{"id":2369,"date":"2008-03-13T09:17:08","date_gmt":"2008-03-13T09:17:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2008\/03\/13\/tips-for-speakers\/"},"modified":"2008-03-13T09:17:08","modified_gmt":"2008-03-13T09:17:08","slug":"tips-for-speakers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2008\/03\/13\/tips-for-speakers\/","title":{"rendered":"Tips for Speakers"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Over at the new(ish) Of Two Minds, Shelley has posted a <a href=\"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/twominds\/2008\/03\/how_to_give_a_bad_science_pres.php\">video giving advice on scientific presentations<\/a> from a couple of guys at Michigan. They offer a few quick tips to giving better presentations:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Know your material well enough to give it without slides<\/li>\n<li>Skip the outline (for short talks in particular)<\/li>\n<li>Minimize text on slides<\/li>\n<li>Make your figures big and visible<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>The central point is really to put the focus on the data, not the words or slides.<\/p>\n<p>The one specific tip I would add to their list is this: When you put up a graph, you should clearly identify what is being plotted on what axes. The first thing you say should be &#8220;Here we have YYYY on the vertical axis versus XXXX on the horizontal axis,&#8221; so that everybody knows what you&#8217;re showing, without having to squint to read the labels.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>(To be fair, all of these can be taken too far&#8211; I&#8217;m all in favor of skipping outlines for ten-minute talks, but for an hour-long talk where you&#8217;re discussing three different experiments, it helps to have an outline to refer back to. And I think a moderate amount of text (no complete sentences, but markers for the important points) is a good thing&#8211; it&#8217;s a safety line for people in the audience who zoned out for a second, or weren&#8217;t able to hear what you just said over the noise of their neighbor eating potato chips.<\/p>\n<p>(As general advice, though, these tips definitely point people in the right direction.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Over at the new(ish) Of Two Minds, Shelley has posted a video giving advice on scientific presentations from a couple of guys at Michigan. They offer a few quick tips to giving better presentations: Know your material well enough to give it without slides Skip the outline (for short talks in particular) Minimize text on&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2008\/03\/13\/tips-for-speakers\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Tips for Speakers<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,13,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2369","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academia","category-education","category-science","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2369","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2369"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2369\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2369"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2369"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2369"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}