13.1 Plan Your Oral Presentation
13.1.2 Understand the Difference between Listeners and Readers
13.2 Design Your Presentation to Be Listened To
13.2.1 Sketch Your Introduction
13.2.2 Design Notes for the Body of Your Talk So That You Can Understand Them at a Glance
13.2.3 Model Your Conclusion on Your Introduction
You may be too early in your career to think about publishing your work, but you’ll probably share some of it as an oral presentation to your class. Working up a talk is easier than preparing a written report, but doing it well still requires a plan and some practice. In fact, the ability to stand up and talk about your work clearly and cogently is a skill that you’ll find crucial in any career you pursue. If you’re working on a PhD dissertation, you probably expect to submit your work for publication eventually, but you should look for opportunities to present it as a talk before you send it off to a professional journal.
In this chapter, we show you how to use your plan for your written text to prepare a talk. We also discuss a hybrid form of presentation called a poster, which combines elements of writing and speech. Finally, we discuss how to prepare a conference proposal so that you’ll get an invitation to give a talk.
Talks have some advantages over writing. You get immediate feedback during the question-and-answer period afterward, responses that may be less severely critical than they would be to your written work, especially if you frame your presentation as only auditioning new ideas or testing new data. But to profit from those responses, you must plan a talk just as carefully as you would a written report.
You will probably have only about twenty minutes for your talk. (If you are reading, which is rarely a good idea, that means no more than seven to ten double-spaced pages.) So you must boil down your work to its essence or focus on just part of it. Here are three common options:
■ Problem statement with a sketch of your argument. If your problem is new, focus on its originality. Start with a short introduction: Brief literature review + Question + Consequences of not knowing an answer + Claim (review 9.2); then explain your reasons, summarizing your evidence for each.
■ Summary of a subargument. If your argument is too big, focus on a key subargument. Mention your larger problem in your introduction and conclusion, but be clear that you’re addressing only part of it.
■ Methodology or data report. If you offer a new methodology or source of data, explain why it matters. Start with a brief problem statement, then focus on how your new methods or data solve it.
Speakers have endless ways to torment their listeners. Some robotically recite memorized sentences or hunch over pages reading every word, rarely making eye contact with their audience. Others ramble through slides of data with no more structure than And now this slide shows … Such presenters think passive listeners are like active readers or engaged conversationalists. They are not.
■ When we read, we can pause to reflect and puzzle over difficult passages. To keep track of organization, we can look at subheads, even paragraph indentations. If our mind wanders, we reread.
■ When we converse, we can pose questions as we think of them and ask the other person to clarify a line of reasoning or just to repeat it.
But as listeners in an audience we can do none of those things. We must be motivated to pay attention, and we need help to follow a complicated line of thought. And if we lose its thread, we may drift off into our own thoughts. So when speaking, you have to be explicit about your purpose and your organization, and if you’re reading a paper, you have to make your sentence structure far simpler than in a written report. So favor shorter sentences with consistent subjects (see 11.1.2). Use “I,” “we,” and “you” a lot. What seems clumsily repetitive to readers is usually welcomed by listeners.
To hold your listeners’ attention, you must seem to be not lecturing at them but rather amiably conversing with them, a skill that does not come easily, because few of us can write as we speak and because most of us need notes to keep us on track. If you must read, read no faster than about two minutes a page (at about three hundred words a page).Time yourself reading more slowly than you ordinarily speak. The top of your head is probably not your most attractive feature, so build in moments when you deliberately look straight out at your audience, especially when you’re saying something important. Do that at least once or twice a page.
Far better is to talk from notes, but to do that well you need to prepare them well.
For a twenty-minute talk, you get one shot at motivating your audience before they tune out, so prepare your introduction more carefully than any other part of your talk. Base it on the four-part problem statement described in section 10.1, plus a road map. (The times in parentheses in the list below are rough estimates.)
Use your notes only to remind yourself of the four parts, not as a word-for-word script. If you can’t remember the content, you’re not ready to give a talk. Sketch enough in your notes to remind yourself of the following:
1. the research that you extend, modify, or correct (no more than a minute)
2. a statement of your research question—the gap in knowledge or understanding that you address (thirty seconds or less)
3. an answer to So what? (thirty seconds)
Those three steps are crucial in motivating your listeners. If your question is new or controversial, give it more time. If your listeners know its significance, mention it quickly and go on.
4. Your claim, the answer to your research question (thirty seconds or less)
Listeners need to know your answer up front even more than readers do, so state at least its gist, unless you have a compelling reason to wait for the end. If you do wait, at least forecast your answer.
5. A forecast of the structure of your presentation (ten to twenty seconds). The most useful forecast is an oral table of contents: “First I will discuss …” That can seem clumsy in print, but listeners need more help than readers do. Repeat that structure as you work through the body of your talk.
Rehearse your introduction, not only to get it right but also to be able to look your audience in the eye as you give it. You can look down at notes later.
All told, spend no more than three minutes or so on your introduction.
Do not write your notes as complete sentences (much less paragraphs) that you read aloud; notes should help you see at a glance only the structure of your talk and cue what to say at crucial points. So do not cut and paste sentences from a written text; create your notes from scratch.
Use a separate page for each main point. On each page, write out your main point not as a topic but as a claims, either in a shortened form or (only if you must) in complete sentences. Above it, you might add an explicit transition as the oral equivalent of a subhead: “The first issue is …”
Visually highlight those main points so that you recognize them instantly. Under them, list as topics the evidence that supports them. If your evidence consists of numbers or quotations, you’ll probably have to write them out. Otherwise, know your evidence well enough to be able to talk about it directly to your audience.
Organize your points so that you cover the most important ones first. If you run long (most of us do), you can skip a later section or even jump to your conclusion without losing anything crucial to your argument. Never build up to a climax that you might not reach. If you must skip something, use the question-and-answer period to return to it.
Make your conclusion memorable, because listeners will repeat it when asked, What did Jones say? Learn it well enough to present it looking at your audience, without reading from notes. It should have these three parts:
■ your claim, in more detail than in your introduction (if listeners are mostly interested in your reasons or data, summarize them as well)
■ your answer to So what? (you can restate an answer from your introduction, but try to add a new one, even if it’s speculative)
■ suggestions for more research, what’s still to be done
Rehearse your conclusion so that you know exactly how long it takes (no more than a minute or two). Then when you have that much time remaining, conclude, even if you haven’t finished your last (relatively unimportant) points. If you had to skip one or two points, work them into an answer during the question-and-answer period. If your talk runs short, don’t ad lib. If another speaker follows you, make her a gift of your unused time.
If you’re lucky, you’ll get questions after your talk, so prepare answers for predictable ones. Expect questions about data or sources, especially if you didn’t cover them in your talk. If you address matters associated with well-known researchers or schools of research, be ready to expand on how your work relates to theirs, especially if you contradict or complicate their results or approach. Also be ready to answer questions about a source you never heard of. The best policy is to acknowledge that you haven’t seen it but that you’ll check it out. If the question seems friendly, ask why the source is relevant. Don’t prepare only defensive answers. Use answers to questions to reemphasize your main points or cover matters that you may have left out.
Listen to every question carefully; then to be sure you understand the question, pause before you respond and think about it for a moment. If you don’t understand the question, ask the questioner to rephrase it. Don’t snap back an answer reflexively and defensively. Good questions are invaluable, even when they seem hostile. Use them to refine your thinking.
You can read short quotations or important data aloud for your listeners, but if you have lots of them, create a handout. If you use slides, pass out printed copies. You might hand out an outline of your main points, with white space for notes.
A poster is a large board on which you lay out a summary of your research along with your most relevant evidence. Poster sessions are usually held in hallways or in a large room filled with other presenters. People move from poster to poster, asking questions of the presenters. Posters combine the advantages of writing and speaking. Those who read your poster have more control than a listener, and they can rely on prominent visual signals that you use to organize your material—boxes, lines, colors, and larger and smaller titles.
You can design your poster using available software and websites that produce a serviceable final product. For the text itself, however, follow the guidelines for a paper to be read aloud, with two more considerations:
1. Layer your argument. Present your argument visually in three levels of detail:
■ Highlight an abstract or a problem statement and summary at the top of the poster (box it, use larger type, etc.).
■ Under it, list your reasons as subheads in a section that summarizes your argument.
■ Under that, restate your reasons and group evidence under them.
2. Explain all graphs and tables. In addition to providing a caption for each graphic, add a sentence or two explaining what is important in the data and how they support your reason and claim (review 7.7 and 8.3.1).
Conferences are good opportunities to share your work, but to be invited to speak, you usually have to submit a proposal. Write it not as a paragraph-by-paragraph summary of your work but as a thirty-second “elevator story”—what you would tell someone who asked, as you both stepped into an elevator on the way to your talk, What are you saying today? In fact, a carefully prepared and rehearsed elevator story is especially useful for any conversation about your work, particularly interviews.
An elevator story has three parts:
■ a problem statement that highlights an answer to So what?
■ a sketch of your claim and major reasons
■ a summary of your most important evidence
Conference reviewers are less interested in your exact words than in why anyone should want to listen to them. Your aims are to pose your research question and to answer the reviewer’s So what? So focus on how your claim contributes to your field of research, especially on what’s novel or controversial about it. If you address a question established by previous research, mention it, then focus on your new data or your new claim, depending on which is more original.
Be aware that reviewers will often know less about your topic than you do and may need help to see the significance of your question. So even after you answer that first So what?, ask and answer it again, and if you can, one more time. Whether your role at a conference is to talk or only to listen depends not just on the quality of your research but also on the significance of your question.