Howtogivesuccessfuloralandposterpresentations.doc

How to give
successful
oral and poster
presentations

J.W. Niemantsverdriet

Schuit Institute of Catalysis,
Eindhoven University of Technology
Eindhoven, The Netherlands

See also:

http:// www.efcats.org
How to give a successful oral presentation

develop your own presentation style…
… but try to avoid commonly made mistakes

13

Introduction
How often have you been listening to oral presentations that dealt with interesting science while you nevertheless had difficulty to pay attention till the end? How often did you lose your interest before the speaker had even come halfway? Was it because of the subject of the talk or was it the way the speaker presented it?

Many presentations concern interesting work, but are nevertheless difficult to follow because the speaker unknowingly makes a number of presentation errors. By far the largest mistake is that a speaker does not realize how an audience listens. If you are well aware of what errors you should avoid, the chances are high that you will be able to greatly improve the effectiveness of your presentations.

Figure 1 Typical attention the audience pays to an average presentation

The Attention Curve
The average attendee of a conference is by all means willing to listen to you, but he is also easily distracted. You should realize that only a minor part of the people have come specifically to listen to your talk. The rest is there for a variety of reasons, to wait for the next speaker, or to get a general impression of the field, or whatever.

Figure 1 illustrates how the average audience pays attention during a typical presentation of, let’s say, 30 minutes. Almost everyone listens in the beginning, but halfway the attention may well have dropped to around 10-20% of what it was at the start. At the end, many people start to listen again, particularly if you announce your conclusions, because they hope to take something away from the presentation.

What can you do to catch the audience’s attention for the whole duration of your talk? The attention curve immediately gives a few recipes:
· Almost everyone listens in the beginning. This is THE moment to make clear that you will present work that the audience cannot afford to miss.
· If you want to get your message through, you should state it loud and clear in the beginning, and repeat it at the end.
· The best approach, however, is to divide your presentation in several parts, each ended by an intermediate conclusion, see Figure 2. People in the audience who got distracted can always easily catch up with you, particularly if you outline the structure of your talk in the beginning.

Figure 2 Ideal attention curve of an audience when the speaker divides his talk in recognizable parts, each summarized by intermediate conclusions. If people loose their attention for some reason, they can easily catch up with the speaker in one of his intermediate summaries. The big advantage of this approach is that every important item is said several times. Repeating the essentials is the key to getting your message across

AUDIENCES LOVE BACKGROUND INFORMATION!
You can raise the interest of attendees who are not per definition interested in your subject, by giving them the impression that they will learn something from your talk. Note that this part of the audience is more interested in general aspects than in the details. You certainly need to give them a good introduction into the background of your subject, before they can fully appreciate the subtleties of your work. Hence, you should spend at least some 30% of your time on general themes, e.g. what is known about the catalytic reaction and the catalysts and how it is applied in industry, or perhaps a less known method of research that is more generally applicable, etc. A large part of the audience may find this very useful to know. But what is even more important, with sufficient background information they will understand a lot more about your specific results, i.e. that part of the talk you are most proud of.

Why does an audience get distracted?
There are many reasons why this may happen, some may be outside your control, such as inadequate sound systems, poor overhead projectors, or noisy conference centers with cardboard walls between two sessions running in parallel. What you can do, is avoid anything that may encourage the audience to stop listening. Such mistakes fall in two classes: speaker’s errors and presentation errors. We list a couple of the most common ones, most are self explanatory.
1) The speaker lives in his own little world of research, he believes that all the background information needed to appreciate the meaning of his work is common knowledge. This is seldom the case!
2) The structure of the presentation is unclear, and consequently the line of reasoning is hard to follow. Important matters as problem identification, aims, or motivation are insufficiently clear.
3) Visual aids (transparencies, slides) are inadequate, confusing, unreadable, too small, too crowded, etc. Some speakers show too many in a too short time (one per minute is not bad as a rule of thumb).
4) The speaker uses long, complicated sentences; he uses unnecessary jargon, abbreviations or difficult words. Passive sentences (“From this figure it was deduced that …” or ”It was therefore concluded that ……) are more difficult to follow than active ones (”This figure implies that …” or ”Therefore, we conclude that …” ).
Not too fast, please….!
Many speakers have rehearsed their talk so often that they speak too fast. Others simply have so much to cover, that the only way to stay within the allotted time is to speed up. Of course, this is not in the interest of the audience, particularly not at an international meeting.

… and try to vary your pace
As a rule of thumb, speaking at 150 words per minute is all right. However, try to vary your rate. Key ideas, complicated points, or concluding remarks (you may want to use one at the end of every slide you show) are best presented at a slower pace.

5) Even worse is when the speaker reads his speech from paper and forgets that
a) written language is usually more formal and complicated than language used in everyday conversations, and
b) reading written text goes a lot faster than impromptu speaking.
In such cases the audience will definitely experience information overload. Of course we sympathize with the speaker who feels insufficiently confident in English. However, reading a text is almost always an unsatisfactory solution. And after all, nobody in the audience will blame you for a couple of mistakes in the language, English will be a foreign language for the majority of the participants.
6) Monotonous sentences, spoken either too fast or too slowly, lack of emphasis, unclear pronunciation, all make it difficult for the listeners to stay attentive. Some speakers turn their back to the audience and watch the projection screen while they are talking, in stead of trying to make visual contact with the audience.

How to organize your presentation
You should be aware of fundamental differences between an oral presentation and a written report. In the presentation the listener by necessity has to follow the order in which the speaker presents his material. The reader of an article can skip parts, go back to the materials section, take a preview at the conclusions when he reads the results, etc. Exactly because of this reason, all scientific reports follow the generally adopted structure of Abstract – Introduction – Experimental Methods – Results – Discussion – Conclusions – References. However, this structure is totally UNSUITABLE for an oral presentation. Nevertheless, the majority of contributed talks at a conference adheres to it.
Why is this generally accepted structure unsuitable for lectures? Because the listener will have to remember details about the experimental methods until the results are presented, and he must recall the various results when the speaker deals with the discussion. In other words, details that should be combined (the why, how, what and what does it mean of a particular experiment) are treated separately. You ask a lot from the audience if they need to remember all these facts and figures until at the end you explain how these bits and pieces fit in a larger picture.

Grouping together what belongs together is a much better way to organize your talk. Hence, if you discuss characterization by e.g. XPS, you start this part of the presentation with a few introductory remarks of what you want to learn about your catalyst, how XPS may help you to provide this information, then you show a few results and you discuss what they mean. End with a conclusion. Then you go to the next item in your presentation, which may be determination of particle size by TEM. When finished with this, you may give an overall conclusion on the state of your catalyst before you go on to speak about catalytic behavior.

Figure 3 In an oral presentation you should group together what belongs together.

In Ten Steps To a Successful Presentation

You should realize that the two key issues in the preparation of a talk are:
· The message: What do I want the audience to know when I am finished?
· The audience: How do I present my talk such that the audience will understand and remember what I have to say?

1) Start in time.
Once you submitted the abstract to the conference organizers, it is time to start thinking about how you organize the material in a talk if your abstract will have been accepted. Read about the background of your work, read related work, look at your own results regularly and think about the most relevant conclusions. Try to imagine what type of audience you would have and consider what you would have to include as background information

Example:
“I want to convince the audience that among a class of bimetallic catalysts the combination of Fe-Ir/SiO2 shows the best catalytic performance for CO hydrogenation and that it works because the adsorption energy of carbon monoxide is efficiently diminished with respect to that on the single metals.”

2) The Message
Try to capture the message of your presentation in a single sentence. This is difficult. You will only be able to do this if you really master your subject (which is actually the main requirement for being able to clearly present your work to others).

3) Select Results and Order Them
Use the sentence under 2) as the criterion to select which results to include, in what order, what basic information is needed to appreciate these results, and which experimental details are necessary and which not. Be very critical, any experiment or result that does not contribute to your main message should be left out.

Although it may at first sight seem natural to present your results in the chronological order in which you obtained them, this does not have to be the most ideal order for the audience to understand what you have done. Think about where to discuss highlights, at the beginning? Near the end? Maybe dispersing the remarkable features through the entire talk? It is up to you, but take the order which you feel appeals most to the audience.
The scientific background of your audience determines how much you should explain about experimental approaches, characterization techniques. Be careful NOT to identify your audience with your supervisor, the majority of listeners is unlikely to possess much specific knowledge about your subject. By the way, hardly anyone minds to hear something he already knows, as long as you explain it well, and possibly in an entertaining way.

4) Opening and Introduction
DON’T DO THIS

An often heard, but poor start of a presentation is:

”Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. I am … ... and I’d like to tell you something about my Ph.D. project at the Group of Archaic Chemistry at the University of Science City. The title of my talk is … … .
I will start with an Introduction, then explain the experimental techniques, next present the most important results, and finally I hope to draw a few conclusions and I want to acknowledge a few people. So let us start with the Introduction …”

If you open this way you will find yourself in the company of many others. Nevertheless, this is a totally inefficient way to start a lecture. How would you respond if you were in the audience?

In the opening, i.e. the first few sentences, you catch the attention, for example by a scientific question, or a catchy or maybe even provocative statement. Perhaps you could already give the conclusion of your work too. Try to speak slowly, with emphasis, and look at the audience. Of course, you must have prepared and rehearsed the opening carefully.

However, before you give your opening sentence, it is good to start with “Mister Chairman, Ladies and Gentlemen … ” followed by a few seconds of silence, in which you look around to see if people are paying attention. By doing so, you actually force the audience to listen. With these words you also test the sound system, and you ascertain that your important opening lines are going to be heard.

In the rest of the Introduction, you sketch the background of your research. Remember that many people will be very interested in a concise summary of the status in your area. Hence, reserve sufficient time (i.e. at least 30% of the total time) for the general aspects of your work. It is good practice to not only clearly identify the scientific question you address, but also give the conclusion of your work, if you wish so. In this way you enable the audience to better follow your reasoning and to anticipate on the outcome of the experiments. In other words, you give them a chance to listen actively. Remember that a scientific presentation is not a detective story which is solved in the last moment.

5) Conclusions and Ending
Conclusions should be properly announced to regain full attention. Present your conclusions in relation to the questions you raised in the Introduction. Avoid all irrelevant details. Once you finished the conclusions, you may acknowledge people who helped you (not the coauthors listed in the program) and the Funding Agencies. Then you may end with a final sentence that repeats the message of your talk, for instance: “Ladies and Gentlemen, I hope I have convinced you that XY/Support is a very promising catalyst for converting methane into synthetic gasoline at room temperature.” This is the take-home message that the audience should remember, hopefully in combination with your name and affiliation.

Figure 4 Spreadsheets often produce unsatisfactory figures, particularly with respect to labeling. A good figure has labels on the curves and not in a legend. Secret codes and jargon should be avoided as much as possible

6) Excellent figur