Mastering Scientific Presentations
1. Prepare Clear Content
Many scientific presentations suffer from too little clarity and too much content. Lecturers too often run through the slides, lose their audience at the very beginning. You should learn to deliver a clear presentation by setting distinct goals and finding vivid examples that make your talk “sticky” and memorable.
2. Design Proper Slides
Today's leading software for scientific presentations is PowerPoint: a powerful tool, however, often poorly used. Lecturers frequently try to remind themselves what they wanted to say by reading their own bullets – facing the projection screen instead of their audience. With overfilled, graphically cluttered, visually incoherent slides they try to support their speech. You should do better.
3. Be Convincing on Stage
Your talk stands or falls with your body language and spoken word. Aside valuable content you must be able to deliver it in a convincing way that motivates your audience to continuously following you. Many great researchers miss this chance and obligation. In this seminar you can learn how to improve based on a sample talk you give and the feedback that you receive for it by your peers.
Content
- Prepare clear content: focus your audience, find your take home message
- Have a strong start and end
- Tell a vivid story: Create “Brain Cinema” with examples and comparisons
- The Six Golden Rules of Slide Design (How many words? – How many slides?…)
- PowerPoint tech tips
- Reworking slides in the workshop and receiving feedback on the new version
- Body language: where to put your hands – and other questions
- A 3-min-presentation of each participant, video analysis of it, feedback and a
second version of this talk integrating the insides made during the seminar
Methods
Mixture of trainer input, practical exercises, participants’ presentations and discussion. Each participant sends in a sample presentation before and will conduct a 3-minutes’ excerpt of one of his earlier talks. You have a chance to learn from feedback and from video analysis.
Preparation required
In order to participate you will have to come prepared for a 3 minutes’ scientific sample talk of yours and send in a set of presentation slides to the trainer. Further information follows before the seminar starts.
Trainer
Dr. Matthias Mayer, www.mmsc.de
