Scenario 7: General Presentation Skills

It has to be said – some presentations are just awful. After 5 minutes the audience is confused and their minds drift to places they'd rather be. The speaker knows that things are slipping out of control, but can't stop now and so plunges deeper. I'm sure that we have all sat through seminars like this, and, even worse, one of us may have been presenting. On the plus side, I'm sure that we have all sat through excellent presentations too – the hour seems to fly by as you hang on the presenters every word and you come out feeling enlightened. But what's the difference? Surely it's more than just the extra cup of coffee you have some mornings.

Your task is to discuss general presentations skills and provide a summary that can be used by other students. There are lots of references on the web, some specifically for statistics presentations, so make good use of the computers if you need. Here are some questions to help guide your thinking, although they are by no means exhaustive:

  1. What are some general presentation guidelines? Have you seen a terrible presentation? What made it so bad?

1)

  1. Keep focused, clearly specify what is the point and what question to answer
  2. Keep it simple, not too much information on each slide
  3. Pictures and toy examples are helpful to understand
  4. Be aware of the pace and timing
  5. Face to audiences and eye contact, being energetic and exciting about his/her own work
  6. Tailored to the audiences
  7. The slides are complementary to the talks
  8. Speak loud and clearly
  9. Double check the slides and make sure that they show correctly. Do not use color in green and yellow
  10. Explain the points instead of reading
  11. Be well prepared. Do rehearsal.
  12. Use graph instead of table /text if you can
  13. Do more talks so you can master all the guidelines above
  14. See the documents online such as

2) They use too many notation and symbols

They are afraid of reiteration.

They jus read the title, not breaking the whole long title into parts

  1. Have you seen a great presentation? What made it so good?

See 1.

  1. Have you made a terrible presentation? Why? Describe what you would do differently.
    Anything opposite to 1) is bad.
  1. Have you made a great presentation? How did you pull it off?

Yes , following 1.