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Don't Sleep Through This

Published by swansont on May 30, 2008 03:55 am under Science-general

Giving a Good Talk over at Life as a Physicist.

Unfortunately (or fortunately) there is a lot more to giving a good talk than just a good deck of slides. I think the number one thing for me is “tell a story.”

Some good tips to check out. A couple to add:

Don’t make your graphs too complicated and the admonition of death-before-yellow-on-white applies here as well. Also remember that (red/green) color blindness is not all that uncommon, so — especially if you’ve used red and/or green — point out which line you’re discussing, rather than just saying “the red line represents X”

I’ve heard a common critique that the presentation slides should be cartoonish, but I rarely find them funny, so I use a different description — simplify. The text should be the highlights, not a transcript. If you’ve followed the advice about fonts (I say minimum size ~18), you won’t be able to fit everything you say on the slides, anyway. You shouldn’t be speeding along any faster than about one slide per minute. And remember to breathe.

No Comment

  1. the tree on May 30th, 2008

    I would say the best policy is to avoid using projectors just for the sake of using projectors. There’s nothing more boring than someone making a power point presentation and then reading off of it.

  2. Matt on May 31st, 2008

    Hear hear on the consideration for red/green colorblind people. I’m one of them. Deuteroanomaly, I think my variant is called. Bright green and bright red especially over large areas are fine, but unsaturated versions over small areas look pretty much the same.

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