Oral Presentation Tips

Hints for preparing a good oral presentation

Most oral presentations of individual studies presented at scientific meetings are ten to twenty minutes long with fifteen minutes being the most common. It is very difficult to get and then keep your audience's attention long enough for them to get and then be convinced of your point. You presentation has to be very clear and concise with a few very well selected, absolutely clear visual aids. Unless you happen to be the first speaker, your audience is already fatigued from hearing other talks and the competition from extraneous sounds and the slow pace of talking vs. thinking has probably left much of the audience daydreaming about more interesting topics. You will lose your audience after just one moment of droning on semi-intelligibly about numbers in front of an unreadable slide covered with unintelligible lines or a table stuffed with even more numbers. Some pointers include:

1. When you speak, make sure that your topic is obviously relevant to the audience's clinical interests or they won't begin to listen.

2. Decide just what message you want to get across then plan your talk and slides based on how you are going to do it.

3. Tell the audience what you are going to tell them, tell it to them, and tell them what you told them - then ask for questions.

4. People have a lot of trouble following oral presentations because they can't flip back a page or two to pick up a point they missed so you need to be very well organized and leave out all information which doesn't lead directly to your goal.

5. Your slides need to be very clear. Nobody can follow a graph with more than a few lines and tables with more than three columns and rows (or so) are hopeless because of size and complexity. Having the main points of the talk on successive slides presented as you go is a big help but keep the verbiage down to a few lines per slide. Get rid of any slides the audience doesn't need to follow your talk. They are simply distractions. Slides full of text can't be read at the same time you talk so people miss both.

6. Your key slides are the title of your talk, a simplified diagram of the study design, a summary of the key results, and a few slides on the conclusions.

7. Practice your talk so you get the length right. Assume that you will go slower on stage. While practicing, get some emotion into your voice (other than terror) and learn to give the talk from an outline. People that read their talks well are incredibly rare. Usually they present in rushed, boring monotones which few people follow.