Most people use slides when giving a presentation. Unfortunately, most slides are awful. Here are some tips to help.

This is a post I will re-visit each year. Here are the 2016 suggestions:

Do’s
1. Use images and graphs. As much as can reasonably be allowed. Visuals trump words.

2. Make your slides readable. Use at most three font sizes. Large size is for titles/headlines, medium is for your main ideas, small is for supporting ideas. You may use bolding, but avoid italics and underlining as they are hard to read. Ensure contrast between the text and background.

3. Think about going to a blank slide when you want to talk and need the audience’s full attention. Most presentation clickers have a button that can do this. From the TED Talks book: “Just go to a blank, black slide and then the audience will get a vacation from images and pay more attention to your words. Then, when you go back to slides, they will be ready to go back to work.”

Don’ts
1. Don’t use slides made in LaTeX. LaTeX is great for making papers. But it makes boring presentations that look like paper subsets. Presentations aren’t for reading, they’re for listening and seeing. Every presentation I’ve seen where the slides were made in LaTeX Beamer has been boring. And, perhaps worse, each presentation is the same sort of boring, as there seems to be little customization. I’m sure it’s possible to give a good presentation with this tool, but I haven’t seen it.

2. Don’t create slides that work as a stand-alone document. You are there to give your presentation. If everything you want to say is already up on the slides, why are you there? Your job is not to make all-encompassing slides. It is to make slides that support your presentation.

3. Don’t put items on your slides that you don’t want to discuss. If the information is not important enough to mention, it shouldn’t be on your slides. Generally, slides shouldn’t speak for themselves. If you think someone might ask about it, move it to your backup slides.

Should you memorize your presentation? There are two correct answers to this question:
1. No, you shouldn’t memorize your talk, but you should be familiar with the flow and have practiced enough that it sounds natural.
2. Yes, you should memorize your talk so well that it sounds natural, not robotic.

Personally, I don’t memorize wording. But I know memorizing makes certain people feel more relaxed and secure. The important thing is that you practice enough so that your talk sounds natural.

If you don’t memorize and don’t practice, your talk will be littered with “uhs” and “umms” while you try to work out what to say next. That sucks.

If you memorize, but not well enough, you’ll fall into the uncanny valley. From the TED Talks book: “[The Uncanny Valley] is a term borrowed from a phenomenon in computer animation where the technology of animating humanlike characters is super-close to seeming real but is not quite there. The effect is creepy: worse than if the animator had steered clear of realism altogether.” Speakers that try to memorize, but don’t do it well enough, fall here. Their talk will sound robotic and rehearsed. But by persisting with practice, you can fight through the uncanny valley. You need to know the talk so well that recalling it is a snap, no matter where you are interrupted. “Then you can use your conscious attention to focus on the meaning of the words once again.”

(image via Slate)

So what is the conclusion? Practice. Then practice again. By practicing and preparing, you can give a talk that values the audience’s time and wins you support.

For every one minute you exceed your allotted time, 10% more of the audience wants to kill you.

I am a stickler for timing, and I am typically incredibly annoyed when presenters cannot plan well and run overtime. When you run overtime, you are implicitly telling the audience (and any subsequent presenters) that their time is not valuable to you. So my first advice this week is to plan an appropriate presentation length.

Your prepared talk is only one of four things that will happen in your allotted time. The other three things are introductions/setup, questions during the talk, and questions after the talk. When you first take the stage, any introduction and preparation of slides must be considered in your timing. If you are in academia, your talk may be frequently interrupted with clarifying questions or interjections from the crowd. Such questions may be held until the end of the talk for certain kinds of talks. And then, at the end, there will be audience questions about the topic and talk.

If you use all your time on your talk and get no useful questions, your talk has been a failure. Questions can alert you to holes in your current research. Questions can illustrate future avenues of fruitful research. A lack of questions signifies that you either did not interest the audience or you did not leave enough time for questions.

So how much talk should you plan for? Let’s assume you are giving a 22 minute academic presentation. Leave about 5 minutes at the end for questions. Assume 1 minute setup and 3 minutes of interruptions during the talk. That leaves 13 minutes. Plan a talk that you can comfortably give in 13 minutes. Without being rushed. That’s not a long time. You won’t be showing all the details of your research. But at a conference where attendees can hear 20 talks a day, they won’t remember all the details anyway. Your goal is to present motivation, basic approach, and interesting results in order to get other people interested in your research.

If no one interrupts you (saving three minutes), have some backup material on the next most interesting aspect of your work to show.

If no one asks questions, start the Q&A session by asking for advice on a specific aspect of the research. Don’t just let the five minute Q&A time wither unused. If you get too many questions and are out of time, offer to take more questions offline after the presentation.

For a talk that won’t be interrupted (questions at the end, if at all, like a TED talk), here is the timing suggestion from the TED book: “Your finish line is your time times 0.9. Write and rehearse a talk that is nine-tenths the time you were given: 1 hour = 54 minutes, 10 minutes = 9, 18 minutes = 16:12. Then get on stage and ignore the clock. You’ll have breathing room to pace yourself, to pause, to screw up a little, to milk the audience’s response. Plus your writing will be tighter and you’ll stand out from the other speakers who are dancing to the rhythms of the same time limit.”