This week has been absolutely crazy – I’m submitting a fellowship application on Saturday and preparing for a talk I’ll be giving at the 86th Annual Meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists. This will actually be my second talk at AAPA; I’ll discuss my first in a later post. I’m actually really excited for this talk because I’ll be participating in a super cool symposium. Remember when I mentioned the Up-Goer Five Text Editor in my post about Dan? Well I’ll be using that tool to try to communicate my research in just 5 minutes!!! I’ll let you know how it goes post-after-next :D
But all this has got me thinking about how I prefer to give oral presentations. While TAing BIOL110, I gave some form of presentation every class, but these are typically less formal than the kind of presentation you'd give at a conference or for your class grade. Fortunately, I was also tasked with grading an oral presentation given by groups of my students about a biodiversity survey they conducted on campus. I noticed immediately that how I graded the presentations was heavily influenced by my perception of “what a good presentation should be”. I even gave my student examples to demonstrate what a “poor” and “good” presentation looked like – the “poor” had over 60 slides for a 15-minute presentation…
A quick Google search will bring you to tons of sites that illustrate the “rules for a good oral presentation". Regardless, today I’d like to share with you the same tips I shared with my BIOL110 students. I bet you're getting annoyed with all of my quotes in this post, but my definition of "good" might be different from yours, and you should always go with whatever you are most comfortable with when presenting. With that in mind, here are my tips! tl;dr [too long, didn't read] graphic at the bottom of the post :)
A quick Google search will bring you to tons of sites that illustrate the “rules for a good oral presentation". Regardless, today I’d like to share with you the same tips I shared with my BIOL110 students. I bet you're getting annoyed with all of my quotes in this post, but my definition of "good" might be different from yours, and you should always go with whatever you are most comfortable with when presenting. With that in mind, here are my tips! tl;dr [too long, didn't read] graphic at the bottom of the post :)
#1: Be Organized.
You may recall that I gave this very same tip when I wrote about my "top three teaching tips". I'm a big fan of being organized in almost all aspects of my life (I say almost because if I didn't then Dan would yell at me about never actually hanging things up in the closet...). But this tip is especially important for oral presentations. Think of them as a more elaborate flip book - you only get one chance to get your point across on each slide, and the entire presentation as a whole really. |
Being organized means knowing the order of the slides and speakers (in the case of a group presentation). An organized speaker will provide necessary background info, make key points, and anticipate questions that their audience might have. Using minimal text and lots of visual aids is also a sign that the speaker is confident enough in their material to not have to read off of the slides, a huge plus for everyone involved :)
#2: Take Your Time.
I am the guiltiest offender when it comes to this tip. Odds are if you're nervous about giving the presentation, you're going to speak more quickly either from nerves or simply just to get the damn thing over with ASAP. It follows that if you speak too quickly then you'll blow past important points or transitions and leave your audience in the dust, struggling to catch up with you and your words. So do me a favor the next time you're giving a presentation: take a deep breath, shake out those nerves, and do what you came here to do in the time that was provided (taking up too much time is not a great thing to do either really - no one will appreciate you running over time).
#3: Make It Pretty.
Your audience will appreciate that you've taken some effort to make your slides look nice, but this is only a happy coincidence. The real advantage to having pretty slides is knowing that you have pretty slides: pride can make us fools, but a little goes a long way when it comes to giving presentations. Think about your color choices, font styles and sizes, and your spacing on each slide. The graphic below is an example of a slide I gave in BIOL110 about oral presentations: dark background, large font, and color-coded :) Speaking of making your presentation aesthetically pleasing, it's time for me to go finish my talk for AAPA next week... Cheers!