One of the things I love most in life is helping people
improve their academic talks. My advice is pretty consistent, and I thought it
would be helpful to gather it here. Specifically, I've been thinking about ten-minute
presentations, are often misunderstood. Below is some advice,
and a video of an example talk.
The problem with short talks
There’s a lot of room for error in an hour-long talk. You have time to build a rapport with the audience, reacting to confused or sleeping faces by changing your pace or giving some extra background information. According to the peak-end principle, the audience will mostly remember the best part of the presentation and the end of it, so
if you nail those you’ll be fine. People may also be there specifically to see you, so they start out primed to listen carefully and make an effort to understand.
Not so for a ten-minute presentation: you
get once chance to grab and keep the attention of an audience who might rather
be playing with their phones.
In other words, you have to be better than Candy Crush.
If you only have ten minutes to speak, it’s probably because the organizers had to squeeze in too many talks into too short a time
period. People will be tired of listening, will be thinking about their own
talk, and will probably not have expertise in your field. So all of the
decisions we make will revolve around three principles:
- Give the audience an incentive to pay attention by being interesting or entertaining.
- Don't make the audience work hard to follow your talk, or require prior specialized knowledge.
- Make the most of your ten minutes by trimming anything unnecessary.
These principles apply in longer talks as well, but they're absolutely critical for short ones.
Here are some tips for putting these principles into practice:
- A 10-minute talk is not a shorter or faster version of a long talk. You can tell exactly one short story in ten minutes. Decide on the one thing you want your audience to take home with them, and write it down in a sentence. Don’t be afraid to repeat this sentence more than once in your talk. Your job is to provide just barely enough context to understand that story, and then tell it well. And no matter how slowly you think you're talking, you're talking faster than that. Slow down.
- The audience can either listen or read, but not both at the same time. Mostly you want them listening, so eliminate as much text as you can. If you’re afraid you’ll forget to say something, put it in the presenter notes. It can help to think of the slides as being there for the presenter’s benefit: they jog your memory so you can remember what comes next in the story.
- You will have the audience’s full attention when the talk starts. You will lose it immediately if you have a bad cover slide. Put the effort into making it tasteful but eye-catching, and spend time talking with that slide shown. That will buy you an extra minute of attention while you set up your story. Also, shorter titles are better. They're easy to understand, and the audience can listen to you instead of reading it.
- Don't use an outline slide. Outlines are useful when you’re going to talk about several topics and you don’t want your audience to get lost. In a short talk, you won't need to organize a complicated story, so outlines just eat the time you could be using to tell a simple one.
- Include animation only when it helps your audience follow the message. Make text come up a line at a time when you don’t want people reading ahead. That goes for figures too. You don't want the audience trying to digest your slide instead of listening to you.
- If you ask your audience to read text, make it easy on them. Using no font smaller than size 30 will not only guarantee readability, but will force you to limit the total amount of text on each slide (this includes chart labels!). If you’re still using Comic Sans… don't.
6.1: Related note on equations: include them only if they make the talk easier to follow. Equations are compact, efficient sentences that can be read in English. Being compact, they're difficult to unpack in real time. Don’t make the audience work that hard. Help them understand the symbols, and make it crystal clear why they lead to better understanding of the material. - Spend the time and effort to make beautiful figures, and emphasize them instead of text. Help your audience understand them by pointing, and literally telling them "look over here." If you have graphs, always identify the axes out loud and teach people how to read them. Point out the important features. As usual, we want people listening instead of parsing data.
- End by saying “That concludes my talk. Thank you for your attention.” Don’t read your acknowledgements out loud (it eats time and gives the audience a chance to forget what they were going to ask), and don’t ask for questions (only the moderator knows how much time there is for questions).
- Make extensive use of supplementary slides. Paste entire presentations into the supplemental section, and load it up with equations and text. It doesn’t have to be pretty. This is your security blanket. If someone asks a question you can’t answer easily, you want to be able to find the answer in your supplementary slides. You’ll look like a genius for having thought ahead.
- Practice, but not to memorize your lines. Practice so you can find out what works and what doesn't, what's clear and what's not, and what you can safely trim away from the talk. Find the clunky transitions or a graphs that take too long to explain. There's no reason for a ten-minute talk not to sound smooth, relaxed, and well-oiled. If you can't get it to that point, you're trying to say too much.
Example talk
I made this talk as an example of how to implement some of the above suggestions, using a recent Python/Twitter project as subject material. It's not perfect (there was no easy way to record a pointer, for example), but hopefully you'll find it useful anyway.
