How to Present your Research: Part 2: Visual Materials

How to Present your Research: Part 2: Visual Materials

(I wrote a related post a long time ago about use of visual materials in teaching. It is related to what's discussed here, but is focused specifically on presentations in the classroom. At the same time, I would argue that whenever you are presenting your work, you are, in fact, teaching.)

About a millisecond after you are asked to give a talk, I'd be willing to bet your attention turns to slide preparation. While I too, almost always, use slides when I give a talk, I do want to point out that there are fields where this it not common. There are fields where talks are people (literally) reading their written work out loud and fields where people give talks without any kind of visual aids.  If you're reading this, I am guessing that you might find this anywhere from surprising to shocking.

Once you have gotten over the shock, however, perhaps we should ask ourselves why we use visual aids. I'm completely serious -- why do we feel the need to have slides to accompany our words?  There are a few reasons:

1. To help illustrate complex concepts.
2. To remind yourself what you want to talk about.
3. Because it's expected.
4. To leave behind an artifact that summarizes your work.

I hope you won't be shocked if I opine that 1 and 2 are good reasons, and that 3&4 are not good reasons. (The artifact you leave behind is, in fact, your paper!  Or, today, perhaps you've been asked to produce a short, e.g., 2-minute, video overview.  This is a much better advertisement for your work than a slide deck.)

If you believe that you produce slides purely for #1, let me ask the following: if you are merely trying to illustrate complex concepts, why do you have slides for every part of your talk (including the introduction and thank you)?  Surely those are not complex concepts?  In other areas, you might see talks that are only occasionally punctuated by images or visuals, which really do illustrate a concept -- they show a picture of a novel experimental apparatus or some results or some particularly complicated concept.  However, there are not necessarily slides to accompany every single part of the talk. In our field, that is not the norm.

So, I ask again, what is the purpose of the slides?

I believe that most of the time, whether we admit it or not, slides are mostly to help us remember what we want to say or talk about as well as to remember how we decided to talk about it. Once you embrace this concept, you buy yourself a great deal of freedom in what you place on your slides. Your slides no longer need to parrot your talk. Instead, they can enhance and embellish your talk. Almost ten years ago, I decided to switch from a fairly conventional slide style where words were primary and images secondary to a style with as few words as possible. Two things happened: First, it started taking me MUCH longer to prepare slides for a talk, because it took forever for me to find exactly the right image to convey what I was trying to convey. Second, I began writing much more extensive speaker notes, frequently, because I like strategic animations, and I want to make sure I use them at precisely the right point in the voiceover. (Sadly, I almost never look at my notes while giving a talk; I ad lib almost completely. Thus, I need to go over my slides enough that I know where I'm supposed to click and hope I get it right. This usually works well the first time I give a talk, because everything is fresh in my brain; when I pull out a deck a year later and "tweak" it and then give the talk, I don't do nearly as well.)

Enough rambling about me, what advice do I have about preparing visual materials to accompany a talk?

1. Do keep in mind that the purpose of the visual materials is to accompany the talk, not replace it.

<flame>

One of my greatest frustrations as a teacher is when students believe that the slides are a replacement for lecture. I do not intend them to be. I tell students this. Yet, time and time again, students who cannot be bothered to attend class complain that the slides sometimes are incomplete. That is explicitly by design so that in class we can discuss and probe things!

</flame>

2. If the slides merely repeat what you are going to say, why should people attend your talk?

3. Think hard about how can you use a visual aid to:

A) Burn an image in your audience's brain that will immediately conjure up you and your work (i.e., make your work memorable).

B) Make something abstract concrete

C) Simplify a complex concept

D) Connect multiple concepts 

4. Use slide real estate to communicate with the audience; use notes to communicate with yourself (although it's good of the slides themselves trigger you to remember most of what you want to talk about).

5. Remember that you want the audience, for the most part, listening to you, not frantically trying to read paragraphs of prose on slides.