How to give a talk

How to give a talk...

My favorite tips on how to give a talk are by Gordon Bower (click here to see the original). Below are a set of tips compiled from Gordon, other excellent talk-givers, and my personal experiences at conferences and on the job market.

First, the bad news: the best thing for a talk is an interesting topic and some compelling data. The good news is that improving every other aspect of your talk is really easy. Here are some tried and true do's and don'ts.

1. Be prepared:

Find out as much about your audience and your room as possible. Who will be there? Only social psychologists? All kinds of psychologists? Undergrads? Physicists? Art history professors?
Dress sharp, but never wear anything uncomfortable. I always wonder at people who try to give talks in too-tight pants or ties, or improbable hair arrangements. You will give a much better talk if you're comfortable. If your tie strangles you, forget the tie. Give at least one practice talk wearing what you plan to wear for the big event. Make sure you can raise your arm to point at things (without splitting seams or revealing mid-riff).
When traveling, always bring an extra copy of your talk somehow (e.g., on a USB flash drive), and always put a copy of your talk somewhere you can easily download it. If something goes wrong with your computer or with the file on your computer, you'll still be covered.
Never check your talk at the airport. Keep it with you. In fact, if you're on the job circuit, don't check anything. You're in a stressful enough situation already - no need to make it worse.
Bring a bottle of water with you. This can be especially useful for Q&A sessions where you can take strategic sips of water to give yourself extra time to think of an answer.
Do not let anyone darken the room. The darker it gets, the less alert people will be. If you must talk in a dark room, bring a small flashlight so you can see your notes.

2. Practice

You must practice giving your talk, several times. First, do it alone. It's weird talking to an empty room, but you'll get used to it. What this practice buys you is the transformation of your talk from an abstract set of points into a verbalized story. It gives you the chance to find and fix any verbal hiccups you may have in the talk, or any places where you might be missing transitions or explanations.
Get as wide a practice audience as you can. And listen to the practice audience's advice! When listeners tell you that something is confusing, they are always, by definition, correct.
If you're preparing for a job talk, do two practice runs for a selected audience of close student and faculty friends and then do one more with a broader local audience before taking it on the road.
You will probably need to practice the beginnings and ends of your talk more than the middle (presenting data and methods is generally the easier part).

3. Get Into It

Everybody gets nervous before talks. Don't let nervousness get in your way - take advantage of it instead. A slightly nervous edge can add zing to a talk. Feeling nervous is very similar to feeling excited, so tell yourself you're just excited and act that way.
Exude self-confidence. Stand up straight, smile. Be excited to be there. Be excited about your work.
Right before your talk, chat with an audience member or the organizer of the talk - this takes up the time you would otherwise spend sitting alone and getting nervous.
Don't give your talk sitting down. Unless you're giving a very informal talk to only a few people, stand. If you've got more than 10 people, they'll expect a performance.
Talk to the audience, not the screen.
Talk simply, like you're telling a story to a friend. Don't orate -- it makes you seem really full of yourself.
A talk is not a written paper. Talks have an informal narrative style and are dramatic rather than detailed or completely informative.
The model for the short talk is the campfire story -- teller of a mystery. Talk informally as though you were telling your grandmother what you did and why. Complexity of expression is uncorrelated with wisdom, intelligence, and originality; it's perfectly correlated with audience puzzlement and boredom.
Do not read your slides to the audience. The slides should be mostly pictures, plus a very sparse outline of the talk to help the audience follow what you're saying. Ultimately, reading a talk is better than giving a terrible, incoherent talk --but only a little.
Ask real and rhetorical questions to keep people actively engaged. Get people to raise their hands to make predictions. (who thinks it will work this way?)
Don't be self-deprecating in job talks. It's fine in lab talks and other lectures, but not job talks.
Humor can be great, but there are several cautions. (1) it has to be topical - don't put up Dilbert cartoons that only sort of relate to your topic - that's lame. (2) it damn well better be funny. If you're not a good joke teller, don't do it. A failed joke can be really difficult to recover from.

4. Use Figures & Examples

Use lots of examples.
Use lots of figures. A picture is worth way more than a thousand words. Try to develop a talk that is entirely in pictures. Then go back and add one or two words per slide.
Use props. Talks are about show and tell and keeping your audience amused, so you can inform them painlessly about what you are doing. Whenever possible, bring and use props: videos, examples of stimuli, etc.
Make sure all your demos work. Cue the videos and check the projectors - make sure everything works. Practice turning things on and off (so the audience doesn't have to watch the vacation videos that you recorded that interesting vision demo over because now you can't figure out how to make the VCR stop).
Use color. Audiences these days expect color. But don't go overboard. Making your talk visually attractive is one thing, but don't turn your slides into a circus. Different projectors will make your colors look different - the more colors you use, the better the chances they'll look really gak.
Don't switch color schemes from slide to slide. If the "verb recall" column is yellow in slide 1, then it damn well better be yellow in slide 2.
In visuals, make it simple, clear and obvious. Don't clutter slides with irrelevancies. No more than 7 words on a visual. No more than 7 numbers on a visual (round them to one or two significant digits).
One word can abbreviate whole phrases. If you have lots of results you must show, use many slides, not one cluttered slide. Idealize graphs, no lightning-bolt data. Ask: are the exact values all that terribly important for my point?
In PowerPoint, NO fancy fade-ins. No slides swooshing in from the left, no dissolves. Just don't.

5. Be VERY VERY Clear

The three most important things in a talk are: clarity, clarity, and clarity. Nothing matters if the audience doesn't understand what you did and why.
Explain the task in terms of what the subjects were doing, not in terms of abstract theoretical manipulations.
Be redundant. Say the same thing several times in different ways. It's all new to your audience, so give them the best chance of understanding you.
If some manipulation is particularly hairy, make a picture or diagram explaining it. Before you go on, it's ok to say "Does anyone have a clarification question about how this worked before I go on?"
Present data kindly. If you must present lots of data, present each piece separately on a different slide. PowerPoint makes it really easy to do "multiple overlay" slides, so you can build up information gradually. These can be very effective.
Present the most important data first! (Present manipulation checks first when it is necessary for your argument, but not otherwise). What the audience wants to know is "Did your experiment support your primary hypothesis?" so answer this question first.
Speak slowly, loudly, and clearly. Make sure the people in the back can hear you.
Use large fonts. Anything smaller than 24 point is too small. If you photocopy a paper from a book and project that, you deserve severe punishment.
Text is clearest when it's black on a white background. Think maximum contrast!

6. Do a lot of pointing

Point to the projection (on the big screen), not the source (your computer screen). People can't see your computer screen, so pointing things out on it is doing them no good. This is a simple theory of mind task. The projection (on the big screen) is the shared artifact - both you and your audience can see it, so that's where you should be pointing.
Some people like to use their mouse to point at things. I say, go up to the screen and point at it with your hand. Not only do you get more exercise waving your arms around, but it is also much more effective at directing your audience's attention. You want the audience to keep their attention on you. When you go up to the screen and point, they're with you. When you use your computer mouse to point to a part of the screen, they have to look past you toward the screen and you lose their attention.
Unless the screen is way too big and way too far away, don't use a laser pointer. Your hand or a pen, or a stick work really well. The humans in your audience are very practiced at following points with arms and fingers. And you are very practiced at pointing with your arms and fingers. Take advantage of this expertise. I always marvel at people standing next to a screen that is barely even their height and searching the whole room for a laser pointer. You came with a pointer built in! Just use your finger!
When the room you're talking in is too big to point at things with your hand, use a laser pointer. Take your time laser-pointing at things, so that people have time to find that little red dot. People cannot find where a laser points very quickly. Try not to zip it around and circle things. You'll make your audience dizzy. Often speakers say "like this here" and noone gets to see where they were pointing because the laser is already somewhere else.
Laser pointers are useful, but have their downfalls. If you're nervous, the pointer dramatically magnifies the shaking of your hand. That leaves a bad impression. Very few speakers are capable of speaking without playing with the thing that's in their hands. It's distracting. It's best not to have things in your hands when giving a talk.
That said, it is important to point things out to your audience to direct their attention. So if you have no other choice, using a laser pointer is much better than not pointing at all.
Put up a slide only a moment before you want to refer to it. Give the audience time to read it or describe it to them. Remove the slide when you want the audience to attend fully to you again. This keeps the attention of your audience exactly where you want it. In powerpoint, you can either insert blank slides (if you just want to talk for a while without a slide) or use the black-out or white-out functions (press 'b' to make the screen go black, or 'w' to make the screen go white during your slide presentation).

7. You probably shouldn't be using overheads any more, but if you are:

If you're using an overhead projector, also, point at the projection on the screen, not at your transparency. Most people pointing at the overhead projector will end up getting their shoulder in the way and blocking the projection. Very annoying. Pointing at the overhead projector will often jiggle the slide. Also annoying. In general, don't touch the slides after you've put them up. Step away from the projector.
Do not adjust the slide unless it's falling off. It makes you look really nervous. Get away from the projector and point at the screen. You won't be blocking the view of your audience and you won't look as nervous.
Be sure the projection is on the screen. Whenever you put a new slide on, take a look back to see that it's displayed properly on the screen.
Do not cover up parts of the slide. The "overhead striptease" act can be very distracting. If you'd like to keep something in suspense or build up information gradually on a slide, use an overlay transparency.

8. Start well

In a job talk, start by saying something like "I'm honored to be here today. Thank you very much for inviting me. I'm very excited to have this opportunity to tell you about my research."
Prepare your first two sentences like they were a Madison-Avenue advertisement for you and your talk. Grab the audience in these first sentences.
Example weak start: ``The research I will tell you about stems from earlier work by Johnson published in Cognitive Psychology which led to a lot of follow ups; and I want to thank my collaborators, Jim and Dorothy Smith''.
A better start: ``How do we understand language'? How can I figure out the meaning of what you say? Some people believe we have a mental dictionary with fixed entries and we assemble the meanings out of this fixed dictionary. Another theory is that we only have flexible procedures which decompose compound phonetic strings into basic morphemes from which we compute a meaning for the utterance . . .''
I usually have the first few sentences of my talk written out in front of me just to get me started on the right foot. Same with the concluding two sentences. Depending on the length of the talk, I often also have a few key connectors written out so that I remember to tie different parts of the talk together clearly and without rambling. Note: writing out these key phrases doesn't mean you should then read them to the audience. You should speak them like you would say anything else. The written phrases are there to remind me not to ramble, and instead to state the point clearly and succinctly at these crucial points in the talk (beginnings, ends, and connectors).
Get interest and attention first, with a rhetorical question, anecdote, or startling statement or paradox. Assume your audience is an Introductory Psych class of undergraduates.
Before you can say what you did, you must say why you did it. What's the big picture?
In longer talks, tell the audience your plan. You should also come back to it to let them know where they are in the talk as you go along. This can really help people put it all together.
In your plan, focus on the questions you're trying to answer. This will get your audience interested and will also help them understand what you're doing.
example useless plan:

introduction
previous studies
experiment 1
experiment 2
experiment 3
summary
further questions

much better plan:

The history of cats and dogs
Do dogs really chase cats?
Why do dogs chase cats?
How do cats feel about this?
Will cats and dogs ever get along?
Implications for the Arab-Israeli conflict.

This way you can come back throughout your talk and answer the questions one by one.

9. Say only the right things, and not any of the other things

You must be very selective of what you can say in a short time. Most short speeches can barely carry one main idea plus its support. Resist the temptation to tell everything you know or every thought you had about it: only the most interesting and important thing can be said.
Ask yourself "What is the take-home point here?" Say the take-home message early and often.
A narrative style is preferable in talks. Research is done to tell a story, going from problem, goal, plan through actions (observations) to outcomes, resolution, and a moral (conclusion). Avoid a written journal-style organization.
Describing your experiments. You are not duty-bound to describe every condition of your experiment, not every result, not every analysis. In particular, suppress complications and unresolved loose-ends or incomprehensible pieces of results -- don't lay your confusions on the poor listener. Your goal is to tell a simple coherent story, to interest and to entertain, not to tell the complete unvarnished messy truth. Your first rule is: tell a simple mystery story that has a neat wrap-up and don't confuse or bore your audience. Not telling the whole truth is not the same as telling a falsehood. Speeches are for conviction, written papers for corrections!
Describing your data. In narrative talks, descriptive and inferential statistics should be suppressed. Speak "eyeball-effects" rather than F-values. Say "These words were remembered very much better than those", NOT "The mean recall for the two categories was 8.76 and 4.37, and difference gave an F of 13.8 which with 1 and 14 degrees of freedom was statistically significant at the .01 level." A better attitude towards description is "Holy baloney, look at that!"
The first thing to do when you put up a graph is to explain what the axes are and what the colors mean. "On the vertical axis I've plotted reaction time, and here we have females on the left, and males on the right. The yellow bars represent how quickly people solved spatial problems, and the red bars how quickly they solved verbal problems." Only now are you ready to say what you found.
Bring up alternative explanations or potential problems when you think people in your audience will think of them. Don't wait till the end of the talk. If you wait till the end, you'll have people in the audience who've been sitting and stewing on this criticism ever since they thought of it, and they probably haven't heard a word you've said afterward. You don't need to address the criticism right then. You just need to acknowledge it, and say that you would be glad to discuss later how to address it or how to reconcile the two viewpoints. It puts your audience at ease, and they will be more accepting of what you say knowing that you're being thoughtful and forthcoming with them.
If you want to say something controversial or speculative, mark it as such. The audience will be much more accepting if they know that you know that what you're saying is speculative. It makes you look careful and thoughtful, but at the same time interesting.
Especially if your research topic is new or controversial, structure your talk in terms of questions, and avoid making claims. For example, "Are concepts perceptually grounded? We did some experiments to try to answer this question." is much better than "Our claim is that all concepts are perceptually grounded. We did some experiments to try to prove this." The content is similar, but will produce very different reactions from the audience. People are very interested in questions, and they are very interested in disproving claims. When you ask questions, the audience will think with you. When you make unsupported claims, the audience will be thinking against you.
Summarize in three steps: First summarize your findings. Second, show the meaning of your findings for the "Big Picture". Finally, point out what other provocative questions your findings suggest.
Do not go over your given time. Even if you start late, it's a courtesy to the audience to end as close to on time as possible. Talking overtime can easily lose you all the points you've previously gained. If you have more material that you desperately want to cover, make it easy for the audience to ask you a question about it afterward. You can say, "we did another experiment to address this last question, but since I am running short on time, I am hoping someone will just ask me a question about this during the question session." With that kind of invitation, someone usually will.

10. Take questions and learn from them

Don't worry about "tough" questions: they almost never come. You know more about the research than anybody, so you have a great advantage. Don't be intimidated by "big shots" in the audience (if there are any): most are struggling to comprehend, and ask only simple questions.
If a question comes you don't know about, it's okay to say "I don't know". Or to say "That's a tough one I haven't thought about -- or I'll need more time to think about that" -- or "Fine idea -- would be worth trying in an experiment". You don't have to have instant answers for everything. If you don't understand a questioner, ask him to rephrase it so you can understand. If he asks three questions, answer any one of them and move on.
Plant at least one pithy question with a friend so he/she can direct it to you in case no one else pops up with a quick question. Often the audience needs time to think of some question to ask about -- so give the audience a long time to come up with a question.
Learn how to say "shush": If you feel that questions are leading you off your track, inform your questioners of this fact, and tell them you will return to the issue later on.
This is your talk. Don't let someone else take control of it by forcing you to deviate from your organizational plan. If someone requires clarification, then answer them briefly and continue. If someone wants to argue philosophy (e.g., "But don't you think that psychology errs when it thinks of people as real?") don't take the bait. A good standby is something like "That's an interesting question and I've given it some thought. In fact, I'll be addressing that issue in a few minutes, but if I don't answer that particular question, please ask it again at the end of my talk. "
Don't agree to criticisms you don't understand.
Don't get defensive.
Be interested in the questions. You are not defending a fortress, you are talking openly about scientific ideas with interested colleagues. If someone does try to attack you, turn them to your side by saying something like "That's exactly the kind of thing I think we need to spend more time thinking about. So, let's think together about what kind of evidence we would find convincing." Then they're thinking with you, not against you.
Prepare slides that address common questions. This is where practice comes in handy. If you get some question more than once, prepare a slide to address it. Your audience will be very impressed with your foresight.

Some more pages on how to give a talk:

Gordon Bower's tips - the best!

Some great tips on giving a talk

some more thoughts on giving a talk

and some more on giving a talk

Tips for surviving the job search

tips for giving a great lecture