self-contained, that’s the easiest way to present.

Practice your talk out loud.

Explain your talk to someone.

Goal is not to make a talk that makes you look smarter because it’s so difficult to understand.
Make a talk that’s simple, elegant, and people can understand.
How can you make people both understand what you did and understand that it was difficult?
- Make it seem like what you really did was more complicated actually
- How do you say something is complicated?
  - Personal stories.

Be nervous.
- Okay in the beginning, but shake it off.
Stare down at the floor.
Keep your hand in your pocket(s). (My personal preference, at least.)
If presenting graphs, do not explain them in detail. Instead, just say “this looks very good as you can see.”
If you have four graphs in one slide, only refer to one of them. Be sure to ignore the others.