Turn your presentation into a presentAWESOME (...and do it without using horrendous puns)

I have been to a lot of scientific presentations. So many in fact, that I’m scared to try and work out how many – I really don’t want to know how much of my life has been spent staring at Powerpoint. Some have been amazing immersive experiences that have held my rapt attention. Others...not so much.

To try and increase the chances of seeing good presentations, I thought I would jot down some suggestions for anyone preparing their own.

Blue and yellow Trying to read yellow text on a blue background is probably the most unpleasant experience I can imagine. It’s so horrifically hard I really can’t understand why people use it. For this article I did a little research and found that people seem to think the contrast difference makes it more readable. Well it doesn’t…. at least not measurably. Internet standards organisation, The W3 foundation, did a small scale study and it was the least popular of ALL the colour combinations tested…so stop it.

Animations With every version of Powerpoint, animating things gets easier and easier. In fact, I’m pretty sure it’s the only feature that actually improves with each version. As it gets easier, the competence required to animate some things gets lower and lower. The result? Zooming boxes looping across slides in weird spiral paths. Often with star trails.

What I think people are going for is something that highlights their content and makes it more memorable. What they are actually saying is: “Look - it’s like 90s clip art but it moves!” Unless you have a really, really, good reason (e.g. someone kidnapped your cat) keep them small and unobtrusive. You’re presenting research – not directing the latest Pixar movie.

All the content

Okay, I’m sure your research is great. In fact, that’s the entire point of doing a presentation – to tell people how great it is. But stay focused. If you have a 15 minute presentation slot and have 30+ slides, you’ve gone wrong – something that might be obvious from the audience groan when they see your slide count. I have actually heard that happen – 40 minute talk, 30 minutes in, the presenter says: ‘Oh, I better speed up, I’ve still got 40 slides to get through...’ Alternatively, you might feel tempted to put more on each slide – which is going to leave most people craning forward to read it, and then confused when you only give them one minute to read ~200 words of text and three graphs.

You are giving a short presentation, not a lecture on either your life story or a day-by-day account of your research. Pick your core points and stick to them – and only them. Details and background are for follow-up questions.

The backup This is partially a solution to the temptation to have all the content, but also just good planning. While it’s not yet happened to me, I have seen presenters asked some truly evil questions by their audience. In the main, audiences are pretty friendly as they all know what it’s like to stand up there and try to answer complex questions on the drosophila (...this is such a terrible pun that I'm not even explaining it).

But you can prepare by having a number of slides at the end of your presentation filled with additional data. Nothing qwells an awkward questioner quicker than the response: “Well actually, I have another graph for that!”

And finally... Relax, very few people die during public speaking, and only a handful of people are actually laughed off the stage. If you get nervous, just try not thinking about how you’re a bit sweaty and whether people can see, especially that person in the front row who is staring...