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How to Give a Great Research Talk

2014-03-01
  • Simon Peyton Jones

    • What your talk is for

      • Advertise your paper; give an intuitive feel for what your idea is
      • Who are you talking to?
        • They haven’t heard of you, they don’t know your topic, they may not be energetic
        • You must wake them up and make them be glad they came.

    • What to put in it

      • Motivation (20%), Key Idea (80%)
      • You have 2 minutes to get everyone’s interest at the very beginning
      • Your key idea
        • You must identify a key idea, very specifically (even if you must say “If you remember nothing else, remember this:")
      • Narrow & deep beats wide & shallow
      • Examples are your main weapon (to motivate the work; to convey the basic intuition; to illustrate The Idea in action; to show extreme cases; to highlight shortcomings)
      • Know the related work, but leave it out. Be prepared to respond to questions about it, and have a slide that acknowledges competitors and pre-cursors.
      • Leave out formalism/detail (maths, figures, charts) unless you intend to explain the bloody details and give the audience all the time and explanation needed to grasp and digest all pieces of them.

    • How to present it

      • with ENTHUSIASM: it makes people dramatically more receptive
      • Know how the talk fits together
        • The talk must be fresh in your mind (freshen up on the slides the night before, or even wait to write them until then)
        • Writing a talk suffers from Parkinson’s law of triviality – expands to fill all time provided
      • Overcoming presentation jitter / anxiety
        • Script your first few sentences very precisely
        • move about enthusiastically to avoid locking up
      • Pay attention not just to your technology
        • Make literal eye contact with your audience
        • Especially if you can spot someone in the audience who’s nodding. When they stop nodding, consider changing approaches
        • Making eye contact makes you receptive to whether people have questions
        • Speak to someone in the back of the room (under the assumption that your mic isn’t working)
      • Taking questions
        • Encourage questions as you go along
        • Be prepared to truncate your talk as necessary
      • The median for presentation skills is very low
        • If you find yourself at a talk and you can’t focus on the content, focus on the process of the presentation to get ideas of what NOT to do.