Giving my first conference presentation: where can I learn about effective slides, effective presentation?

[theWUbear]

I've had a proposal accepted to speak at one of the national groups' academic assemblies for the first time. 25 minute presentation (does that mean roughly 25 slides?).

Does anyone in academia have good resources for preparing presentations for conferences/effective slide creation?

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[BoardingDoc]

I've had a proposal accepted to speak at one of the national groups' academic assemblies for the first time. 25 minute presentation (does that mean roughly 25 slides?).

Does anyone in academia have good resources for preparing presentations for conferences/effective slide creation?

It means 25 slides at the most. If you make more, you will likely run out of time.

General rules for making an interesting talk.
1: rehearse beforehand
2: know what your want to say, but don't memorize a speech. It will sound fake and boring otherwise
3: do NOT read from your slides
4: Do NOT read from your slides.

Seriously, there is no faster way to lose an audience's interest than to put a slide on a board and then read it out loud to them.

5: limit your deck to one or two busy slides. If you have multiple slides of tables and spreadsheets one after another, you're going to lose people.

That all I have at the moment as I'm post overnight and about to go to bed. I'm sure others will have suggestions as well.

 

[Rekt]

Yellow font on blue background really catches the eye.

 

[bravotwozero]

don't put too much information/bullet points on each single slide. If it means more slides with fewer points, then so be it. Busy slides are distracting, and the more info you cram on each slide, the more difficult it is to read them.

 

[gutonc]

A picture is worth a thousand words. Presentations and posters that are a wall of text are impossible to grok on such a short timeline as you'll have for this. If you can tell your story with a picture, graph, infographic, meme, do it that way instead.

 

[rokshana]

For my first presentation, my research mentor said write out a script...with pauses listed, when to turn your slide, even instructions to when to highlight things on the screen...he said the screen is big, the lights are low and people are looking at the screen, they are not going to notice you are reading from your script.

I did exactly that and by the time I actually did the presentation , I didn’t really need it, but it was reassuring to
Know it was there.

And realize you will probably go through your presentation way faster than when
You practice...25 slides will be more
Than enough.

 

[thegenius]

And realize you will probably go through your presentation way faster than when
You practice...25 slides will be more
Than enough.

Yea man seriously make it about 15 slides.

 

[DeadCactus]

The one line advice is that there really is no magic, it just takes work to put together a good presentation and most people just aren't that into it. And yes, 25 slides is the absolute cap for a 25 minute presentation and that's assuming some of those are minor slides like a title, disclosures, memes, and thank you slides.

Become knowledgeable about your subject, come up with your key points and a coherent way to flow between them, put effort into making you presentation, and practice your presentation. If you don't know your material, you're going to paste a wall of text into each slide because you're not confident you'll remember it. If you don't practice it a few times, you won't smoothly flow through it and remember everything you wanted to say. This is how we end up spending hours with people reading walls of texts off of slides to us. If you put effort into your part of the presentation, the slides can just be a few pictures, graphs, and memes.

A reference I like for how to do presentations well:

#htdap Archives - p cubed presentations

#htdap how to do a presentation. A collection of posts with step by step guides on how to do a presentation

ffolliet.com