Presenting for Dummies
Now here’s the deal: one of the most central key activities for researchers is the presentation of their findings. Which is great – if the presentation are acceptable. Now there are a few very basic rules that most people should have heard about by the time they are an undergrad student
Slide Content
Slides are not meant to be made up of one or two sentences that strech over the entire slide. The presenter should try to fluently speak about his topic using the slides as a lead for his talk rather than reading the content out load. The audience will read the notes prior to listening to the presenter and then use them as clues during the talk. By filling the slides with an endless amount of words, this reading will obviously interfer with the viewers attention listening to the presentation. The audience will be unable to follow the talk.
Referencing
Using references to other work is good and important. It is always informative and helpful to know what other people are doing and to include this information in the presentation. Providing a full blown reference on a slide is often not feasible. Hence, most presenters move the full reference to a bibliography and use only abbreviations when refering. In most papers, simple numbering is used for these abbreviations. And this is fine in papers. The reader can simply skip ahead if he reads of a reference he might be interested in and identify the source. In presentations, however, this skipping ahead is not possible. Latest after the first three references displayed with numbers, the user will loose track on which numbers are being used in what context. The refencing will become useless. If you refer inside an application it is wiser to use more descriptive abbreviations such as the authors last names plus the year.
more rules might follow…