Effective Communication in Academic Presentations, Lecture notes of Geography

Download Effective Communication in Academic Presentations and more Lecture notes Geography in PDF only on Docsity! Tips on Giving a Short Geography Presentation by Mark Fonstad PREPARING THE TALK: 1. Your talk is an advertisement for other people to talk with you more about your work afterwards, or for them to read a paper of yours, or to work with you. It is not a replacement for these things. People often try to put in WAY too much detail (and sometimes even too much content) into their talks. This leads listeners down the path of missing the big message of your talk, which you had better have figured out. 2. Presentations are should include three things. (1) Communication of your ideas, (2) Persuasion of others towards your viewpoint, and (3) Entertainment of the audience. Anything that doesn’t serve these three things should be removed from your presentation. 3. Have something interesting and unique to say. You might be surprised how many presentations at national meetings spend lots of time talking about what the speaker is planning to do in the future, or all the things that have been done on the topic in the past. A little of those things go a long way. Work hard to make sure you have at least some interesting results to show, or new interpretations of old results, or something else that will be of interest to an academic audience. 4. One of the biggest mistakes many speakers make is assuming that a talk can be arranged and presented as if it were a written document. That can’t be done well. The reason is that human brains process written information quite differently than audiovisual information. One example of the difference is in material organization. In a paper, it is common to write a logical, linear argument building up to a conclusion at the end. The problem with this approach in a talk is that if an observer misses the point of a single slide, all could be lost. A much better approach to organization is the ―onion‖ model. START with your main message, PROCEED by adding content depth in successive layers around the main message, always returning to the main message between layers. Since the main message and the main ideas are repeated often, a listener can still follow most of the talk even after dozing off for a minute. Also the talk does not get into trouble near the end when the speaker is running out of time, because by then, the most important things have been said already and the speaker has no reason to worry. 5. Either extemporaneously speak, memorize your talk, or speak off of notecard notes. DO NOT construct slides with a main intention being that you can read off of them. The main rule is this: Minimize words and maximize images. You don’t want your audience to have to read – you want them to THINK. Many, many students put lots of text on slides as a mental crutch because they haven’t practiced enough and are trying to lower their stage fright. It just makes things worse for the viewer. In some rooms, it is hard for the speaker to even see the screen very well, so you certainly shouldn’t be relying it for your own speaking. 6. Geographers often have a problem of spending way too much of their precious time talking about all the extraneous details of their study area, rather than focusing just on those study area qualities of importance to their own study. This will quickly eat up most of your time. 7. Ruthlessly remove as much text as possible from your slides. I rarely have more than a couple of lines of text on a slide, and as a result I can show a lot more figures and people remember these images much better. 8. Bulleted lists are just about the worst things to put in a Powerpoint presentation. Lists like this work well for communicating information in written documents, but not in verbal ones. People can read through these lists faster than you can speak them, meaning you will disconnect your audience’s thoughts from your own voice. Also, bulleted lists are one more way of keeping you from looking at the audience; your tendency will be to read the bullets. 9. Fonts smaller than about 24 point basically can’t be seen well by much of an audience. I often use 38 point text and 42-50 point titles. As wise speakers rarely put more than twelve words on a slide, there's plenty of room. 10. Avoid black text on simple white backgrounds. A great deal of controversy about whether or not to use light text on dark background versus dark text on light backgrounds exists, but here is the simple fact: if most of your slide is filled with a figure, then it doesn’t matter what the background color scheme is. Avoid multi-color backgrounds or backgrounds with complicated pictures; they distract from your figures. 11. Don’t use (a) fancy fonts, (b) fancy slide changes, or (c) Powerpoint ―chartjunk‖. All of this stuff simply is a distraction and it annoys some people. 12. Avoid complicated software setups. Try to avoid preparing a short talk that requires you having the internet, or needed special software (such as GIS) beyond a presentation package such as Powerpoint. Even embedding video into your powerpoint presentation sometimes causes problems when your talk is moved to a new computer. 13. Unlike printed documents, projected slides do not need wide margins. Yet most speakers put wide bands of empty space on the border of every slide. I feel that they are taunting the audience: ―I could have used a readable font and big pictures, but I decided to do extra work to make them illegible.‖