The Acagamic

In the six­ties Marshall McLuhan already said that “the medium through which infor­ma­tion is trans­mit­ted strongly influ­ences how the infor­ma­tion will be received by its audi­ence”. Even today some peo­ple have not under­stood that the “medium is the mes­sage”. This shock­ingly came to my mind, when I saw some oral stu­dent pre­sen­ta­tions last week at HGO, where I cur­rently pur­sue my PhD. Now this arti­cle is espe­cially for those stu­dents lack­ing knowl­edge on how to effec­tively present them­selves and the mes­sage they want to bring across, both ulti­mately being the same thing.

A few constraints 

While some peo­ple are born to present, oth­ers get the total stage fright, when they are in front of a crowd. But in a sci­en­tific edu­ca­tion — no mat­ter what type you are — it is always impor­tant to bring your point across — be it a research paper, your the­sis or just plainly some new idea. This a thing that frus­trates many stu­dents: While they have worked quite hard on their assign­ments (in our case on their board and video games), most of them fail to make it vis­i­ble to their lec­turer or tutor. This has to do with some tough con­straints used in most qual­ity education:

• Time. You usu­ally have approx­i­mately 20 min­utes for class pre­sen­ta­tions. In Germany, you have to present the work of your Master’s the­sis in exactly 20 min­utes. Quite a tough chal­lenge for some­thing that you have worked on for more than 5 months.
• Audience. Usually, the peo­ple sit­ting in front of you know less about the your sub­ject, now can you make your work clear for them with­out being too detailed?
• Setting. Naturally you have to present at a place or on a com­puter that you do not know to well. How can you make sure every­thing works there? This is espe­cially true, if your pre­sen­ta­tion includes videos, games or other software.

Communication is important

While most often found in edu­ca­tion these con­straints may also be equally valid to any other occa­sion where you give a pre­sen­ta­tion. And believe me, University is def­i­nitely not the last place, where you will need to present your­self and your ideas. But this is the only place where it does not mat­ter to much if you make mis­takes, so take this as your big oppor­tu­nity to learn how to make good presentations.

Communicating effec­tively is key fac­tor for per­sonal suc­cess and suc­cess in busi­ness. And talk­ing to a per­son is only one way of com­mu­ni­ca­tion, as the topic sug­gests, your body lan­guage, your per­son­al­ity and appear­ance as well as your mate­r­ial and prepa­ra­tion are all part of the mes­sage that you give to your audience.

Communication is subconscious 

Connecting your desired infor­ma­tion with emo­tional con­no­ta­tions will give them a sub­con­scious anchor in your view­ers’ minds. The sub­con­scious mes­sages your are send­ing all the time is some­thing you need to be aware of dur­ing your presentation.

Most deci­sions are made on an emo­tional basis. Thus, if you want to con­vince your audi­ence to do some­thing, the impres­sion that you make is impor­tant. And this impres­sion is always sub­jec­tive. You can­not change that fact, but you can improve on it once you are aware of it.

Communication is difficult

Having said that the impres­sion you make is of high impor­tance, we should look at some com­mon prob­lems that occur dur­ing stu­dent pre­sen­ta­tions (almost all of them were present dur­ing the stu­dent pre­sen­ta­tions I watched last week). What went wrong?

• Poor or no use of visual media. All stu­dents were told to give their pre­sen­ta­tions with OOo Impress or Power Point, but clearly only 5% seemed to remem­ber that. And if they were using slides, most com­pletely for­got to insert images/video to exem­plify their points.
• No or com­pletely unclear struc­ture. While it was clear that all stu­dents wanted to say how their games func­tion and what hypoth­e­sis this lead to, almost none of them seemed to have a clear struc­ture to bring this across. I felt lost after a few seconds.
• Bad tim­ing. Most of the pre­sen­ta­tions were either way too short or way too long, when the stu­dents either did not want to say too much about their project (SAD! — because they should be proud of their work) or they lost them­selves into details that were not really nec­es­sary to know (ever heard of the KISS prin­ci­ple?).
• Unpractised appear­ance. To present some­thing, it is of utmost impor­tance not only to know what points you will talk about, but also to rehearse your pre­sen­ta­tion, which will lead us to the fol­low­ing tips...

You can­not not communicate

As said before, a lot of sub­con­scious infor­ma­tion is per­ceived while you give your oral pre­sen­ta­tion. The most reveal­ing is body lan­guage. Now accord­ing to one of the lec­tures I had about pre­sen­ta­tions, body lan­guage con­sists mainly of four parts:

• Position. You should always face the audi­ence and at best try to make eye con­tact with every­body in there every once in a while. It is also not good to hide behind fur­ni­ture or to stand to far away from the peo­ple. Another bad habit some peo­ple have is to obscure their pre­sen­ta­tion so that oth­ers can­not read the slides or watch the visual media.
• Movement. While too much walk­ing around and fid­dling with objects (like a pen) can be quite dis­trac­tive for the view­ers, it is impor­tant to elu­ci­date your ideas with ges­tures and also facial expres­sions. Do not be too stiff.
• Posture. A sta­ble but relaxed stand is good to give your­self and your audi­ence con­fi­dence in you. You should also not hide your hands in your pockets.
• Eyes. With your eyes you con­tact your audi­ence directly and they will give you straight atten­tion when you look at them. You should also try not to look on the floor and ceil­ing too often, because this way, your audi­ence will also lose focus from your talk.

A word about speaking

While you speak to peo­ple every­day, it is a bit dif­fer­ent when you are pre­sent­ing. It is all about your voice and how you mod­u­late it. Most peo­ple tend to speak a bit too silent and also too fast when they present. In my expe­ri­ence it is often due to inex­pe­ri­ence of the pre­sen­ter. So, again the counter mea­sure to this is a thor­ough rehearsal. Make a pause, when you want a strong point to sink in. You should always think about the mod­u­la­tion, clar­ity and phras­ing of your speech. If you are non-English speak­ing, you might also want to think about the lan­guage. While in your home coun­try is most often ok to speak in your mother tongue (with­out any hin­der­ing accent), how­ever at a University with inter­na­tional stu­dents, you should con­sider hav­ing the talk or at least your slides in English.

Once you have good slides, do not be mis­taken to just read them to your view­ers, this will imme­di­ately bore every­body and also agi­tate some peo­ple. If you have strong prob­lems mem­o­riz­ing your points, index cards can help, but I per­son­ally pre­fer to rehearse long enough to speak freely. Abbreviations and inap­pro­pri­ate lan­guage are also com­mon fac­tors that will have the same effect on your audi­ence, while per­sonal anec­dotes can help to lighten up your talk a lit­tle bit (how­ever, do not overuse!). Do not be too wordy when you speak and con­cen­trate on the sub­ject and mean­ing of each slide that you want to bring across. Try to use tri­colons (the magic three) for impor­tant points. People will remem­ber those!

Structure your slides

Before we talk about the lay­out of your slides, we will now talk a bit about struc­ture: The seman­tic struc­ture of your pre­sen­ta­tion needs to emi­nent at all times. Whenever you make a new slide think about how it under­mines the main thread. Never lose that focus dur­ing your pre­sen­ta­tion. Also note that like clas­si­cal drama, a good pre­sen­ta­tion has three parts (remem­ber the rule of three?).

• Introduction. The most impor­tant part of your talk is intro­duc­ing your­self and your topic (it can­not hurt to give your talk a fancy name to grab atten­tion and thank the peo­ple for com­ing as well). Here you need to moti­vate your audi­ence to lis­ten to you. Attention is some­thing peo­ple are only will­ing to give away at a cer­tain price, so you need to work on mak­ing a per­fect entrée. The rest will be peanuts then. The bet­ter you plan this, the more it also helps to over­come your ini­tial nervi­ness. You should also include an out­line of your talk so that every­one knows, what you will be talk­ing about (and how long if this is not a given time frame). Whether or not ques­tions are allowed dur­ing the talk may depend­ing on the cir­cum­stances, but should nev­er­the­less quickly be addressed here as well.
• Main Body. Once you have the atten­tion of your audi­ence, it is time to tell them what you have been work­ing on. Communicate all the infor­ma­tion you want and with all the means from above here. The level of detail you go into needs to fit your audi­ence. Make it clear, when you tran­si­tion from one topic to another dur­ing your talk, so peo­ple can keep track of where you are in your pre­sen­ta­tion. Be also aware the most of the infor­ma­tion you will present here will be for­got­ten after your talk (see Pareto prin­ci­ple).
• Conclusion/Ending. Whatever you think your most impor­tant three points are, you need to sum­ma­rize them short and pre­cisely in the end. Next step is to derive the most impor­tant mes­sage of your talk and for­mu­late it clearly as a take-home mes­sage for your audi­ence. Ask your­self what value your talk has added to the life of your audi­ence and how you can make them aware of that. Once every­body feels he/she has gained some­thing from you, you have suc­ceeded. The only thing left for you is to thank every­body for giv­ing you their atten­tion and to leave a pos­i­tive impression.

For the con­tent of your slides you should always remem­ber the com­mon prin­ci­ple of “when in doubt, leave it out”. Concentrate on the key points you want to make and refine your slides over and over. Guy Kawasaki has cer­tainly got a point in his 10 20 30 rule, where he argues that 10 slides are enough for 20 min­utes. So roughly cal­cu­late 2 min­utes for each slide you make and adjust that accord­ing to your given time frame. Visualize when­ever you think it is appro­pri­ate.

Slide design

We have been through a lot in this arti­cle and we will fin­ish with some last words on slide design. Now, a thing I most dis­like about slide design is the wrong choice of color. Be aware that this even hap­pens to University pro­fes­sors a lot. If it was up to me, I would like to NEVER see green/blue on red, red on black, pur­ple on blue, yel­low on white text again, but that would just be too lovely...

Now, when you design the color scheme for your slide, be aware of effec­tive con­trast between back­ground and text color. Also keep in mind the peo­ple with color view­ing defi­cien­cies. If you hand out your slides to stu­dents, also make a print ver­sion of them avail­able that uses black text on white back­ground, oth­er­wise print­ing will become hell for them and it is a waste of toner/ink. This is sadly often for­got­ten by many pro­fes­sors, because it means a bit of extra work for the slide design. For the lazy ones among us, it might be best to stick with clas­sic light back­ground, dark fore­ground schemes (although the oppo­site would be opti­mal for readability/projection in large rooms).

I have already said some­thing about the magic num­ber 3, now 7 is also a bit magic: In the ideal case, you should not use more than seven items on a slide, not more than seven lines per slide, not more than seven words per line. Try not to write sen­tences and sum up every­thing to key­words and phrases. Always ask your­self what the key point of the slide is. If in doubt, leave it out. Deja vue.

Size and the shape of your font affect the read­abil­ity of your slides. Therefore you should use rather big font sizes (Power Point gen­er­ally already gives you good pre­sets). Do not use a font smaller than 24pt. Choose a font with con­stant line width (e.g. Arial, Frutiger) and keep away from those fonts with ser­ifs (e.g. Times New Roman). While serific fonts (e.g. Times, Garamond) look great on printed paper, it is a com­pletely dif­fer­ent show on your slides. Always stick to sans-serif fonts here, if you want to be any seri­ous. Do not overuse tables and try to stick to bul­let points where possible.

Now, that’s about all from me for now. My fin­gers hurt and I should fin­ish this arti­cle to let you go off to mak­ing your presentations. 

While this guide is far from being most com­pre­hen­sive, I strongly hope it serves as a good start­ing point for you to pre­pare your next pre­sen­ta­tion in class. Once you have pre­sented a few times in pub­lic, you will become very used to it and prepa­ra­tion will go faster and more flu­ently. Maybe you will even enjoy pre­sen­ta­tions one day. Whatever it is, please share your valu­able expe­ri­ences with me in your com­ments. I am look­ing most for­ward to it. Thank you for your atten­tion!

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