---------------------------------------------------------------------- How to give a talk (for the COMSOC course) Ulle Endriss, 07/12/2010 (last update: 17/03/2015) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For the course, you will give a short talk in which you should present the main results from the project you have been working on. Below I list a few hints for how to give a good talk. I also recommend that you look around the web for other people's opinion on this matter, in particular the opinion of people working in similar areas (say, logic, AI, or economic theory). ---------------------------------------------------------------------- STRUCTURE OF THE TALK ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Start with a very short high-level explanation of what the problem is you are going to discuss. Maybe you can give this explanation while your title slide is up, or maybe you want to prepare a very short slide (definitely not more than one!) specifically for this purpose. This should be followed by a "talk outline" slide, where you sketch, in a few bullet points, what you will talk about. At the end of your talk you should summarise again what you have done, offer some evaluation of the results presented, and make suggestions for interesting and potentially fruitful future work. Your last slide should repeat the main message of your talk (usually as part of conclusions + future work). It should definitely NOT be a list of references, or just say "thank you", or "questions?", or anything of that sort. Due to the question period, your last slide will typically be visible longer than any of the other slides (an opportunity not to be missed). A well-done final slide also helps the audience to ask relevant questions. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- GENERAL TIPS ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Make sure you get all the basics right: use a large enough font for your slides, speak loudly and clearly and not too fast, face your audience while speaking (and try to actually look at the people---this part is quite difficult!). Prepare well, but not too well. In my experience, it pays off to know exactly what you want to say during the first two minutes or so (when you'll still be a little nervous), but for the rest it is better not to have everything planned out word for word. The reasons are that if you are over-prepared, then you will tend to speak too fast, you will sound boring, you will not think yourself while you are presenting and thus lose the feel for what's difficult and what's routine (thereby making life hard for your audience), and you risk getting totally derailed by a small clarification question or some other unexpected event. Choose a realistic number of slides. A very common mistake (not only of beginners) is to bring far too much material to a talk. Do not put too much information on a single slide. Only put material on the slides that you actually want people to read (of course, there are some rare cases where you might want to deviate from this rule). For a talk such as this, your slides should be optimised for the audience experience during the talk. This is different from slides used for teaching; there you also want the slides to be useful for your students afterwards, to look things up. That is, good teaching slides might look different from good conference talk-type slides. Don't use too many transitions within a single slide (I usually don't use any). There are several reasons for this. First, it can come across as patronising if you are trying to dictate in too much minute detail what your audience should focus on at every single moment in time. So, even if you do make use of a modest number of transitions, definitely do not grey out again the text you have gone over already (it is extremely annoying when a speaker does that). Second, having too many transitions gives you less flexibility to adapt your speed in case you have to go a bit faster during the second part of your talk. Third, if during question time a member of the audience asks you to return to a specific slide, that cane be more difficult if you have too many virtual slides making up one proper slide. Keep in mind that most people in the audience will not pay 100% attention all of the time. Try to prepare your talk in a way that allows them make up for what they may have missed. For instance, to give an overly simplistic example, you may have defined that N is the set of voters on slide 3, but it does not do any harm to occasionally remind people by writing "the set of voters N" rather than just "N" also on later slides (unless those are very crowded already). Also, do occasionally remind people where in the talk you are right now ("we have just seen that X is not possible, so now we will try Y"). Say what you will say, then say it, and finally say that you said it. This is good advise at all levels of a talk. At the global level, for instance, say what you will say in your outline slide, then give your talk, and finally say what you said with your conclusion slide. But the same advise also applies to a single slide (at least when it is one of the more difficult ones): first say what the next point will be, then make that point, and then briefly summarise what you have just done. Keep in mind that what you present is difficult, and most members of your audience will not know much about the topic beforehand. Your goal should be to explain them something new and to get them interested. For the particular task of giving a talk for this course, please try to relate to topics covered in the course (and thus familiar to all of us) whenever this is feasible. Also, please use the terminology and notation employed in the course wherever feasible. Don't be afraid of questions. The worst that can happen to you as a speaker is when nobody has any questions. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- EVALUATION ---------------------------------------------------------------------- I will take your talk into account when grading your project. Here are some of the things I will pay attention to: the clarity of your presentation, the technical depth of the chosen material, the apprpriateness of your choice of material (e.g., interestingness, accessibility, overall structure), your (apparent) understanding of the wider area, the extent to which you are able to make connections to the course, the planning of your talk (timing, preparedness), the quality of the slides, and finally your handling of questions. ----------------------------------------------------------------------