Computers and the Internet have made things great for scientists, particularly for us, since our jobs are sitting in front of them analysing data all day. Imagine being a bioinformatician without a computer, multivariate statistics is more of a pain than usual, genome sequence alignments need large pieces of paper. There would however be an upside to this analog dystopia - no more powerpoint presentations. Computers have arguably had a detrimental effect on the presentation of research, they allow the easy creation of big, text heavy slide sets. The emphasis of a talk leans towards the slides, and not the speaker.

Being asked to give a talk is viewed as a dull task: time taken away from research plus the discomfort of public speaking. If you’ve already decided beforehand that it’s going to be a dull, pointless exercise then don’t bother, not only will you be wasting your own time but also the time of everyone watching. Now imagine, for a second time, a world where we have both computers and great presentations. The chance to give a presentation is greeted with enthusiasm, as an opportunity to teach the world about what you commit most of your time to, and to get valuable feedback on it. But we don’t need to imagine this place, we’re the generation of scientists coming through: the professors and PI of the next 30 years, we can start this revolution now.

There are plenty tips around the interweb on giving a good presentation, it doesn’t take much effort to find these.

You are the focus

Not the slides. People have come to see you talk, to hear your enthusiasm. If it came down to it. You know your work better than anyone, you’ve invested x number of months, worked late nights and weekends, and spent more time with your computer than your girlfriend/boyfriend. Maybe slides are a crutch that you need to rely on to give a talk, or maybe they actually hold you back, the audience spends more of their attention looking at the slides when they should be focusing on you, the main attraction.

When you try to prepare a set of slides that can be used as a presentation, and as a document, you end up with neither. Your audience has a limited attention span, even more limited if you’re one of the last speakers in a day of talks; lists, too much text, small text, too many slides, all these things can drain your audience’s capacity to concentrate on your message.

Science is marketing

We strive to get our work published in high profile journals, and present to large conferences so that other researchers will cite our work, effectively “buying” our product. Of course if the research is rubbish, it won’t matter how well it’s dressed up, people will see through it. So the message here is “Have something interesting to say, and say it well”. Entertain your audience, and inform them at the same time, they’re not mutually exclusive. Practise exhaustively in preparation, then deliver a short, punchy, exciting talk. Isn’t better to leave them begging for more, rather than begging for it to be over?

Believe in yourself, and your research

If you believe in your research, be strident, put your message out there. Don’t couch it in “maybe”, “possibly”, and half hearted statements. I’m not telling you to be brash, and leap out on preliminary results that could be proved wrong next week, this would quickly earn you the disdain of your peers. But if you’ve got a good results and a strong message, what’s the point of delivering a mediocre talk that no one will remember the next day. Say what you think, engage the audience in direct conversation - they’ll love it or hate it, but they won’t forget it. And after all, isn’t science an on going discussion, until some discovers the definitive result and we go home, everything is open to being proved wrong.

One final point, in science there are people who are rude, people who ask obnoxious questions to increase their own standing. At the end of the day the only thing you can do is just forget about them, focus on the people who will give you positive comments and suggest ways where you could strengthen your presentation. Guy Kawasaki has some especially useful examples of this - the chairmen of IBM said there would never be a need for more than five computers in the world, or a Western Union memo states that telephones would never be taken seriously as a means of communication.