presentation skills research paper

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• CAREER GUIDE
• 12 May 2021

Good presentation skills benefit careers — and science

• David Rubenson 0

David Rubenson is the director of the scientific-communications firm No Bad Slides ( nobadslides.com ) in Los Angeles, California.

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A better presentation culture can save the audience and the larger scientific world valuable time and effort. Credit: Shutterstock

In my experience as a presentation coach for biomedical researchers, I have heard many complaints about talks they attend: too much detail, too many opaque visuals, too many slides, too rushed for questions and so on. Given the time scientists spend attending presentations, both in the pandemic’s virtual world and in the ‘face-to-face’ one, addressing these complaints would seem to be an important challenge.

I’m dispirited that being trained in presentation skills, or at least taking more time to prepare presentations, is often not a high priority for researchers or academic departments. Many scientists feel that time spent improving presentations detracts from research or clocking up the numbers that directly affect career advancement — such as articles published and the amount of grant funding secured. Add in the pressing, and sometimes overwhelming, bureaucratic burdens associated with working at a major biomedical research institute, and scientists can simply be too busy to think about changing the status quo.

Improving presentations can indeed be time-consuming. But there are compelling reasons for researchers to put this near the top of their to-do list.

You’re probably not as good a presenter as you think you are

Many scientists see problems in colleagues’ presentations, but not their own. Having given many lousy presentations, I know that it is all too easy to receive (and accept) plaudits; audiences want to be polite. However, this makes it difficult to get an accurate assessment of how well you have communicated your message.

Why your scientific presentation should not be adapted from a journal article

With few exceptions, biomedical research presentations are less effective than the speaker would believe. And with few exceptions, researchers have little appreciation of what makes for a good presentation. Formal training in presentation techniques (see ‘What do scientists need to learn?’) would help to alleviate these problems.

Improving a presentation can help you think about your own research

A well-designed presentation is not a ‘data dump’ or an exercise in advanced PowerPoint techniques. It is a coherent argument that can be understood by scientists in related fields. Designing a good presentation forces a researcher to step back from laboratory procedures and organize data into themes; it’s an effective way to consider your research in its entirety.

You might get insights from the audience

Overly detailed presentations typically fill a speaker’s time slot, leaving little opportunity for the audience to ask questions. A comprehensible and focused presentation should elicit probing questions and allow audience members to suggest how their tools and methods might apply to the speaker’s research question.

Many have suggested that multidisciplinary collaborations, such as with engineers and physical scientists, are essential for solving complex problems in biomedicine. Such innovative partnerships will emerge only if research is communicated clearly to a broad range of potential collaborators.

It might improve your grant writing

Many grant applications suffer from the same problem as scientific presentations — too much detail and a lack of clearly articulated themes. A well-designed presentation can be a great way to structure a compelling grant application: by working on one, you’re often able to improve the other.

It might help you speak to important, ‘less-expert’ audiences

As their career advances, it is not uncommon for scientists to increasingly have to address audiences outside their speciality. These might include department heads, deans, philanthropic foundations, individual donors, patient groups and the media. Communicating effectively with scientific colleagues is a prerequisite for reaching these audiences.

Collection: Conferences

Better presentations mean better science

An individual might not want to spend 5 hours improving their hour-long presentation, but 50 audience members might collectively waste 50 hours listening to that individual’s mediocre effort. This disparity shows that individual incentives aren’t always aligned with society’s scientific goals. An effective presentation can enhance the research and critical-thinking skills of the audience, in addition to what it does for the speaker.

What do scientists need to learn?

Formal training in scientific presentation techniques should differ significantly from programmes that stress the nuances of public speaking.

The first priority should be to master basic presentation concepts, including:

• How to build a concise scientific narrative.

• Understanding the limitations of slides and presentations.

• Understanding the audience’s time and attention-span limitations .

• Building a complementary, rather than repetitive, relationship between what the speaker says and what their slides show.

The training should then move to proper slide design, including:

• The need for each slide to have an overarching message.

• Using slide titles to help convey that message.

• Labelling graphs legibly.

• Deleting superfluous data and other information.

• Reducing those 100-word text slides to 40 words (or even less) without losing content.

• Using colour to highlight categories of information, rather than for decoration.

• Avoiding formats that have no visual message, such as data tables.

A well-crafted presentation with clearly drawn slides can turn even timid public speakers into effective science communicators.

Scientific leaders have a responsibility to provide formal training and to change incentives so that researchers spend more time improving presentations.

A dynamic presentation culture, in which every presentation is understood, fairly critiqued and useful for its audience, can only be good for science.

Nature 594 , S51-S52 (2021)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-021-01281-8

This is an article from the Nature Careers Community, a place for Nature readers to share their professional experiences and advice. Guest posts are encouraged .

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Article Contents

Body language and movement, verbal delivery.

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Effective presentation skills

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Robert Dolan, Effective presentation skills, FEMS Microbiology Letters , Volume 364, Issue 24, December 2017, fnx235, https://doi.org/10.1093/femsle/fnx235

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Most PhD's will have a presentation component during the interview process, as well as presenting their work at conferences. This article will provide guidance on how to develop relevant content and effectively deliver it to your audience.

Most organizations list communication skills as one of their most critical issues…and presentation skills are a large component of communications. Presentation skills are crucial to almost every aspect of academic/business life, from meetings, interviews and conferences to trade shows and job fairs. Often times, leadership and presentation skills go hand in hand. NACE Survey 2016 - Ability to communicate verbally (internally and externally) ranked 4.63/5.0 and was the #1 skill employers want. The information provided in this article is designed to provide tips and strategies for delivering an effective presentation, and one that aligns the speaker with the audience.

What type of speaker are you?

Facts and fears of public speaking.

Your blueprint for delivery.

Avoider —You do everything possible to escape from having to get in front of an audience.

Resister —You may have to speak, but you never encourage it.

Accepter —You’ll give presentations but don’t seek those opportunities. Sometimes you feel good about a presentation you gave.

Seeker —Looks for opportunities to speak. Finds the anxiety a stimulant that fuels enthusiasm during a presentation.

Public speaking can create anxiety and fear in many people. Dale Carnegie has a free e-book that provides tips and advice on how to minimize these fears www.dalecarnegie.com/Free-eBook

People are caught between their fear and the fact that many employers expect them to demonstrate good verbal communication skills.

Most interviews by PhD’s have a presentation component.

Academic interviews always have a presentation component.

If your job doesn’t demand presentation skills, odds are that you’ll need them in your next job

Develop your blueprint for delivery:

Information by itself can be boring, unless it's unique or unusual. Conveying it through stories, gestures and analogies make it interesting. A large portion of the impact of communications rests on how you look and sound, not only on what you say. Having good presentation skills allows you to make the most out of your first impression, especially at conferences and job interviews. As you plan your presentation put yourself in the shoes of the audience.

Values …What is important to them?

Needs …What information do they want?

Constraints …Understand their level of knowledge on the subject and target them appropriately.

Demographics …Size of audience and location may influence the presentation. For example, a large auditorium may be more formal and less personal than a presentation to your team or lab mates in a less formal setting.

Structure—Introduction, Content and Conclusion

Body Language and Movement

Verbal Delivery

Introduction

Build rapport with audience (easier in a smaller less formal setting).

State preference for questions—during or after?

Set stage: provide agenda, objective and intended outcomes

Introduce yourself providing your name, role and function. Let the audience know the agenda, your objectives and set their expectations. Give them a reason to listen and make an explicit benefit statement, essentially what's in it for them. Finally, let them know how you will accomplish your objective by setting the agenda and providing an outline of what will be covered.

Deliver your message logically and structured.

Use appropriate anecdotes and examples.

Illustrate and emphasize key points by using color schemes or animations.

Establish credibility, possibly citing references or publications.

Structure your presentation to maximize delivery. Deliver the main idea and communicate to the audience what your intended outcome will be. Transition well through the subject matter and move through your presentation by using phrases such as; ‘now we will review…’ or ‘if there are no more questions, we will now move onto…’ Be flexible and on course. If needed, use examples not in the presentation to emphasize a point, but don’t get side tracked. Stay on course by using phrases such as ‘let's get back to…’ Occasionally, reiterate the benefits of the content and the main idea of your presentation.

Restate the main objective and key supporting points

For Q&A: ‘Who wants more details?’ (Not, ‘any questions?’)

Prompting for questions: ‘A question I often hear is…’

Summarize the main elements of your presentation as they relate to the original objective. If applicable, highlight a key point or crucial element for the audience to take away. Signal the end is near…‘to wrap up’ or ‘to sum up’. Clearly articulate the next steps, actions or practical recommendations. Thank the audience and solicit final questions.

Your non-verbal communications are key elements of your presentation. They are composed of open body posture, eye contact, facial expressions, hand gestures, posture and space between you and the audience.

Stand firmly and move deliberately. Do not sway or shift.

Move at appropriate times during presentation (e.g. move during transitions or to emphasize a point).

Stand where you can see everyone and do not block the visuals/screen.

Decide on a resting position for hands (should feel and look comfortable).

Gestures should be natural and follow what you are saying.

Hand movement can emphasize your point.

Make gestures strong and crisp…ok to use both arms/hands.

Keep hands away from face.

When pointing to the screen, do so deliberately. Do not wave and face the audience to speak

Look at audience's faces, not above their heads.

If an interview or business meeting…look at the decision makers as well as everyone else.

Look at faces for 3–5 seconds and then move on to the next person.

Do not look away from the audience for more than 10 seconds.

Looking at a person keeps them engaged.

Looking at their faces tells you how your delivery and topic is being received by the audience. The audience's body language may show interest, acceptance, openness, boredom, hostility, disapproval and neutrality. Read the audience and adjust where and if appropriate to keep them engaged. For example, if they seem bored inject an interesting anecdote or story to trigger more interest. If they appear to disapprove, ask for questions or comments to better understand how you might adjust your delivery and content if applicable.

Use active rather than passive verbs.

Avoid technical terms, unless you know the audience is familiar with them.

Always use your own words and phrases.

Cut out jargon/slang words.

Look at your audience and use vocal techniques to catch their attention. Consider changing your pace or volume, use a longer than normal pause between key points, and change the pitch or inflection of your voice if needed. Consider taking a drink of water to force yourself to pause or slowdown. View the audience as a group of individual people, so address them as if they were a single person.

Tips for reducing anxiety

If you experience nervousness before your presentation, as most people do, consider the following.

Be Organized —Knowing that your presentation and thoughts are well organized will give you confidence.

Visualize —Imagine delivering your presentation with enthusiasm and leaving the room knowing that you did a good job.

Practice —All successful speakers rehearse their presentations. Either do it alone, with your team, or video tape yourself and review your performance after. Another tip is to make contact before your talk. If possible, speak with the audience before your presentation begins; however, not always possible with a large audience. Walk up to them and thank them in advance for inviting you to speak today.

Movement —Speakers who stand in one spot may experience tension. In order to relax, move in a purposeful manner and use upper body gestures to make points.

Eye Contact —Make your presentation a one-on-one conversation. Build rapport by making it personal and personable. Use words such as ‘ we ’ , ‘ our ’, ‘ us ’ . Eye contact helps you relax because you become less isolated from the audience.

Personal appearance

Clothes should fit well, not too tight. Consider wearing more professional business-like attire. Find two to three colors that work well for you. Conservative colors, such as black, blue, gray and brown, seem to be the safest bet when presenting or meeting someone for the first time in a professional setting. Depending upon the audience, a sport coat and well-matched dress slacks are fine. Generally, try to avoid bright reds, oranges and whites, since these tend to draw attention away from your face. Avoid jewelry that sparkles, dangles or makes noise. Use subtle accessories to compliment your outfit.

Other resources: www.toastmasters.org https://www.skillsyouneed.com/present/presentation-tips.html

https://www.ag.ndsu.edu/evaluation/documents/effective-presentations-a-toolkit-for-engaging-an-audience

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Princeton Correspondents on Undergraduate Research

How to Make a Successful Research Presentation

Turning a research paper into a visual presentation is difficult; there are pitfalls, and navigating the path to a brief, informative presentation takes time and practice. As a TA for  GEO/WRI 201: Methods in Data Analysis & Scientific Writing this past fall, I saw how this process works from an instructor’s standpoint. I’ve presented my own research before, but helping others present theirs taught me a bit more about the process. Here are some tips I learned that may help you with your next research presentation:

More is more

In general, your presentation will always benefit from more practice, more feedback, and more revision. By practicing in front of friends, you can get comfortable with presenting your work while receiving feedback. It is hard to know how to revise your presentation if you never practice. If you are presenting to a general audience, getting feedback from someone outside of your discipline is crucial. Terms and ideas that seem intuitive to you may be completely foreign to someone else, and your well-crafted presentation could fall flat.

Less is more

Limit the scope of your presentation, the number of slides, and the text on each slide. In my experience, text works well for organizing slides, orienting the audience to key terms, and annotating important figures–not for explaining complex ideas. Having fewer slides is usually better as well. In general, about one slide per minute of presentation is an appropriate budget. Too many slides is usually a sign that your topic is too broad.

Limit the scope of your presentation

Don’t present your paper. Presentations are usually around 10 min long. You will not have time to explain all of the research you did in a semester (or a year!) in such a short span of time. Instead, focus on the highlight(s). Identify a single compelling research question which your work addressed, and craft a succinct but complete narrative around it.

You will not have time to explain all of the research you did. Instead, focus on the highlights. Identify a single compelling research question which your work addressed, and craft a succinct but complete narrative around it.

Craft a compelling research narrative

After identifying the focused research question, walk your audience through your research as if it were a story. Presentations with strong narrative arcs are clear, captivating, and compelling.

• Introduction (exposition — rising action)

Orient the audience and draw them in by demonstrating the relevance and importance of your research story with strong global motive. Provide them with the necessary vocabulary and background knowledge to understand the plot of your story. Introduce the key studies (characters) relevant in your story and build tension and conflict with scholarly and data motive. By the end of your introduction, your audience should clearly understand your research question and be dying to know how you resolve the tension built through motive.

• Methods (rising action)

The methods section should transition smoothly and logically from the introduction. Beware of presenting your methods in a boring, arc-killing, ‘this is what I did.’ Focus on the details that set your story apart from the stories other people have already told. Keep the audience interested by clearly motivating your decisions based on your original research question or the tension built in your introduction.

• Results (climax)

Less is usually more here. Only present results which are clearly related to the focused research question you are presenting. Make sure you explain the results clearly so that your audience understands what your research found. This is the peak of tension in your narrative arc, so don’t undercut it by quickly clicking through to your discussion.

• Discussion (falling action)

By now your audience should be dying for a satisfying resolution. Here is where you contextualize your results and begin resolving the tension between past research. Be thorough. If you have too many conflicts left unresolved, or you don’t have enough time to present all of the resolutions, you probably need to further narrow the scope of your presentation.

• Conclusion (denouement)

Return back to your initial research question and motive, resolving any final conflicts and tying up loose ends. Leave the audience with a clear resolution of your focus research question, and use unresolved tension to set up potential sequels (i.e. further research).

Use your medium to enhance the narrative

Visual presentations should be dominated by clear, intentional graphics. Subtle animation in key moments (usually during the results or discussion) can add drama to the narrative arc and make conflict resolutions more satisfying. You are narrating a story written in images, videos, cartoons, and graphs. While your paper is mostly text, with graphics to highlight crucial points, your slides should be the opposite. Adapting to the new medium may require you to create or acquire far more graphics than you included in your paper, but it is necessary to create an engaging presentation.

The most important thing you can do for your presentation is to practice and revise. Bother your friends, your roommates, TAs–anybody who will sit down and listen to your work. Beyond that, think about presentations you have found compelling and try to incorporate some of those elements into your own. Remember you want your work to be comprehensible; you aren’t creating experts in 10 minutes. Above all, try to stay passionate about what you did and why. You put the time in, so show your audience that it’s worth it.

For more insight into research presentations, check out these past PCUR posts written by Emma and Ellie .

— Alec Getraer, Natural Sciences Correspondent

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Open Access

Ten simple rules for effective presentation slides

* E-mail: [email protected]

Affiliation Biomedical Engineering and the Center for Public Health Genomics, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia, United States of America

• Kristen M. Naegle

Published: December 2, 2021

• https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1009554
• Reader Comments

Citation: Naegle KM (2021) Ten simple rules for effective presentation slides. PLoS Comput Biol 17(12): e1009554. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1009554

Copyright: © 2021 Kristen M. Naegle. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Funding: The author received no specific funding for this work.

Competing interests: The author has declared no competing interests exist.

Introduction

The “presentation slide” is the building block of all academic presentations, whether they are journal clubs, thesis committee meetings, short conference talks, or hour-long seminars. A slide is a single page projected on a screen, usually built on the premise of a title, body, and figures or tables and includes both what is shown and what is spoken about that slide. Multiple slides are strung together to tell the larger story of the presentation. While there have been excellent 10 simple rules on giving entire presentations [ 1 , 2 ], there was an absence in the fine details of how to design a slide for optimal effect—such as the design elements that allow slides to convey meaningful information, to keep the audience engaged and informed, and to deliver the information intended and in the time frame allowed. As all research presentations seek to teach, effective slide design borrows from the same principles as effective teaching, including the consideration of cognitive processing your audience is relying on to organize, process, and retain information. This is written for anyone who needs to prepare slides from any length scale and for most purposes of conveying research to broad audiences. The rules are broken into 3 primary areas. Rules 1 to 5 are about optimizing the scope of each slide. Rules 6 to 8 are about principles around designing elements of the slide. Rules 9 to 10 are about preparing for your presentation, with the slides as the central focus of that preparation.

Rule 1: Include only one idea per slide

Each slide should have one central objective to deliver—the main idea or question [ 3 – 5 ]. Often, this means breaking complex ideas down into manageable pieces (see Fig 1 , where “background” information has been split into 2 key concepts). In another example, if you are presenting a complex computational approach in a large flow diagram, introduce it in smaller units, building it up until you finish with the entire diagram. The progressive buildup of complex information means that audiences are prepared to understand the whole picture, once you have dedicated time to each of the parts. You can accomplish the buildup of components in several ways—for example, using presentation software to cover/uncover information. Personally, I choose to create separate slides for each piece of information content I introduce—where the final slide has the entire diagram, and I use cropping or a cover on duplicated slides that come before to hide what I’m not yet ready to include. I use this method in order to ensure that each slide in my deck truly presents one specific idea (the new content) and the amount of the new information on that slide can be described in 1 minute (Rule 2), but it comes with the trade-off—a change to the format of one of the slides in the series often means changes to all slides.

• PPT PowerPoint slide
• PNG larger image
• TIFF original image

Top left: A background slide that describes the background material on a project from my lab. The slide was created using a PowerPoint Design Template, which had to be modified to increase default text sizes for this figure (i.e., the default text sizes are even worse than shown here). Bottom row: The 2 new slides that break up the content into 2 explicit ideas about the background, using a central graphic. In the first slide, the graphic is an explicit example of the SH2 domain of PI3-kinase interacting with a phosphorylation site (Y754) on the PDGFR to describe the important details of what an SH2 domain and phosphotyrosine ligand are and how they interact. I use that same graphic in the second slide to generalize all binding events and include redundant text to drive home the central message (a lot of possible interactions might occur in the human proteome, more than we can currently measure). Top right highlights which rules were used to move from the original slide to the new slide. Specific changes as highlighted by Rule 7 include increasing contrast by changing the background color, increasing font size, changing to sans serif fonts, and removing all capital text and underlining (using bold to draw attention). PDGFR, platelet-derived growth factor receptor.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1009554.g001

Rule 2: Spend only 1 minute per slide

When you present your slide in the talk, it should take 1 minute or less to discuss. This rule is really helpful for planning purposes—a 20-minute presentation should have somewhere around 20 slides. Also, frequently giving your audience new information to feast on helps keep them engaged. During practice, if you find yourself spending more than a minute on a slide, there’s too much for that one slide—it’s time to break up the content into multiple slides or even remove information that is not wholly central to the story you are trying to tell. Reduce, reduce, reduce, until you get to a single message, clearly described, which takes less than 1 minute to present.

Rule 3: Make use of your heading

When each slide conveys only one message, use the heading of that slide to write exactly the message you are trying to deliver. Instead of titling the slide “Results,” try “CTNND1 is central to metastasis” or “False-positive rates are highly sample specific.” Use this landmark signpost to ensure that all the content on that slide is related exactly to the heading and only the heading. Think of the slide heading as the introductory or concluding sentence of a paragraph and the slide content the rest of the paragraph that supports the main point of the paragraph. An audience member should be able to follow along with you in the “paragraph” and come to the same conclusion sentence as your header at the end of the slide.

Rule 4: Include only essential points

While you are speaking, audience members’ eyes and minds will be wandering over your slide. If you have a comment, detail, or figure on a slide, have a plan to explicitly identify and talk about it. If you don’t think it’s important enough to spend time on, then don’t have it on your slide. This is especially important when faculty are present. I often tell students that thesis committee members are like cats: If you put a shiny bauble in front of them, they’ll go after it. Be sure to only put the shiny baubles on slides that you want them to focus on. Putting together a thesis meeting for only faculty is really an exercise in herding cats (if you have cats, you know this is no easy feat). Clear and concise slide design will go a long way in helping you corral those easily distracted faculty members.

Rule 5: Give credit, where credit is due

An exception to Rule 4 is to include proper citations or references to work on your slide. When adding citations, names of other researchers, or other types of credit, use a consistent style and method for adding this information to your slides. Your audience will then be able to easily partition this information from the other content. A common mistake people make is to think “I’ll add that reference later,” but I highly recommend you put the proper reference on the slide at the time you make it, before you forget where it came from. Finally, in certain kinds of presentations, credits can make it clear who did the work. For the faculty members heading labs, it is an effective way to connect your audience with the personnel in the lab who did the work, which is a great career booster for that person. For graduate students, it is an effective way to delineate your contribution to the work, especially in meetings where the goal is to establish your credentials for meeting the rigors of a PhD checkpoint.

Rule 6: Use graphics effectively

As a rule, you should almost never have slides that only contain text. Build your slides around good visualizations. It is a visual presentation after all, and as they say, a picture is worth a thousand words. However, on the flip side, don’t muddy the point of the slide by putting too many complex graphics on a single slide. A multipanel figure that you might include in a manuscript should often be broken into 1 panel per slide (see Rule 1 ). One way to ensure that you use the graphics effectively is to make a point to introduce the figure and its elements to the audience verbally, especially for data figures. For example, you might say the following: “This graph here shows the measured false-positive rate for an experiment and each point is a replicate of the experiment, the graph demonstrates …” If you have put too much on one slide to present in 1 minute (see Rule 2 ), then the complexity or number of the visualizations is too much for just one slide.

Rule 7: Design to avoid cognitive overload

The type of slide elements, the number of them, and how you present them all impact the ability for the audience to intake, organize, and remember the content. For example, a frequent mistake in slide design is to include full sentences, but reading and verbal processing use the same cognitive channels—therefore, an audience member can either read the slide, listen to you, or do some part of both (each poorly), as a result of cognitive overload [ 4 ]. The visual channel is separate, allowing images/videos to be processed with auditory information without cognitive overload [ 6 ] (Rule 6). As presentations are an exercise in listening, and not reading, do what you can to optimize the ability of the audience to listen. Use words sparingly as “guide posts” to you and the audience about major points of the slide. In fact, you can add short text fragments, redundant with the verbal component of the presentation, which has been shown to improve retention [ 7 ] (see Fig 1 for an example of redundant text that avoids cognitive overload). Be careful in the selection of a slide template to minimize accidentally adding elements that the audience must process, but are unimportant. David JP Phillips argues (and effectively demonstrates in his TEDx talk [ 5 ]) that the human brain can easily interpret 6 elements and more than that requires a 500% increase in human cognition load—so keep the total number of elements on the slide to 6 or less. Finally, in addition to the use of short text, white space, and the effective use of graphics/images, you can improve ease of cognitive processing further by considering color choices and font type and size. Here are a few suggestions for improving the experience for your audience, highlighting the importance of these elements for some specific groups:

• Use high contrast colors and simple backgrounds with low to no color—for persons with dyslexia or visual impairment.
• Use sans serif fonts and large font sizes (including figure legends), avoid italics, underlining (use bold font instead for emphasis), and all capital letters—for persons with dyslexia or visual impairment [ 8 ].
• Use color combinations and palettes that can be understood by those with different forms of color blindness [ 9 ]. There are excellent tools available to identify colors to use and ways to simulate your presentation or figures as they might be seen by a person with color blindness (easily found by a web search).
• In this increasing world of virtual presentation tools, consider practicing your talk with a closed captioning system capture your words. Use this to identify how to improve your speaking pace, volume, and annunciation to improve understanding by all members of your audience, but especially those with a hearing impairment.

Rule 8: Design the slide so that a distracted person gets the main takeaway

It is very difficult to stay focused on a presentation, especially if it is long or if it is part of a longer series of talks at a conference. Audience members may get distracted by an important email, or they may start dreaming of lunch. So, it’s important to look at your slide and ask “If they heard nothing I said, will they understand the key concept of this slide?” The other rules are set up to help with this, including clarity of the single point of the slide (Rule 1), titling it with a major conclusion (Rule 3), and the use of figures (Rule 6) and short text redundant to your verbal description (Rule 7). However, with each slide, step back and ask whether its main conclusion is conveyed, even if someone didn’t hear your accompanying dialog. Importantly, ask if the information on the slide is at the right level of abstraction. For example, do you have too many details about the experiment, which hides the conclusion of the experiment (i.e., breaking Rule 1)? If you are worried about not having enough details, keep a slide at the end of your slide deck (after your conclusions and acknowledgments) with the more detailed information that you can refer to during a question and answer period.

Rule 9: Iteratively improve slide design through practice

Well-designed slides that follow the first 8 rules are intended to help you deliver the message you intend and in the amount of time you intend to deliver it in. The best way to ensure that you nailed slide design for your presentation is to practice, typically a lot. The most important aspects of practicing a new presentation, with an eye toward slide design, are the following 2 key points: (1) practice to ensure that you hit, each time through, the most important points (for example, the text guide posts you left yourself and the title of the slide); and (2) practice to ensure that as you conclude the end of one slide, it leads directly to the next slide. Slide transitions, what you say as you end one slide and begin the next, are important to keeping the flow of the “story.” Practice is when I discover that the order of my presentation is poor or that I left myself too few guideposts to remember what was coming next. Additionally, during practice, the most frequent things I have to improve relate to Rule 2 (the slide takes too long to present, usually because I broke Rule 1, and I’m delivering too much information for one slide), Rule 4 (I have a nonessential detail on the slide), and Rule 5 (I forgot to give a key reference). The very best type of practice is in front of an audience (for example, your lab or peers), where, with fresh perspectives, they can help you identify places for improving slide content, design, and connections across the entirety of your talk.

Rule 10: Design to mitigate the impact of technical disasters

The real presentation almost never goes as we planned in our heads or during our practice. Maybe the speaker before you went over time and now you need to adjust. Maybe the computer the organizer is having you use won’t show your video. Maybe your internet is poor on the day you are giving a virtual presentation at a conference. Technical problems are routinely part of the practice of sharing your work through presentations. Hence, you can design your slides to limit the impact certain kinds of technical disasters create and also prepare alternate approaches. Here are just a few examples of the preparation you can do that will take you a long way toward avoiding a complete fiasco:

• Save your presentation as a PDF—if the version of Keynote or PowerPoint on a host computer cause issues, you still have a functional copy that has a higher guarantee of compatibility.
• In using videos, create a backup slide with screen shots of key results. For example, if I have a video of cell migration, I’ll be sure to have a copy of the start and end of the video, in case the video doesn’t play. Even if the video worked, you can pause on this backup slide and take the time to highlight the key results in words if someone could not see or understand the video.
• Avoid animations, such as figures or text that flash/fly-in/etc. Surveys suggest that no one likes movement in presentations [ 3 , 4 ]. There is likely a cognitive underpinning to the almost universal distaste of pointless animations that relates to the idea proposed by Kosslyn and colleagues that animations are salient perceptual units that captures direct attention [ 4 ]. Although perceptual salience can be used to draw attention to and improve retention of specific points, if you use this approach for unnecessary/unimportant things (like animation of your bullet point text, fly-ins of figures, etc.), then you will distract your audience from the important content. Finally, animations cause additional processing burdens for people with visual impairments [ 10 ] and create opportunities for technical disasters if the software on the host system is not compatible with your planned animation.

Conclusions

These rules are just a start in creating more engaging presentations that increase audience retention of your material. However, there are wonderful resources on continuing on the journey of becoming an amazing public speaker, which includes understanding the psychology and neuroscience behind human perception and learning. For example, as highlighted in Rule 7, David JP Phillips has a wonderful TEDx talk on the subject [ 5 ], and “PowerPoint presentation flaws and failures: A psychological analysis,” by Kosslyn and colleagues is deeply detailed about a number of aspects of human cognition and presentation style [ 4 ]. There are many books on the topic, including the popular “Presentation Zen” by Garr Reynolds [ 11 ]. Finally, although briefly touched on here, the visualization of data is an entire topic of its own that is worth perfecting for both written and oral presentations of work, with fantastic resources like Edward Tufte’s “The Visual Display of Quantitative Information” [ 12 ] or the article “Visualization of Biomedical Data” by O’Donoghue and colleagues [ 13 ].

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the countless presenters, colleagues, students, and mentors from which I have learned a great deal from on effective presentations. Also, a thank you to the wonderful resources published by organizations on how to increase inclusivity. A special thanks to Dr. Jason Papin and Dr. Michael Guertin on early feedback of this editorial.

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• 9. Cravit R. How to Use Color Blind Friendly Palettes to Make Your Charts Accessible. 2019. Available from: https://venngage.com/blog/color-blind-friendly-palette/ .
• 10. Making your conference presentation more accessible to blind and partially sighted people. n.d. Available from: https://vocaleyes.co.uk/services/resources/guidelines-for-making-your-conference-presentation-more-accessible-to-blind-and-partially-sighted-people/ .
• 11. Reynolds G. Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery. 2nd ed. New Riders Pub; 2011.
• 12. Tufte ER. The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. 2nd ed. Graphics Press; 2001.

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• v.12(1); Fall 2013

Engaging the Audience: Developing Presentation Skills in Science Students

This article describes a graduate class in presentation skills (“PClass”) as a model for how a class with similar objectives, expectations and culture might be mounted for undergraduates. The required class is given for students in neuroscience and physiology programs at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; I describe the class in the years I led it, from 2003–2012. The class structure centered on peer rehearsal, critiquing of PowerPoint, and chalk talks by the students; video-recording of student talks for later review by the student with the instructor; and presentation of polished talks in a formal setting. A different faculty visitor to the class each week gave the students a variety of perspectives. The students also gained insight into their own evolving skills by discussing the strengths and weaknesses of seminars given by visitors to the campus. A unique feature of the class was collaboration with a professional actor from the University’s Department of Dramatic Arts, who helped the students develop techniques for keeping the attention of an audience, for speaking with confidence, and for controlling nervousness. The undergraduate campus would be expected to lend itself to this sort of interdisciplinary faculty cooperation. In addition, students worked on becoming adept at designing and presenting posters, introducing speakers graciously and taking charge of the speaker’s question session, and speaking to a lay audience.

INTRODUCTION

In any university such as The University of North Carolina, in any given week, there are perhaps a dozen or more seminars on scientific topics. The seminar is an important part of the scientific research enterprise: the speaker typically delivers a broad, up-to-date overview of a topic, followed by new, unpublished, hot-off-the-press data. Researchers keep up with one another and students glimpse possible mentors for their future as postdocs.

Unfortunately, for too many of these seminars the audience will have lost the thread early on. Indeed, an amusing but pathetically accurate graph of audience attention versus time in a scientific talk shows audience attention falling over the first 20 minutes of the seminar, never to recover until the summary at the seminar’s end (see Kenney, 1982 ). For any seminar in which the audience’s interest has clearly been lost, a quick assessment of the number of faculty, postdocs and students present, who are politely waiting for the end, gives a sense of the lost productivity.

Numerous books and articles proffer advice on how to communicate scientific results in a way that will keep, rather than lose, audience attention (e.g., Kenney, 1982 ; Noonan, 1999 ; Alley, 2003 ; Anholt, 2005 ). Yet books do not seem to have solved the problem and it persists. An excellent iBio seminar by Susan McConnell, a Stanford neuroscientist ( http://www.ibioseminars.org/lectures/bio-techniques/susan-mcconnell.html ) attempts to educate speakers through a presentation – on presentations. She points out that many of the issues are actually well known: PowerPoint slides have driven speakers to speak much too quickly for the audience to follow; speakers want to show that their lab is productive and exciting so they cram all of the lab’s projects into their hour (which used to be 50 minutes), leaving the audience bored or exhausted; speakers do not take the time to design truly effective slides. Many speakers would seem to have no clue as to their effectiveness.

And no wonder: the training in audience engagement is not part of the typical education of a scientist. The rare speakers who can truly hold an audience in the palm of their hand have usually learned their skills through having been mentored at some point and then by rehearsing their talks, often with colleagues. They have taken the time to fashion an elegant set of slides rather than simply throwing together a talk from a series of figures imported from their own manuscripts or from the literature.

The irony is that so many scientific seminars (and indeed so many science classes) are so boring when the subjects are so inherently exciting! The scientists giving the talks find their work so compelling that they are willing to work for lower salaries than in other professions, and often to stay in the lab until the wee hours getting the data! Why the boring talks? The answer must lie in part in human nature – in the discrepancy between the world of the non-threatening lab, where thinking, observing and discussing predominate, and that of the stage, where the command of an audience is essentially a performing art. But being able to communicate what one is discovering in the lab inescapably means becoming as skilled in that art as in the technique of thinking through a problem.

Why don’t we make it a priority to give our science students skills in speaking, in exciting an audience, from the earliest point in their trajectory – as undergraduates? The rest of this article describes the efforts of myself and my colleagues to change this culture with a serious, intense class in presentation skills to graduate students, the “Presentation Class” (fondly called “PClass” by the students). We were convinced that our future scientists must be empowered to bring science alive for any audience they might have to address – for the specialists they would encounter at a meeting where they would be judged as they entered the profession, for the broad audience at their job talk when their future would be on the line, and especially for the lay audience, where the understanding of science by the electorate is of great importance. We wanted them to be able to communicate the excitement of research, and what it entails, to the stranger sitting beside them in a chance encounter, or to a life-long learning class at an institution, or to a TV or radio audience they might be selected to address. While this class was for graduate students, we argue that its fundamental approaches could and should be adapted to the undergraduate experience.

THE ORIGIN OF THE PCLASS IDEA: THE HARVARD NEUROBIOLOGY DEPARTMENT OF THE 1960s

The PClass had its roots in the culture of the Neurobiology Department at Harvard Medical School, the first department of its kind. Founded in 1966 by Steve Kuffler ( McMahan, 1990 ), an exceptional and perspicacious neurophysiologist, the department brought together those anatomists, biochemists and electrophysiologists whose interests focused on the nervous system – an early and highly successful multidisciplinary experiment.

Three members of the faculty in particular – Ed Furshpan, David Potter, and Ed Kravitz – initiated a culture of high expectations for departmental talks through their own example. Furshpan and Potter, and then Kravitz when he joined the department, had retreated to the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) in Woods Hole to prepare their lectures for medical students on the new and exciting field of neurobiology. They rehearsed one another until the lectures were outstanding, learning each lecture so that it could be delivered without notes. Their efforts initiated a culture. If you were a member of the Neurobiology Department – faculty, postdoc or student – you were expected to plan your slides and blackboard drawings carefully, rehearse your lecture or seminar talk, and speak from memory. Many of the offspring of the department soon developed reputations as terrific speakers. They knew how to do it through rehearsals, collegial critiquing, and simply investing time.

Many of us who were privileged to be immersed in this culture attempted to take it with us when we left. It was not an easy job. In academic settings other than that of Harvard Neurobiology, rehearsing was often viewed as a waste of time of the speaker and the listener. I myself tried a number of different approaches when I joined the faculty of the Department of Physiology (now Cell Biology and Physiology) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNCCH). When a new Chair (James Anderson) arrived in 2002, and was clearly interested in supporting faculty experiments, I had formulated an audacious plan – and he supported it.

THE STRUCTURE OF THE CLASS

The evolution of the unc pclass.

Often faculty do not think it is important for students to take time away from the bench to work on developing their abilities to give talks. Sometimes this is with good reason, as working on PowerPoint animations in a presentation can be a seductive time sink. But just as often it is because the faculty member has not spent that time developing his or her own abilities so they do not understand what is involved in turning a student into a first-rate speaker.

Our wise Chair did understand this. He made it a priority to have the department’s students become outstanding speakers and agreed to my proposal that they be required to attend PClass every week of their first three graduate years to practice both oral and written communication and explore other professional skills. While this amount of time might have seemed outrageous, it was astonishingly successful in ways unimagined at its beginning, particularly in building collegiality amongst the students. Many students in this group became such confident speakers that they began winning awards. Through the peer mentoring in the class, they absorbed an instinctive collegiality that made it possible for them to give criticism with diplomacy and accept it without defensiveness.

The class began with the Physiology students, later adding students from the Neurobiology Curriculum. The size of the class in any year ranged from 12 to 24 students. With time, the three-year requirement was reduced to adapt to an umbrella-based admission system since the students did not join programs until their second year. The essential, successful elements of the class did not change, however, and the class continues at this writing in the hands of another faculty member. I describe the class during the decade that I was the “coach.”

Two rules and high expectations centered the class

Rule #1: Respect for the audience should guide every detail of preparation and delivery of the talk. We insisted that the students know if the audience was specialized in their area or more diverse. We insisted that they design slides carefully, reducing text and bullets to a minimum, making sure every line of text (including axes) could be seen from the back of the auditorium, and choosing contrasting colors, especially those that color-blind people can see. We told them how important it was to time their talks, and that speaking overtime conveys the worst disrespect for the audience. It says that the speaker’s fabulous talk is more important than the time of the captive audience.

Rule #2: Talks should be carefully prepared, practiced, critiqued and refined. For most speakers, engaging the interest of an audience for an hour is a learned skill. Conveying enthusiasm for the subject to the audience is essential; it requires overcoming nervousness and building the confidence derived from thoughtfully-prepared slides and choice of words, composed transitions and practice. The class was structured around rehearsals and feedback from peers, faculty visitors to the class, and myself. A student could earn a low grade only by not taking seriously the rehearsal of their own talk or the pre-class rehearsals of the talks of their peers.

Diplomatic peer critiquing was a key element

The class was (and continues to be) structured around peer, self, and faculty critiquing. Peer critiquing began even before class. I divided the class into “rehearsal pods” of three to four students. When a member of the pod was “on the spot” to give a talk in class that week, the other pod students rehearsed him or her beforehand. After the talk in class, there was a brief period for feedback from the students and visiting faculty member, followed by a moment when all of the students wrote more extensive comments for the student to review later. With time the students learned that “Good job” was a useless comment compared to “You went much too quickly through slide 3 for me to follow – perhaps you could make two slides at this point to slow yourself down,” or “Please always tell us the axes of each graph before you describe the results.”

At the undergraduate level, students often are assigned to present talks of various lengths to a class or in a lab. Why not begin even at this level with serious professional expectations of the talks, perhaps by assigning a buddy to rehearse the student beforehand and pointing out guidelines such as those found on the website of the Burroughs-Welcome Fund? ( http://www.scribd.com/doc/34887738/Communicating-Science-Giving-Talks-Second-Edition )

The PClass united faculty and students

So that my viewpoints (and, admittedly, prejudices) would not dominate the PClass, each week I invited a second faculty member to sit in, watch and question the presenters, and contribute their experience and advice to the group. The faculty generally were happy to make this very small time commitment of one session per semester. The students gained a more personal view of faculty members whom they might not have encountered in a class, and the faculty acquired more knowledge of, and respect for, the students in this different setting.

It was important for the students to feel that the questions from the visiting faculty were intended to help them prepare for what they might be asked in a talk setting, not those they might encounter in a qualifying exam! I warned each faculty member about this before class.

Beyond talk mechanics, discussions in the class were revealing of the students’ struggles as they tried to think about the research process at a more sophisticated level than they ever had before. I was happy to have a faculty colleague enter the fray. I sensed perplexity over a number of issues – for example, what constituted a hypothesis versus what was simply a plan. The visiting faculty member and I often found we were participating in a discussion of fundamental matters of research.

Food can help bonding and add an air of importance to an endeavor. At the end of the semester I hosted a reasonably fancy lunch (not pizza!) for the students and the twelve faculty visitors from that semester. Our continually-supportive Chair realized the benefits of this social time and funded the lunch.

Movies of the presentation provided vital feedback

An essential part of the class was having the students watch themselves in action. I recorded each presentation, then reviewed the movie with the student afterwards in detail (slide by slide, sometimes sentence by sentence). Chairman Anderson gave the class a budget that allowed me to purchase a video camera, chosen for its ability to record in low light, and a low-end MacBook. It was easy to lead the camera directly into the computer and use Apple’s iMovie software to record.

I then made a DVD for the student. Watching the movie together gave the student and me a chance to discuss his or her research in more detail as well as talk improvement. Robert Rosenberg at Earlham College is currently using the video-recording approach with his undergraduates (see below) and YouTube rather than DVDs.

Speaking skills take time to develop

It is rare that students perform at a high level when “thrown into the deep end” – that is, when required to fill 50 minutes or even 30 minutes with their first talk. So, in PClass, first-year students were tasked with giving a timed 5-minute (yes, 5-minute) talk on their first rotation with a maximum of five slides. They had to define four things: the big question, their more focused question, the approach and technique to be used, and plausible results. I encouraged them to present imagined observations or graphs as a way of thinking through the possibilities. For undergraduates beginning an independent project, a five-minute presentation, rehearsed and carefully prepared, would force them to plan their project before they began the work.

As the first-year students in PClass began to obtain experimental results, we increased the length of their talks to the standard 10 minutes of a meeting talk. At the end of the semester all of the students gave their now-polished, 10-minute talks to the members of the department in an auditorium. I rejected more informal rooms so that they could become familiar with the nerve-wracking elements of a formal setting: being on a stage with a huge screen; using the sometimes-testy technology of the lectern; controlling the lighting, microphones and sound levels; and knowing how to deal with the possible lurking disasters such as movies not playing. The students became quite confident and able to deal with trouble. In one instance the “help phone” on the side of the lectern rang in the middle of the student’s presentation and (impressing the audience) she answered it, dealt with the issue, then resumed her talk without missing a beat!

Then there was the dreaded question period to be mastered. In class, the time devoted to questions – from the other students, myself, and the visiting faculty member – was equal to the time for the presentation itself, since dealing with questions is often the most unnerving part of giving a talk. As well, the questions could help the presenters think more carefully about their projects.

Learning ALWAYS to repeat the question

We required the students to repeat the question, even though the room was small, and to give a brief, formal answer. Indeed we would stop them from answering until they had repeated or rephrased the question. So many speakers do not train themselves to repeat the question, which is all too often not heard by many in the audience. Thus the question period, supposedly a time for intellectual discourse, is lost on much of the audience as speaker and questioner have their private chat. Rephrasing the question also gives the speaker a moment to think and, most importantly, to make sure they actually understand what has been asked.

This small, important speaking skill would be so easy to implement for any talk at the undergraduate level. Thinking of it as rephrasing the question is perhaps the key so that the repetition leads somewhere. But this skill requires vigilance by the faculty member to stop the student from launching into the answer: I would wave my hands vigorously in the back of the room. In retaliation I received a present from the class ( Fig.1 )!

The PClass mantra, immortalized on a shirt presented to the ”coach.” Also immortalized is the coach’s admonition not to use red text on a blue background, as the text will not project well; further, color-blind persons will not be able to read it.

Learning the skills of the introducer

Students in the PClass also learned to be skilled introducers. At the formal talks they were to give a gracious, interesting, notes-free introduction of their fellow student, manage the microphone and audio level, preside over the questions, keep the talk and question period precisely on time, help solve any technical problems arising, and thank the audience at the end of the session. I instituted the “Student Introducer” plan when one faculty visitor to the class, a prominent faculty member who had won teaching awards, admitted that she was more nervous having to introduce a speaker than when giving a talk! Certainly being introducers (even in class in rehearsals) raised the students’ awareness of the duties of this important position. It also made them appreciate, and learn from, those faculty who carried out these responsibilities adroitly for visiting seminar speakers.

Critiquing the seminars of visiting speakers

As an important part of the class, the students criticized the department seminar of the week. When the class comprised only the physiology students, all students had attended (or should have attended) the same seminar. They were expected to form opinions on the slides and on the style of presentation as well as to follow the science. When we added neurobiology students, who had attended a different seminar that week, each group had to brief the other on the main point of their seminar. (This class requirement for discussion of the seminars had the additional benefit of increasing seminar attendance.)

With their awareness heightened by the expectations of the class, students began to notice the things that doom an audience to boredom: the speaker staring at the screen or computer the whole time instead of engaging the audience, fonts too small to be seen except from the front of the room, a blistering pace topped by introduction of new material in the last 10 minutes, imported graphs from the literature with unreadable axes, the speaker never repeating the question. This exercise also was comforting to new students who realized that getting lost in a seminar could be a shared experience and that it was not their fault but the fault of the speaker!

One week the class was paid a compliment by the speaker, a prominent faculty member from another department (someone who was well known to be an excellent speaker): “I know that the PClass is here so I am sort of nervous and have taken special care with this talk!”

Mastering the chalk talk

While students must be facile with PowerPoint nowadays, there are many settings that require equal skill at the white board. Often a job interview demands a “chalk talk” in which the candidate outlines plans for future research. Even if prepared slides are allowed, the questioning can bring up matters best explained on the board. And students choosing a teaching path certainly need board skills. Consequently, students of PClass worked on PowerPoint talks in the fall semester and chalk talks in the spring.

The challenges of speaking at the white board are many: learning how to write legibly, straight, and at a size appropriate for the room; how not to turn one’s back to the audience while writing; how to organize the talk on the board; how to use the colored markers cleverly so that one color is always associated with one idea or entity. Indeed even how to manage a set of markers of different colors in the hand takes practice. Any undergraduate having to explain something at a white board could certainly be encouraged to master these skills early on rather than simply allowed to write illegibly and without a plan.

Students wondered how to represent data in a chalk talk. My advice was: draw it. A graph? A current or voltage recording versus time? Learn to label the axes and draw the data accurately. It might give you even more insight to what you have observed.

Learning how to design, present, and even visit posters

Both the Physiology Department and Neurobiology Curriculum had an annual “Research Day” where the students in that program were supposed to prepare posters. While lab groups tend to focus on the design of posters, the actual presentation and visiting of posters tends to be a neglected skill. Typically the making of posters is such a last-minute, intense activity that there is no time to rehearse how to “go through” the poster with a visitor. Even in the design, students still seemed puzzled about how much text to display and in what font, whom to acknowledge, how much space to devote to the methods, etc. Several sessions of PClass were devoted to poster skills for the Research Days, where posters were judged.

Students prepared 2-minute and 8-minute run-throughs so they were ready for either, as requested by visitors or the judges. Students who did not have a poster were assigned to visit the posters of students who did. As usual, they were expected to complete a feedback sheet on how the poster and its delivery could be improved. An amusing article in the Journal of Cell Biology by “Dear Labby” was comforting and useful in this exercise. Labby responds to a student terrified by the ordeal of presenting a poster at a meeting for the first time, giving tips on how to deal with the different ways in which people visit posters ( http://www.ascb.org/files/0611dearlabby.pdf ).

At the undergraduate level, practicing the skills of poster design and presentation may depend on the resources available for poster printing. The Biology Department at Swarthmore College has a poster printer and makes good use of it for training students. In preparation for an Honors Thesis Poster Session, for example, students put up poster drafts for their peers and faculty to critique by leaving post-it feedback notes on the posters. The poster is then revised and printed again.

Engaging a lay audience

One goal of the class was to have the students be able to summarize their work for a lay person, jargon-free and without slides. We called this “The NPR speech,” imagining that Diane Rehm had called them from her radio show and asked about their research. We aimed for a brief, lively and understandable explanation of their research and its importance for the pretend radio audience.

The jargon-free assignment is not so easy! I called on students by surprise (because who knows when they will be asked to do this?) and video-recorded their effort for later review. The rest of the class was to be alert for any jargon in the brief speech. Understandably, these sessions often led to discussions about what was jargon and what was not.

A marvelous opportunity arose outside of the PClass structure for students who wished more experience in speaking to a lay audience. Two students were invited to prepare hour-long talks for a class in the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute associated with Duke University. The audience for these talks is typically older, intelligent and educated, hungry to learn new things, and extremely diverse. The students who took on this challenge were amazed at the amount of time they had to spend preparing, even after they had been through the PClass. An hour-long talk about a scientific topic, jargon-free or at least jargon-explained, is truly new territory for a student. Both students received rave reviews from the audience and were thrilled that they had taken the challenge and triumphed.

CAPTURING AN AUDIENCE IS A DRAMATIC ART

An experiment with an actor at unc.

Although scientists hate to admit it, giving a good talk requires skills akin to acting. Students in drama programs are taught techniques for overcoming nervousness, for speaking loudly, slowly and confidently, and for generally engaging the attention of an audience. Why not make our students aware of these techniques?

I approached UNC’s Department of Dramatic Art where Jeffrey Meanza, the Associate Artistic Director of the Playmaker’s Repertory Company and a professional actor, became intrigued with the idea of coaching students who were giving scientific talks. We formed a collaboration with two parts: an acting class in one of the large rooms of the theater building, and a “Master Class,” where Meanza visited our classroom and critiqued student talks. Our efforts led to an article in a campus newspaper ( Shoaf, 2010 ) that inspired inquiries from other science departments about this unique collaboration.

In time I realized that the acting class was a great way to start the fall semester. Meanza involved the students in body exercises of all sorts, particularly those involving the voice and breathing; they were fun as well as useful, so that by the end of the class inhibitions had broken down. The students entered the acting class strangers and emerged sudden friends, united by their reaction to these non-scientific, playful exercises.

As the master of the Master Class, Meanza stopped a student’s talk after a slide or two to comment or give advice, similar to the tradition in a music Master Class. He helped them envision a better way to engage his interest and then had them try again. Acting tricks such as learning when to breathe or how to annunciate more clearly the long and difficult words of scientific jargon (try saying it several times with your tongue out!) instantly improved that portion of the presentation.

When the idea of the acting class was initially broached to the skeptical students, one student said, “We are scientists, not actors.” The faculty member visiting class that day took exception. “You are wrong,” she said. “You must be both if you want people to pay attention to your work.”

A PClass theater experiment at the University of Wisconsin

While versions of PClass undoubtedly exist at other universities, I know of only one other involving the drama department. At the University of Wisconsin, Donata Oertel (Department of Neuroscience) has collaborated with Patricia Boyette, a Professor of Acting at the institution, to work with the neuroscience graduate students on their talks. Exercises included having the students bring to class 6–8 lines of text, something the student thought was interesting and important, that they would then practice speaking. Oertel reported that the choices, in one case a poem written for the occasion, were amazingly varied. The chosen text enabled the students to quickly know one another better while it trained their speaking voice.

Oertel and I entered into these collaborations as an adventure, hoping to help the students learn strategies that would enable them to relax at the podium, overcome nervousness, project confidence, and better command audience attention. We were not sure what to expect. To our delight, as an unexpected benefit in both cases, the drama exercises made the students more comfortable with one another. We felt that the increased esprit de corps might have made it easier for them to give and accept criticism, a central goal of the PClass that we hope will persist in their scientific lives.

MEASURES OF PCLASS SUCCESS

The success of a presentation class is difficult to measure except anecdotally. Prize-winning is certainly one indication, although it is usually difficult to know whether the research itself or the presentation has factored more in the prize. To my knowledge there is currently no competition where each student prepares a talk on the same results so that only the presentation differs amongst the students. Perhaps there should be! Competition is an effective driving force for encouraging perfection and creativity.

Nevertheless, I was deeply pleased when PClass students started winning awards after the class had been in place for several years. One student was the only graduate student to win an award in a local presentation contest open to both postdocs and students. Five more students won awards for their posters and talks over the next four years. An alumna won two presentation awards as a postdoc at a different university. This past summer an alumna of the class, Sarah Street, was selected by the UNC medical students to give the 2012 Whitehead Lecture, an honor highly coveted by the medical faculty. And then there is Jennifer Morgan, who joined an earlier form of the class as an undergraduate in my lab and then, when she became faculty at the University of Texas Austin, mounted her own PClass based on the UNC model. This past summer Morgan received a University of Texas Regent’s Outstanding Teaching Award, earning a hefty monetary prize.

CAN THE PCLASS WORK FOR UNDERGRADUATES?

My prejudiced answer to this question is that it is important to teach presentation skills to undergraduates who are seriously interested in pursing a scientific career. A full course such as the UNC PClass would clearly need the support of the department chair and other faculty. But the skills of PClass could be incorporated into regular classes as well. The essential factor is for both students and faculty to approach learning these skills seriously. The grading of a student would be expected to reflect their seriousness: how thoroughly they prepared their talk, their participation in rehearsing their peers as well as asking questions of the speaker and providing feedback in class, and their willingness to evaluate their own performance.

For example, at Earlham College Robert Rosenberg (who is familiar with UNC PClass methods from his time on the UNC faculty) has instituted rehearsed presentations, video-recording, and mandatory student self-evaluations in a class that he teaches in neuroscience. The class aims to build a neuroscience community at Earlham by targeting neuroscience majors from sophomores through seniors as well as students with other majors who have an interest in neuroscience. His students view their recorded talks on YouTube where he uploads the video files with an unlisted setting and gives the URL to the student.

At the Mount Desert Island Biological Laboratory (MDIBL) in Maine in the past three summers, a lucky cadre of about 20 undergraduates and high school graduates heading to college have been able to take a PClass from Susan Fellner, a faculty member in physiology at UNC and MDIBL adjunct professor. As one of the faculty visitors to the UNC PClass, Fellner became determined to provide a PClass opportunity to the MDIBL students.

Fellner’s class was the only formal instruction at the MDIBL, where students are assigned to research labs for the summer. The class met each week and was modeled on the UNC PClass in several fundamental ways: the students were expected to critique the seminars of visitors to the MDIBL (and as a result, Fellner says, they paid much more attention to the seminars); the student talks were short, at 8 minutes, were timed, and were followed by a question period where the students had to repeat the question; Fellner made herself available for rehearsing; and the students were expected to critique one another in a respectful but helpful manner after each talk. Fellner reports that the pride the students took in their talks was obvious as they dressed up to present their talks at the Lab’s end-of-summer Student Research Day.

For her efforts Fellner received an award from the director and scientists at the Lab, who were struck by the obvious, enormous improvement in the talks and posters presented by students compared to those in years prior to her class. Fellner says that a common comment from faculty after Research Day was, “These kids are better than I am!”

When Jennifer Morgan (now an Assistant Scientist at the MBL) crafted her own PClass at the UT Austin, she and I shared effective techniques as our classes evolved at the separate institutions. While her class, like mine, was for graduate students, she reported, first of all that her students wished they had been able to take this class much earlier in their careers and, second, that after they had moved on to postdocs, they felt that the PClass was one of the most (or THE most) valuable classes they had in graduate school. I had heard the same comments from the UNC PClass alums.

In the neurobiology/physiology Presentation Class at UNC Chapel Hill we have endeavored to empower the students with the self confidence that would enable them to enjoy, rather than fear, the moment of standing before their colleagues to show their results and defend their ideas. We have aspired to foster collegiality by encouraging these nascent scientists to develop thoughtfulness and diplomacy when discussing ideas with peers or giving them feedback. In the process, we faculty have derived great pleasure from seeing the students evolve and flourish. Anecdotal evidence and the spread of the PClass concept to other institutions argue that this type of formal instruction is successful and should be a part of the training of future scientists. Indeed it is imperative if we want science to be more understood by the general public.

Serious students mature in their speaking skills through thoughtful observation of other presentations – those of peers or visiting seminar speakers – as well as through taking the time to prepare and rehearse their own talks. The growth in confidence and mastery that eventually results in a first-rate speaker is unlikely to come from simply reading books and articles, or even attending a oneday “how to” session on public speaking. Making a bench scientist into someone who can grab and hold the attention of an audience is a slow process. Why not begin this process at the undergraduate level?

Acknowledgments

I thank the colleagues who have taken the time to tell me about their versions of the UNC Presentation Class and to critique this manuscript: Susan Fellner, Jennifer Morgan, Donata Oertel and Bob Rosenberg. I also thank Kathleen Siwicki who provided information about poster critiquing at Swarthmore College. A special thanks to Jeffrey Meanza who entered this unusual collaboration with enthusiasm and won over the students’ with his charm, playful sense of humor, and useful advice.

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Reference management. Clean and simple.

How to make a scientific presentation

Scientific presentation outlines

Questions to ask yourself before you write your talk, 1. how much time do you have, 2. who will you speak to, 3. what do you want the audience to learn from your talk, step 1: outline your presentation, step 2: plan your presentation slides, step 3: make the presentation slides, slide design, text elements, animations and transitions, step 4: practice your presentation, final thoughts, frequently asked questions about preparing scientific presentations, related articles.

A good scientific presentation achieves three things: you communicate the science clearly, your research leaves a lasting impression on your audience, and you enhance your reputation as a scientist.

But, what is the best way to prepare for a scientific presentation? How do you start writing a talk? What details do you include, and what do you leave out?

It’s tempting to launch into making lots of slides. But, starting with the slides can mean you neglect the narrative of your presentation, resulting in an overly detailed, boring talk.

The key to making an engaging scientific presentation is to prepare the narrative of your talk before beginning to construct your presentation slides. Planning your talk will ensure that you tell a clear, compelling scientific story that will engage the audience.

In this guide, you’ll find everything you need to know to make a good oral scientific presentation, including:

• The different types of oral scientific presentations and how they are delivered;
• How to outline a scientific presentation;
• How to make slides for a scientific presentation.

Our advice results from delving into the literature on writing scientific talks and from our own experiences as scientists in giving and listening to presentations. We provide tips and best practices for giving scientific talks in a separate post.

There are two main types of scientific talks:

• Your talk focuses on a single study . Typically, you tell the story of a single scientific paper. This format is common for short talks at contributed sessions in conferences.
• Your talk describes multiple studies. You tell the story of multiple scientific papers. It is crucial to have a theme that unites the studies, for example, an overarching question or problem statement, with each study representing specific but different variations of the same theme. Typically, PhD defenses, invited seminars, lectures, or talks for a prospective employer (i.e., “job talks”) fall into this category.

➡️ Learn how to prepare an excellent thesis defense

The length of time you are allotted for your talk will determine whether you will discuss a single study or multiple studies, and which details to include in your story.

The background and interests of your audience will determine the narrative direction of your talk, and what devices you will use to get their attention. Will you be speaking to people specializing in your field, or will the audience also contain people from disciplines other than your own? To reach non-specialists, you will need to discuss the broader implications of your study outside your field.

The needs of the audience will also determine what technical details you will include, and the language you will use. For example, an undergraduate audience will have different needs than an audience of seasoned academics. Students will require a more comprehensive overview of background information and explanations of jargon but will need less technical methodological details.

Your goal is to speak to the majority. But, make your talk accessible to the least knowledgeable person in the room.

This is called the thesis statement, or simply the “take-home message”. Having listened to your talk, what message do you want the audience to take away from your presentation? Describe the main idea in one or two sentences. You want this theme to be present throughout your presentation. Again, the thesis statement will depend on the audience and the type of talk you are giving.

Your thesis statement will drive the narrative for your talk. By deciding the take-home message you want to convince the audience of as a result of listening to your talk, you decide how the story of your talk will flow and how you will navigate its twists and turns. The thesis statement tells you the results you need to show, which subsequently tells you the methods or studies you need to describe, which decides the angle you take in your introduction.

➡️ Learn how to write a thesis statement

The goal of your talk is that the audience leaves afterward with a clear understanding of the key take-away message of your research. To achieve that goal, you need to tell a coherent, logical story that conveys your thesis statement throughout the presentation. You can tell your story through careful preparation of your talk.

Preparation of a scientific presentation involves three separate stages: outlining the scientific narrative, preparing slides, and practicing your delivery. Making the slides of your talk without first planning what you are going to say is inefficient.

Here, we provide a 4 step guide to writing your scientific presentation:

• Outline your presentation
• Plan your presentation slides
• Make the presentation slides
• Practice your presentation

Writing an outline helps you consider the key pieces of your talk and how they fit together from the beginning, preventing you from forgetting any important details. It also means you avoid changing the order of your slides multiple times, saving you time.

Plan your talk as discrete sections. In the table below, we describe the sections for a single study talk vs. a talk discussing multiple studies:

The following tips apply when writing the outline of a single study talk. You can easily adapt this framework if you are writing a talk discussing multiple studies.

Introduction: Writing the introduction can be the hardest part of writing a talk. And when giving it, it’s the point where you might be at your most nervous. But preparing a good, concise introduction will settle your nerves.

The introduction tells the audience the story of why you studied your topic. A good introduction succinctly achieves four things, in the following order.

• It gives a broad perspective on the problem or topic for people in the audience who may be outside your discipline (i.e., it explains the big-picture problem motivating your study).
• It describes why you did the study, and why the audience should care.
• It gives a brief indication of how your study addressed the problem and provides the necessary background information that the audience needs to understand your work.
• It indicates what the audience will learn from the talk, and prepares them for what will come next.

A good introduction not only gives the big picture and motivations behind your study but also concisely sets the stage for what the audience will learn from the talk (e.g., the questions your work answers, and/or the hypotheses that your work tests). The end of the introduction will lead to a natural transition to the methods.

Give a broad perspective on the problem. The easiest way to start with the big picture is to think of a hook for the first slide of your presentation. A hook is an opening that gets the audience’s attention and gets them interested in your story. In science, this might take the form of a why, or a how question, or it could be a statement about a major problem or open question in your field. Other examples of hooks include quotes, short anecdotes, or interesting statistics.

Why should the audience care? Next, decide on the angle you are going to take on your hook that links to the thesis of your talk. In other words, you need to set the context, i.e., explain why the audience should care. For example, you may introduce an observation from nature, a pattern in experimental data, or a theory that you want to test. The audience must understand your motivations for the study.

Supplementary details. Once you have established the hook and angle, you need to include supplementary details to support them. For example, you might state your hypothesis. Then go into previous work and the current state of knowledge. Include citations of these studies. If you need to introduce some technical methodological details, theory, or jargon, do it here.

Conclude your introduction. The motivation for the work and background information should set the stage for the conclusion of the introduction, where you describe the goals of your study, and any hypotheses or predictions. Let the audience know what they are going to learn.

Methods: The audience will use your description of the methods to assess the approach you took in your study and to decide whether your findings are credible. Tell the story of your methods in chronological order. Use visuals to describe your methods as much as possible. If you have equations, make sure to take the time to explain them. Decide what methods to include and how you will show them. You need enough detail so that your audience will understand what you did and therefore can evaluate your approach, but avoid including superfluous details that do not support your main idea. You want to avoid the common mistake of including too much data, as the audience can read the paper(s) later.

Results: This is the evidence you present for your thesis. The audience will use the results to evaluate the support for your main idea. Choose the most important and interesting results—those that support your thesis. You don’t need to present all the results from your study (indeed, you most likely won’t have time to present them all). Break down complex results into digestible pieces, e.g., comparisons over multiple slides (more tips in the next section).

Summary: Summarize your main findings. Displaying your main findings through visuals can be effective. Emphasize the new contributions to scientific knowledge that your work makes.

Conclusion: Complete the circle by relating your conclusions to the big picture topic in your introduction—and your hook, if possible. It’s important to describe any alternative explanations for your findings. You might also speculate on future directions arising from your research. The slides that comprise your conclusion do not need to state “conclusion”. Rather, the concluding slide title should be a declarative sentence linking back to the big picture problem and your main idea.

It’s important to end well by planning a strong closure to your talk, after which you will thank the audience. Your closing statement should relate to your thesis, perhaps by stating it differently or memorably. Avoid ending awkwardly by memorizing your closing sentence.

By now, you have an outline of the story of your talk, which you can use to plan your slides. Your slides should complement and enhance what you will say. Use the following steps to prepare your slides.

• Write the slide titles to match your talk outline. These should be clear and informative declarative sentences that succinctly give the main idea of the slide (e.g., don’t use “Methods” as a slide title). Have one major idea per slide. In a YouTube talk on designing effective slides , researcher Michael Alley shows examples of instructive slide titles.
• Decide how you will convey the main idea of the slide (e.g., what figures, photographs, equations, statistics, references, or other elements you will need). The body of the slide should support the slide’s main idea.
• Under each slide title, outline what you want to say, in bullet points.

In sum, for each slide, prepare a title that summarizes its major idea, a list of visual elements, and a summary of the points you will make. Ensure each slide connects to your thesis. If it doesn’t, then you don’t need the slide.

Slides for scientific presentations have three major components: text (including labels and legends), graphics, and equations. Here, we give tips on how to present each of these components.

• Have an informative title slide. Include the names of all coauthors and their affiliations. Include an attractive image relating to your study.
• Make the foreground content of your slides “pop” by using an appropriate background. Slides that have white backgrounds with black text work well for small rooms, whereas slides with black backgrounds and white text are suitable for large rooms.
• The layout of your slides should be simple. Pay attention to how and where you lay the visual and text elements on each slide. It’s tempting to cram information, but you need lots of empty space. Retain space at the sides and bottom of your slides.
• Use sans serif fonts with a font size of at least 20 for text, and up to 40 for slide titles. Citations can be in 14 font and should be included at the bottom of the slide.
• Use bold or italics to emphasize words, not underlines or caps. Keep these effects to a minimum.
• Use concise text . You don’t need full sentences. Convey the essence of your message in as few words as possible. Write down what you’d like to say, and then shorten it for the slide. Remove unnecessary filler words.
• Text blocks should be limited to two lines. This will prevent you from crowding too much information on the slide.
• Include names of technical terms in your talk slides, especially if they are not familiar to everyone in the audience.
• Proofread your slides. Typos and grammatical errors are distracting for your audience.
• Include citations for the hypotheses or observations of other scientists.
• Good figures and graphics are essential to sustain audience interest. Use graphics and photographs to show the experiment or study system in action and to explain abstract concepts.
• Don’t use figures straight from your paper as they may be too detailed for your talk, and details like axes may be too small. Make new versions if necessary. Make them large enough to be visible from the back of the room.
• Use graphs to show your results, not tables. Tables are difficult for your audience to digest! If you must present a table, keep it simple.
• Label the axes of graphs and indicate the units. Label important components of graphics and photographs and include captions. Include sources for graphics that are not your own.
• Explain all the elements of a graph. This includes the axes, what the colors and markers mean, and patterns in the data.
• Use colors in figures and text in a meaningful, not random, way. For example, contrasting colors can be effective for pointing out comparisons and/or differences. Don’t use neon colors or pastels.
• Use thick lines in figures, and use color to create contrasts in the figures you present. Don’t use red/green or red/blue combinations, as color-blind audience members can’t distinguish between them.
• Arrows or circles can be effective for drawing attention to key details in graphs and equations. Add some text annotations along with them.
• Write your summary and conclusion slides using graphics, rather than showing a slide with a list of bullet points. Showing some of your results again can be helpful to remind the audience of your message.
• If your talk has equations, take time to explain them. Include text boxes to explain variables and mathematical terms, and put them under each term in the equation.
• Combine equations with a graphic that shows the scientific principle, or include a diagram of the mathematical model.
• Use animations judiciously. They are helpful to reveal complex ideas gradually, for example, if you need to make a comparison or contrast or to build a complicated argument or figure. For lists, reveal one bullet point at a time. New ideas appearing sequentially will help your audience follow your logic.
• Slide transitions should be simple. Silly ones distract from your message.
• Decide how you will make the transition as you move from one section of your talk to the next. For example, if you spend time talking through details, provide a summary afterward, especially in a long talk. Another common tactic is to have a “home slide” that you return to multiple times during the talk that reinforces your main idea or message. In her YouTube talk on designing effective scientific presentations , Stanford biologist Susan McConnell suggests using the approach of home slides to build a cohesive narrative.

To deliver a polished presentation, it is essential to practice it. Here are some tips.

• For your first run-through, practice alone. Pay attention to your narrative. Does your story flow naturally? Do you know how you will start and end? Are there any awkward transitions? Do animations help you tell your story? Do your slides help to convey what you are saying or are they missing components?
• Next, practice in front of your advisor, and/or your peers (e.g., your lab group). Ask someone to time your talk. Take note of their feedback and the questions that they ask you (you might be asked similar questions during your real talk).
• Edit your talk, taking into account the feedback you’ve received. Eliminate superfluous slides that don’t contribute to your takeaway message.
• Practice as many times as needed to memorize the order of your slides and the key transition points of your talk. However, don’t try to learn your talk word for word. Instead, memorize opening and closing statements, and sentences at key junctures in the presentation. Your presentation should resemble a serious but spontaneous conversation with the audience.
• Practicing multiple times also helps you hone the delivery of your talk. While rehearsing, pay attention to your vocal intonations and speed. Make sure to take pauses while you speak, and make eye contact with your imaginary audience.
• Make sure your talk finishes within the allotted time, and remember to leave time for questions. Conferences are particularly strict on run time.
• Anticipate questions and challenges from the audience, and clarify ambiguities within your slides and/or speech in response.
• If you anticipate that you could be asked questions about details but you don’t have time to include them, or they detract from the main message of your talk, you can prepare slides that address these questions and place them after the final slide of your talk.

➡️ More tips for giving scientific presentations

An organized presentation with a clear narrative will help you communicate your ideas effectively, which is essential for engaging your audience and conveying the importance of your work. Taking time to plan and outline your scientific presentation before writing the slides will help you manage your nerves and feel more confident during the presentation, which will improve your overall performance.

A good scientific presentation has an engaging scientific narrative with a memorable take-home message. It has clear, informative slides that enhance what the speaker says. You need to practice your talk many times to ensure you deliver a polished presentation.

First, consider who will attend your presentation, and what you want the audience to learn about your research. Tailor your content to their level of knowledge and interests. Second, create an outline for your presentation, including the key points you want to make and the evidence you will use to support those points. Finally, practice your presentation several times to ensure that it flows smoothly and that you are comfortable with the material.

Prepare an opening that immediately gets the audience’s attention. A common device is a why or a how question, or a statement of a major open problem in your field, but you could also start with a quote, interesting statistic, or case study from your field.

Scientific presentations typically either focus on a single study (e.g., a 15-minute conference presentation) or tell the story of multiple studies (e.g., a PhD defense or 50-minute conference keynote talk). For a single study talk, the structure follows the scientific paper format: Introduction, Methods, Results, Summary, and Conclusion, whereas the format of a talk discussing multiple studies is more complex, but a theme unifies the studies.

Ensure you have one major idea per slide, and convey that idea clearly (through images, equations, statistics, citations, video, etc.). The slide should include a title that summarizes the major point of the slide, should not contain too much text or too many graphics, and color should be used meaningfully.

Presentation Skills: How to Present Research Results

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This book is about designing, implementing and interpreting clinical research. This chapter is aimed at a discussion of how to present the research that has been performed. Although almost no one currently disagrees that a formal curriculum in research methodology is critical for a new investigator, the manner in which the results of a study are presented is presumed to be obvious, and training in the art of presentations is much less common. The belief is that good speakers are born, not made, and this is no more true than good researchers are born and not made. And so, the methodology of presentations should be an important part of a young investigators training. This chapter provides an introduction to delivering an effective presentation.

Speech is power; Speech is to persuade, to convert, to compel Ralph Wald Emerson I know from experience that “sometimes it is better to be quiet and be thought a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt”… Abraham Lincoln

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The majority of this chapter was taken from personal experience and extensive notes that I had taken from a large number or Presentation Skills Workshops that I have attended. Although I cannot give specific credit for individual pieces of information, I can credit the Instructors of those workshops as follows:

Sue Castorino, President, The Speaking Specialist, Chicago, IL, 1993.

Gerald Kelliher PhD, Associate Dean, Medical College of Pennsylvania.

Eleanor Lopez, Let’s Communicate Better, www.eleanorlopez.com

Power Speaking, and More, Joyce Newman Communications Inc.

Jerry Michaels-Senior Consultant CommCore Communication Strategies.

Science and Medicine Canada, Presentation and Platform Skills Workshop, 1992.

Wyeth Ayerst Laboratories, Ciba-Geigy, Schering, Pfizer, and KOS Pharmaceuticals for sponsoring many of the Presentation Skills Workshops that I attended.

Foley RP, Smilansky J. Teaching techniques, a handbook for health professionals. New York: McGraw-Hill Book; 1980. p. 1–14.

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Garson A, Gutgesell H, Pinsky WW, McNamara DG. The 10-minute talk, slides, writing, and delivery. Am Heart J. 1985;111:193–203.

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Griswold A. 9 ways to sound like you know what you are talking about Business Insider. www.businessinsider.com/common-speaking-mistakes-2013

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Glasser, S.P. (2014). Presentation Skills: How to Present Research Results. In: Glasser, S. (eds) Essentials of Clinical Research. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-05470-4_22

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Home Blog Presentation Ideas How to Create and Deliver a Research Presentation

How to Create and Deliver a Research Presentation

Every research endeavor ends up with the communication of its findings. Graduate-level research culminates in a thesis defense , while many academic and scientific disciplines are published in peer-reviewed journals. In a business context, PowerPoint research presentation is the default format for reporting the findings to stakeholders.

Condensing months of work into a few slides can prove to be challenging. It requires particular skills to create and deliver a research presentation that promotes informed decisions and drives long-term projects forward.

Table of Contents

What is a Research Presentation

Key slides for creating a research presentation, tips when delivering a research presentation, how to present sources in a research presentation, recommended templates to create a research presentation.

A research presentation is the communication of research findings, typically delivered to an audience of peers, colleagues, students, or professionals. In the academe, it is meant to showcase the importance of the research paper , state the findings and the analysis of those findings, and seek feedback that could further the research.

The presentation of research becomes even more critical in the business world as the insights derived from it are the basis of strategic decisions of organizations. Information from this type of report can aid companies in maximizing the sales and profit of their business. Major projects such as research and development (R&D) in a new field, the launch of a new product or service, or even corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives will require the presentation of research findings to prove their feasibility.

Market research and technical research are examples of business-type research presentations you will commonly encounter.

In this article, we’ve compiled all the essential tips, including some examples and templates, to get you started with creating and delivering a stellar research presentation tailored specifically for the business context.

Various research suggests that the average attention span of adults during presentations is around 20 minutes, with a notable drop in an engagement at the 10-minute mark . Beyond that, you might see your audience doing other things.

How can you avoid such a mistake? The answer lies in the adage “keep it simple, stupid” or KISS. We don’t mean dumbing down your content but rather presenting it in a way that is easily digestible and accessible to your audience. One way you can do this is by organizing your research presentation using a clear structure.

Here are the slides you should prioritize when creating your research presentation PowerPoint.

1.  Title Page

The title page is the first thing your audience will see during your presentation, so put extra effort into it to make an impression. Of course, writing presentation titles and title pages will vary depending on the type of presentation you are to deliver. In the case of a research presentation, you want a formal and academic-sounding one. It should include:

• The full title of the report
• The date of the report
• The name of the researchers or department in charge of the report
• The name of the organization for which the presentation is intended

When writing the title of your research presentation, it should reflect the topic and objective of the report. Focus only on the subject and avoid adding redundant phrases like “A research on” or “A study on.” However, you may use phrases like “Market Analysis” or “Feasibility Study” because they help identify the purpose of the presentation. Doing so also serves a long-term purpose for the filing and later retrieving of the document.

Here’s a sample title page for a hypothetical market research presentation from Gillette .

2. Executive Summary Slide

The executive summary marks the beginning of the body of the presentation, briefly summarizing the key discussion points of the research. Specifically, the summary may state the following:

• The purpose of the investigation and its significance within the organization’s goals
• The methods used for the investigation
• The major findings of the investigation
• The conclusions and recommendations after the investigation

Although the executive summary encompasses the entry of the research presentation, it should not dive into all the details of the work on which the findings, conclusions, and recommendations were based. Creating the executive summary requires a focus on clarity and brevity, especially when translating it to a PowerPoint document where space is limited.

Each point should be presented in a clear and visually engaging manner to capture the audience’s attention and set the stage for the rest of the presentation. Use visuals, bullet points, and minimal text to convey information efficiently.

3. Introduction/ Project Description Slides

In this section, your goal is to provide your audience with the information that will help them understand the details of the presentation. Provide a detailed description of the project, including its goals, objectives, scope, and methods for gathering and analyzing data.

You want to answer these fundamental questions:

• What specific questions are you trying to answer, problems you aim to solve, or opportunities you seek to explore?
• Why is this project important, and what prompted it?
• What are the boundaries of your research or initiative? 
• How were the data gathered?

Important: The introduction should exclude specific findings, conclusions, and recommendations.

4. Data Presentation and Analyses Slides

This is the longest section of a research presentation, as you’ll present the data you’ve gathered and provide a thorough analysis of that data to draw meaningful conclusions. The format and components of this section can vary widely, tailored to the specific nature of your research.

For example, if you are doing market research, you may include the market potential estimate, competitor analysis, and pricing analysis. These elements will help your organization determine the actual viability of a market opportunity.

Visual aids like charts, graphs, tables, and diagrams are potent tools to convey your key findings effectively. These materials may be numbered and sequenced (Figure 1, Figure 2, and so forth), accompanied by text to make sense of the insights.

5. Conclusions

The conclusion of a research presentation is where you pull together the ideas derived from your data presentation and analyses in light of the purpose of the research. For example, if the objective is to assess the market of a new product, the conclusion should determine the requirements of the market in question and tell whether there is a product-market fit.

Designing your conclusion slide should be straightforward and focused on conveying the key takeaways from your research. Keep the text concise and to the point. Present it in bullet points or numbered lists to make the content easily scannable.

6. Recommendations

The findings of your research might reveal elements that may not align with your initial vision or expectations. These deviations are addressed in the recommendations section of your presentation, which outlines the best course of action based on the result of the research.

What emerging markets should we target next? Do we need to rethink our pricing strategies? Which professionals should we hire for this special project? — these are some of the questions that may arise when coming up with this part of the research.

Recommendations may be combined with the conclusion, but presenting them separately to reinforce their urgency. In the end, the decision-makers in the organization or your clients will make the final call on whether to accept or decline the recommendations.

7. Questions Slide

Members of your audience are not involved in carrying out your research activity, which means there’s a lot they don’t know about its details. By offering an opportunity for questions, you can invite them to bridge that gap, seek clarification, and engage in a dialogue that enhances their understanding.

If your research is more business-oriented, facilitating a question and answer after your presentation becomes imperative as it’s your final appeal to encourage buy-in for your recommendations.

A simple “Ask us anything” slide can indicate that you are ready to accept questions.

1. Focus on the Most Important Findings

The truth about presenting research findings is that your audience doesn’t need to know everything. Instead, they should receive a distilled, clear, and meaningful overview that focuses on the most critical aspects.

You will likely have to squeeze in the oral presentation of your research into a 10 to 20-minute presentation, so you have to make the most out of the time given to you. In the presentation, don’t soak in the less important elements like historical backgrounds. Decision-makers might even ask you to skip these portions and focus on sharing the findings.

2. Do Not Read Word-per-word

Reading word-for-word from your presentation slides intensifies the danger of losing your audience’s interest. Its effect can be detrimental, especially if the purpose of your research presentation is to gain approval from the audience. So, how can you avoid this mistake?

• Make a conscious design decision to keep the text on your slides minimal. Your slides should serve as visual cues to guide your presentation.
• Structure your presentation as a narrative or story. Stories are more engaging and memorable than dry, factual information.
• Prepare speaker notes with the key points of your research. Glance at it when needed.
• Engage with the audience by maintaining eye contact and asking rhetorical questions.

3. Don’t Go Without Handouts

Handouts are paper copies of your presentation slides that you distribute to your audience. They typically contain the summary of your key points, but they may also provide supplementary information supporting data presented through tables and graphs.

The purpose of distributing presentation handouts is to easily retain the key points you presented as they become good references in the future. Distributing handouts in advance allows your audience to review the material and come prepared with questions or points for discussion during the presentation.

4. Actively Listen

An equally important skill that a presenter must possess aside from speaking is the ability to listen. We are not just talking about listening to what the audience is saying but also considering their reactions and nonverbal cues. If you sense disinterest or confusion, you can adapt your approach on the fly to re-engage them.

For example, if some members of your audience are exchanging glances, they may be skeptical of the research findings you are presenting. This is the best time to reassure them of the validity of your data and provide a concise overview of how it came to be. You may also encourage them to seek clarification.

5. Be Confident

Anxiety can strike before a presentation – it’s a common reaction whenever someone has to speak in front of others. If you can’t eliminate your stress, try to manage it.

People hate public speaking not because they simply hate it. Most of the time, it arises from one’s belief in themselves. You don’t have to take our word for it. Take Maslow’s theory that says a threat to one’s self-esteem is a source of distress among an individual.

Now, how can you master this feeling? You’ve spent a lot of time on your research, so there is no question about your topic knowledge. Perhaps you just need to rehearse your research presentation. If you know what you will say and how to say it, you will gain confidence in presenting your work.

All sources you use in creating your research presentation should be given proper credit. The APA Style is the most widely used citation style in formal research.

In-text citation

Add references within the text of your presentation slide by giving the author’s last name, year of publication, and page number (if applicable) in parentheses after direct quotations or paraphrased materials. As in:

The alarming rate at which global temperatures rise directly impacts biodiversity (Smith, 2020, p. 27).

If the author’s name and year of publication are mentioned in the text, add only the page number in parentheses after the quotations or paraphrased materials. As in:

According to Smith (2020), the alarming rate at which global temperatures rise directly impacts biodiversity (p. 27).

Image citation

All images from the web, including photos, graphs, and tables, used in your slides should be credited using the format below.

Creator’s Last Name, First Name. “Title of Image.” Website Name, Day Mo. Year, URL. Accessed Day Mo. Year.

Work cited page

A work cited page or reference list should follow after the last slide of your presentation. The list should be alphabetized by the author’s last name and initials followed by the year of publication, the title of the book or article, the place of publication, and the publisher. As in:

Smith, J. A. (2020). Climate Change and Biodiversity: A Comprehensive Study. New York, NY: ABC Publications.

When citing a document from a website, add the source URL after the title of the book or article instead of the place of publication and the publisher. As in:

Smith, J. A. (2020). Climate Change and Biodiversity: A Comprehensive Study. Retrieved from https://www.smith.com/climate-change-and-biodiversity.

1. Research Project Presentation PowerPoint Template

A slide deck containing 18 different slides intended to take off the weight of how to make a research presentation. With tons of visual aids, presenters can reference existing research on similar projects to this one – or link another research presentation example – provide an accurate data analysis, disclose the methodology used, and much more.

Use This Template

2. Research Presentation Scientific Method Diagram PowerPoint Template

Whenever you intend to raise questions, expose the methodology you used for your research, or even suggest a scientific method approach for future analysis, this circular wheel diagram is a perfect fit for any presentation study.

Customize all of its elements to suit the demands of your presentation in just minutes.

3. Thesis Research Presentation PowerPoint Template

If your research presentation project belongs to academia, then this is the slide deck to pair that presentation. With a formal aesthetic and minimalistic style, this research presentation template focuses only on exposing your information as clearly as possible.

Use its included bar charts and graphs to introduce data, change the background of each slide to suit the topic of your presentation, and customize each of its elements to meet the requirements of your project with ease.

4. Animated Research Cards PowerPoint Template

Visualize ideas and their connection points with the help of this research card template for PowerPoint. This slide deck, for example, can help speakers talk about alternative concepts to what they are currently managing and its possible outcomes, among different other usages this versatile PPT template has. Zoom Animation effects make a smooth transition between cards (or ideas).

5. Research Presentation Slide Deck for PowerPoint

With a distinctive professional style, this research presentation PPT template helps business professionals and academics alike to introduce the findings of their work to team members or investors.

By accessing this template, you get the following slides:

• Introduction
• Problem Statement
• Research Questions
• Conceptual Research Framework (Concepts, Theories, Actors, & Constructs)
• Study design and methods
• Population & Sampling
• Data Collection
• Data Analysis

Check it out today and craft a powerful research presentation out of it!

A successful research presentation in business is not just about presenting data; it’s about persuasion to take meaningful action. It’s the bridge that connects your research efforts to the strategic initiatives of your organization. To embark on this journey successfully, planning your presentation thoroughly is paramount, from designing your PowerPoint to the delivery.

Take a look and get inspiration from the sample research presentation slides above, put our tips to heart, and transform your research findings into a compelling call to action.

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What It Takes to Give a Great Presentation

• Carmine Gallo

Five tips to set yourself apart.

Never underestimate the power of great communication. It can help you land the job of your dreams, attract investors to back your idea, or elevate your stature within your organization. But while there are plenty of good speakers in the world, you can set yourself apart out by being the person who can deliver something great over and over. Here are a few tips for business professionals who want to move from being good speakers to great ones: be concise (the fewer words, the better); never use bullet points (photos and images paired together are more memorable); don’t underestimate the power of your voice (raise and lower it for emphasis); give your audience something extra (unexpected moments will grab their attention); rehearse (the best speakers are the best because they practice — a lot).

I was sitting across the table from a Silicon Valley CEO who had pioneered a technology that touches many of our lives — the flash memory that stores data on smartphones, digital cameras, and computers. He was a frequent guest on CNBC and had been delivering business presentations for at least 20 years before we met. And yet, the CEO wanted to sharpen his public speaking skills.

• Carmine Gallo is a Harvard University instructor, keynote speaker, and author of 10 books translated into 40 languages. Gallo is the author of The Bezos Blueprint: Communication Secrets of the World’s Greatest Salesman  (St. Martin’s Press).

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How to Make a PowerPoint Presentation of Your Research Paper

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Table of Contents

A research paper presentation is often used at conferences and in other settings where you have an opportunity to share your research, and get feedback from your colleagues. Although it may seem as simple as summarizing your research and sharing your knowledge, successful research paper PowerPoint presentation examples show us that there’s a little bit more than that involved.

In this article, we’ll highlight how to make a PowerPoint presentation from a research paper, and what to include (as well as what NOT to include). We’ll also touch on how to present a research paper at a conference.

Purpose of a Research Paper Presentation

The purpose of presenting your paper at a conference or forum is different from the purpose of conducting your research and writing up your paper. In this setting, you want to highlight your work instead of including every detail of your research. Likewise, a presentation is an excellent opportunity to get direct feedback from your colleagues in the field. But, perhaps the main reason for presenting your research is to spark interest in your work, and entice the audience to read your research paper.

So, yes, your presentation should summarize your work, but it needs to do so in a way that encourages your audience to seek out your work, and share their interest in your work with others. It’s not enough just to present your research dryly, to get information out there. More important is to encourage engagement with you, your research, and your work.

Tips for Creating Your Research Paper Presentation

In addition to basic PowerPoint presentation recommendations, which we’ll cover later in this article, think about the following when you’re putting together your research paper presentation:

• Know your audience : First and foremost, who are you presenting to? Students? Experts in your field? Potential funders? Non-experts? The truth is that your audience will probably have a bit of a mix of all of the above. So, make sure you keep that in mind as you prepare your presentation.

Know more about: Discover the Target Audience .

• Your audience is human : In other words, they may be tired, they might be wondering why they’re there, and they will, at some point, be tuning out. So, take steps to help them stay interested in your presentation. You can do that by utilizing effective visuals, summarize your conclusions early, and keep your research easy to understand.
• Running outline : It’s not IF your audience will drift off, or get lost…it’s WHEN. Keep a running outline, either within the presentation or via a handout. Use visual and verbal clues to highlight where you are in the presentation.
• Where does your research fit in? You should know of work related to your research, but you don’t have to cite every example. In addition, keep references in your presentation to the end, or in the handout. Your audience is there to hear about your work.
• Plan B : Anticipate possible questions for your presentation, and prepare slides that answer those specific questions in more detail, but have them at the END of your presentation. You can then jump to them, IF needed.

What Makes a PowerPoint Presentation Effective?

You’ve probably attended a presentation where the presenter reads off of their PowerPoint outline, word for word. Or where the presentation is busy, disorganized, or includes too much information. Here are some simple tips for creating an effective PowerPoint Presentation.

• Less is more: You want to give enough information to make your audience want to read your paper. So include details, but not too many, and avoid too many formulas and technical jargon.
• Clean and professional : Avoid excessive colors, distracting backgrounds, font changes, animations, and too many words. Instead of whole paragraphs, bullet points with just a few words to summarize and highlight are best.
• Know your real-estate : Each slide has a limited amount of space. Use it wisely. Typically one, no more than two points per slide. Balance each slide visually. Utilize illustrations when needed; not extraneously.
• Keep things visual : Remember, a PowerPoint presentation is a powerful tool to present things visually. Use visual graphs over tables and scientific illustrations over long text. Keep your visuals clean and professional, just like any text you include in your presentation.

Know more about our Scientific Illustrations Services .

Another key to an effective presentation is to practice, practice, and then practice some more. When you’re done with your PowerPoint, go through it with friends and colleagues to see if you need to add (or delete excessive) information. Double and triple check for typos and errors. Know the presentation inside and out, so when you’re in front of your audience, you’ll feel confident and comfortable.

How to Present a Research Paper

If your PowerPoint presentation is solid, and you’ve practiced your presentation, that’s half the battle. Follow the basic advice to keep your audience engaged and interested by making eye contact, encouraging questions, and presenting your information with enthusiasm.

We encourage you to read our articles on how to present a scientific journal article and tips on giving good scientific presentations .

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Improve the flow and writing of your research paper with Language Editing Plus. This service includes unlimited editing, manuscript formatting for the journal of your choice, reference check and even a customized cover letter. Learn more here , and get started today!

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How is the assessment of mathematics learning during the COVID-19 pandemic? Research review in Indonesia

• Geong, Efrem Alfandro Pascal
• Hidayati, Kana

This article was written to review the existing research in Indonesia related to the process of assessing mathematics learning during the COVID-19 pandemic. The results of the study focused on the obstacles, the alternative assessments, and the benefits of the assessment. Articles were analysed qualitatively through five steps, namely identification of research questions, identification of relevant articles, article selection, article mapping, and compiling, summarising, and reporting the results. The research data was sourced from 31 research articles. The results of the content analysis of the article show that some of the assessment constraints are: (1) the assessment only focuses on the cognitive domain; (2) educators do not directly observe students' skills; (3) poor internet connection; (4) students do not have gadgets; (5) educators have difficulty making exam questions; (6) lack of mastery of technology; (7) students commit fraud; (8) lack of student motivation; and (9) lack of peer help. Alternative assessments during the pandemic, namely: (1) online tests; (2) quizizz; (3) Google Classroom; (4) portfolio; (5) self-assessment; (6) face-to-face learning through home visits; (7) attitude assessment by looking at the activity, responsibility for doing assignments, and student attendance; (8) knowledge assessment is seen from the student's ability to work on the questions; (9) assessment of skills with performance techniques; (10) formative assessment, (11) poster presentation; and (11) students get teacher empathy. The benefits of online assessment are (1) fast feedback, (2) students can control their assessment, (3) saving time, (4) reducing cheating, and (5) supporting students' higher-order thinking skills.

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