How to give a good 15 minute talk
Some dos and don'ts of giving a good 15 minute talk by Scott Keogh
- Do keep the message of your talk very simple, have only a few main points.
- Do think and plan carefully about the structure of your talk - make sure it follows a logical progression.
- Do be very prepared for your talk, practice, practice, practice.
- Do plan on about four minutes each for intro, materials and methods, and results/discussion.
- Do plan on about one slide per minute.
- Do speak slowly and clearly.
- Do have a joke or two ready if you are feeling confident, people like to laugh but be prepared to go on if they don't.
- Do have very good text slides, keep them simple.
- Do have good study species slides, at least 20% of total slide number.
- Do have conclusions slides.
- Do make sure that the people in the back of the room can see what's on your slides.
- Do state your aims clearly and explain WHY you have done the research and the SIGNIFICANCE of the research.
- Do try to reach as wide an audience as possible and reflect this attitude in the way you present statistics and complicated results.
- Do make sure that every slide means something.
- Don't read your talk if you can help it. If you are well prepared and have practiced you won't have to.
- Don't use a laser pointer until you have practiced using one, be slow and deliberate with your movements or it annoys everybody.
- Don't use the shadow of the pointer unless you say that's what you're doing.
- Don't apologise for mistakes in your slides, just explain.
- Don't show complicated tables or DNA sequences - tables are talk death. If you have to show tables, keep them very simple and only show the data that you are actually going to talk about.
- Don't ever start explaining a slide by saying "I know you can't read this but....".
- Don't go overtime, it's disrespectful to everyone and unprofessional.
- Don't say "Now this is really interesting.....", just make it self-evident.
- Don't use more than three colours, and make sure they are highly contrasting.
- Don't say "that's it" at the end, have an ending prepared.
- Don't say "more work is required" because it always is.
- Don't show raw data.
- Don't go too much into well known methods.
- Don't end with a slide of a sunset because that always annoys me!