Presentations

Yesterday I held a presentation for a community of hobby enthusiasts in my field.

Writing presentations can be quite enlightening, since you ideally should know what you're talking about. Granted, I think it's easier to talk to non-specialists because then you can get away with more handwaving, but sometimes, when you want to explain stuff in the most basic way possible, it requires you to think things through - what's really going on in this process I'm trying to describe? How can it be explained in plain words?

There are some of things I loathe when it comes to listening to a presentation:

• Slides containing walls of text

Like this

• When the slides are exact copies of the speaker's manuscript
• When the speaker provides too little background. I would rather hear things one time too many than one time too little.

I therefore try to heed these problematic points when I make presentations, and I work by the following guidelines:

• I view slides not as the main conveyors of information, but rather as a tool to complement what I say. What I say is the most important thing in a presentation - not what's on the slides.
• I try to illustrate my points with pictures when possible - it's much easier to grasp and you don't have to read while the presenter is talking
• When I have to resort to text, I try to keep it as short and simple as possible. The slides provide cues for what I will say, but they're only cues, not manuscripts.
• I try (time permitting) to provide as much background as the listeners need to understand what I'm talking about.

The last point of course requires you to know your audience. My audience yesterday was quite varied in terms of background - some understand math, some don't. I wanted to explain a little bit how we analyse data in my field, which required me to explain Fourier decomposition and power spectrum analysis to the audience. I didn't quite succeed, even if I did it as basic as I could. However, the more math-savvy parts of the audience grasped what I said. So it would have been a choice between just dropping my goal of explaining what we do, and having a section of the talk being unintelligible. My choice was the latter even if I didn't know that's what I chose.

As for choosing the style of your slides: sometimes I think certain slide styles can look cool, but elaborate slide designs can sometimes take focus away from what you're saying. I use the Latex beamer class with just a very clean setup for my presentations.