CS702 - Advice on giving oral presentations

Useful info from the web:

• How to Give a Bad Talk, by David Patterson (part of Oral presentation advice, by Mark Hill)
• How to give a talk, by Bruce Donald
• How to give a good research talk, by Simon Peyton Jones
• Pointers on giving a talk, by David Messerschmitt
• Gettysburg PowerPoint Presentation (a little bit of fun)

Tips from the CS faculty

1. Practice your talk! Do it out loud, and to someone else if you can find someone willing to listen.
2. Make sure your talk doesn’t run past your allotted time. Time yourself when you practice (you are practicing, right?). A general rule of thumb is approximately one slide a minute, but that is no replacement for timing yourself as you practice.
3. A pure math talk can (should) be given on the blackboard. However, you can cover much less material, and you don’t have much time. One approach is to give a PowerPoint talk and then develop some of the math on the board. Note that giving a good blackboard talk is HARDER than giving a good PowerPoint talk, and requires even MORE practicing.

Using PowerPoint (or Keynote or Impress or Prezi or …)

Good slides allow you to easily supplement your talk with visuals, pull out key points, and give your audience something to focus on. However, bad PowerPoint presentations are exceedingly common. These range from the exceedingly dull or redundant to the distractingly flashy and contentless. here are some thoughts:

1. Use a simple background and high-contrast writing
2. Keep the color scheme simple (I’ve seen a red text on blue background presentation – it was physically painful)
3. Use large font sizes. Most tools will automatically shrink your text to fit – be very wary of that
4. Avoid animations that serve no purpose
5. Use illustrations instead of text as much as possible, but don’t use meaningless illustrations (e.g., clip art)
6. Don’t use full sentences, and don’t read your slides in your talk
   • either say more than what is on the slide (use the slide to list big points or keywords)
   • or put more text than you will say and expect your audience to read it
7. Have an outline and a conclusion slide
8. To get math equations onto your slides, you can use the equation editor or a tool like Latexit to build your equations
9. Start with an outline of what you want to say and create slides that support you in getting across your points. If you could easily give your talk without the slides or someone else could easily give your talk with your slides, you don’t have the balance between the two right.
10. Practice your talk!