How to give an amazing talk
If you work in academia you have to give a lot of talks. While many people dread it, I love doing it. I would consider myself even a little bit of a presentation geek. I try to give quite a lot of talks ranging from lectures, presentations of our work in front of research groups, for stakeholders from industry, at Science festivals, and in front of school kids. A few years back I even gave a talk in a pub at the Pint of Science festival and I was also invited to New Scientist Live.
I truly believe you always should give your best possible presentation. You owe that to your audience. They have decided that the best thing to do right now is to listen to you. It is your responsibility to make it worth it for them. It is also a wonderful opportunity to inspire and to connect with people. You never know who is sitting in the audience and I have been given so many great opportunities by people coming up to me after one of my talks. In my experience giving presentations is one of the best ways to engage with people.
To ensure I give the best talk possible, I apply a few basic rules and a handful of tricks, which I am happy to share here with you.
Know your audience and make it relevant for them
It is quite obvious that there is a huge difference between giving a talk in front of school kids and a presentation in front of your peers. However, more often than not there are subtleties when it comes to different audiences. Knowing the background and their level of knowledge of your listeners will you enable to connect with them.
"Giving a talk is not about convincing somebody. It's about making a connection and to inspire."
It is your job to take the audience from the place where they are and lead them into your world. Knowing them as much as possible will enable you to use words and concepts they can relate to. It also helps you to find relevant examples. Ask yourself, what are applications of your work that they could use in their lives?
“Make it relevant for your audience. Why should they care about what you have to say?”
For invited presentations I try to learn about my audience from my contact person by specifically asking them to give me more information about who will be there. In addition, I browse through their webpages to learn about their research and try to find connections to what I am going to talk about. The key here is to make it as relevant as possible for your audience. Otherwise you will lose them and you would have missed a wonderful opportunity to connect and inspire.
By the way, also make sure you know the venue as well. If it is on campus go to the lecture hall a couple of days before (check the timetable to make sure it is free) and get a feeling for the space. Walk around. Make it your place. Also take this opportunity to test your equipment. In case you travel to an invited talk, ask your host to show you the room where you are going to give the presentation. A good way to tell them is by asking them to let you test the equipment.
What's your message?
The main reason why a lot of talks are boring is that they lack a consistent message. Yes, there is a motivation and there are results, but there is no clear message. People want to know, what does this mean for me? Note that it doesn't matter if you have school kids or experts from your field in front of you, they all want this question to be answered. How you address them, will be of course different.
“Start with a clear message, then make your slides.”
Before you start to work on the talk make sure you have a message that can be written down in 1 short sentence. If it is a paragraph long, it's not a message, it's a summary. Cut it down. Get to the core. You can ask yourself, if the audience won't remember anything from your talk, but just one sentence, which one should it be?
This is one of the toughest parts of preparing a talk. I am sure you have a whole list of interesting points and exciting results that you want to share, but you will have to boil it down to a single sentence. It is hard, but believe me it is necessary. You can later add parts that support the message (but only those!) to build up your presentation.
Repeat your message in various forms
People are different. And so are people in your audience. Some are visual learners, while others get the message more by hearing it spoken. Make sure you convey your message in various forms. Show an inspiring photo, tell a personal story, play a video or sound clips or combine them – be creative! You can even dance the message as people have shown in Dance your PhD competitions.
Also consider, especially at international conferences, some people in your audience might be really tired and/or jet-lagged. Make sure you repeat your message. Redundancy is good, as long as it is not boring. Your audience will appreciate that.
Examples, examples, examples
One of the best ways to convey a new concept (as well as to repeatedly tell your message), is by giving examples – lots of examples. Start with a very simple one and then increase the complexity step by step. Don't worry about oversimplifying when you start out. In the academic context a surprisingly big number of speakers are afraid of being perceived as not being sophisticated or not precise. Don't worry about that. A good example is one that the audience can relate to, not one that is "correct" in every detail. Engage with the audience and let them know about your approach. You can say, for example, "Let's start with a simple example" or "For the sake of simplicity".
As previously pointed out, take the audience's background into account. For example, when I talk about soft robotics to school kids, I talk about Baymax from Big Hero 6 which is very different from Wall-E or the Terminator. On the other hand, when I talk in front of biologists, I talk about how much better animals are than any state-of-the-art robot. Furthermore, I remind them that almost all animal bodies are very soft and how that is very different from the way we typically build robots.
Learn your first 30 seconds by heart
Often the beginning of a talk can be shaky. You are nervous. You are getting introduced and suddenly everyone is looking at you. You don't know your audience and have not made a connection yet. You feel vulnerable and exposed. A great tip to overcome this anxiety is to learn your first 30 seconds by heart. It gives you confidence and it provides you with a buffer to get comfortable.
“If you have a great start, you will have a great talk.”
You don't have to think about your sentences. It gives you the time and mental space to assess your situation, to look into the room and connect. You will gain confidence and you will give a great talk!
For beginners, also make sure your first couple of sentences are independent from how you got introduced. For example, it can be quite awkward when you had planned to start with "Welcome my name is Helmut Hauser and I am from the University of Bristol", but they have already introduced you with the exact same information. A small variation can help you to solve this issue. For example, you could say, "Thank you for this wonderful introduction. As you have already heard, I am Helmut Hauser and I am from ..." With more experience you will be able to do that on the fly, maybe even react directly to what has been mentioned in the introduction. However, for beginners a well prepared start is quite helpful.
By the way, it’s also a good idea to learn the last 30 seconds of your talk. Close strongly and confidently will shape the overall impression the audience will have about your talk.
Make it personal
If possible, make the talk personal. Share a story. Open up and be vulnerable. It is okay if you feel a little bit uncomfortable doing so. The audience wants you to do well and a personal story is a great way to engage. It also shows that you really care about the topic. The best stories are where you share a failure. Whatever you do, don't exaggerate or lie. The story has to be authentic. Don't make one up just for the sake of having a story to tell.
In the academic context it is not always possible to connect to a personal story. But you can still show that this is personal to you. Show them your excitement. Tell them why this result or insight is so cool or why the outcome was frustrating! Don't be afraid of sharing your emotions with the audience.
Make beautiful slides
I am sure you have seen quite a lot of talks with really, really bad slides. Often they are showing way too much information or they consist only of boring bullet lists. Some slides are even straight out ugly. How do you feel sitting in the audience and looking at those slides? Do you feel appreciated or do they make you cringe? Do they make you more open minded about what the speaker had to say or do you feel a resistance building up? Slides are like giving a first impression. They are not more important than the message, but they play a crucial role to get people listening to you.
“Beautiful slides are a way to say, this is important. I took the effort to put it into a clean and beautiful form, because it matters.”
For Mac users I recommend to use Keynote. It includes a whole range of incredible good looking templates made by professionals. There is no need change their fonts or colouring. Choose one template and stick with it.
For public presentations, where I don't talk so much about specific research results, I use big, beautiful pictures and I add just a couple words here and there. A picture says more than a thousand words. One of the greatest sources of beautiful high-res pictures published under Creative Commons Zero (basically meaning you can do almost anything with them) is Unsplash. Another one is Pexels. Below you can see a couple of slides from a talk that I gave at the Pint of Science festival using pictures from Unsplash.
Be prepared and practice, practice, practice
It is always a bit awkward when you see people skipping slides, because they don't have enough time to go through everything. Another embarrassing moment is to see people peek at the next slide to see what they need to say next. You also might have seen speakers who simply read from their slides. What they have in common is that they are all not well-prepared.
Don't make this mistake! Practice your talk over and over again. Make sure you know what is on your next slide and that you know exactly what you want to say at every point in your talk. This will give you confidence, which is crucial to deliver a great presentation. Moreover, extensive practice will give you the structure needed to improvise when necessary.
Like with every skill, you get better by practicing. Volunteer to give talks. The more the better.
To avoid running out of time, I go through parts of my talk and time each segment of my talk. Usually, I have a text document in Apple Notes or nvALT with all the information about my talk like starting time, abstract that I sent them, title, venue, information about audience, and crucially, my timing list. Below you can see an example of such a list. This also allows me to remove or add parts from older talks to hit the target time. For example, if I know the presentation of a specific result takes me 5 minutes, I know immediately, if I can add it or not. If you want to know about other great uses for nvALT in academia have a look at my blog post.
Another aspect of your preparation should be to check if your videos play correctly and if your connector and remote control are working. Also make sure you switch off all unnecessary applications. You don't want to see the audience your latest cat video from YouTube or a confidential email.
Have extra slides prepared for follow-up questions
When I give talks in front of my academic peers I often prepare some extra slides with more details on a mathematical proof or an experimental or simulation setup. I also have additional slides on further results and videos. I put them right after my final slide to access them easily, but I show them only to address (common) follow-up questions. They serve the same role as an appendix in a publication. I put there everything that is too complex or too detailed for the main presentation. Over time I was able to build up a whole library of slides that are able to cover a wide range of the most asked questions. I also use them as a tool to facilitate follow up discussions that happen often offline after the talk. Make sure they are also as clean and professionally looking as the rest of your presentation. Often these slides are the last impression the audience will get from you.
Small bits with big impact
This was just the beginning. There are so many more layers to giving a good presentation. Here are just a couple of smaller tips.
Talk slowly: You should speak much, much slower than you think is appropriate. Try it with someone and see how slow you can go without seeming odd. You'll be surprised at how slow you can be.
Use your body: .Don't just use your hands to tell your story; engage your whole body. The larger the audience or room, the bigger your gestures should be.
Pause: Make plenty of pauses. This gives the audience time to reflect on what you've said. If you have a clever surprise in your talk, allow time for people to ponder it.
Pause: Make a lot of pauses. This gives the audience time to think about what you have just said. If you have clever surprise in your talk, let people think about it.
Eye contact: Look at people directly. Start with one, pause briefly, then move to another. Speak directly to one person at a time. If you're nervous, return to familiar or friendly faces. Another technique is to look over the crowd to the back of the room.
Experiment: Try out new approaches and techniques and see if they work for you. You have to feel comfortable with them. Otherwise don't use them. Try out also different presentation formats, like Pecha Kucha, Ignite or 3-minutes-thesis.
Get support: Join a presentation club. For example, have a look at Toastmasters. They are world-wide available and have a great reputation in helping people to get excellent in public speaking.
Observe: Watch others give talks. Note what you like and what they do poorly. Did they engage you? If yes, how? If not, why? Talk to speakers you love about their approach.
Video tape: Take a video of yourself and watch it. What could be improved? Watch it without sounds or listen only to the sound (this is a tip I learned from Vinh Giang)
Improve. If you give talks on similar topics, which are the most common request for clarification afterwards? How could you improve your slides and the way you present them to avoid confusion in the audience?
More resources
If you need to put equations on your slides check out my blog post on how to make LaTeX work with Keynote
Vinh Giang is great source for learning for making better presentations
TED talks are renowned for their quality. Watch them and learn.
There is also a great book “TED Talks: The official TED guide to public speaking" by Chris Anderson on this topic
Another great author on this topic is Nancy Duarte. Her books “slide:ology: The Art and Science of Creating Great Presentations” and “Resonate: Present Visual Stories that Transform Audiences” are both great reads.
As always, if you like the blog post or if you other resources that might help people to improve their presentation, please share them in the comment section below.
