SXC.HU, VIXSThis January, I argued on this website that “the typical biomedical research presentation has become a dizzying whirlwind of incomprehensible slides, presented at lightening speed and labeled with unreadable font sizes and abbreviations known only to the speaker.” I argued that this problem was deeply rooted in our research culture and threatens progress.
Since then, I have received no substantial disagreement. Rather, I’ve gotten numerous questions to the tune of “How do we do better?”
Through teaching a course on presentation techniques at Stanford University, I’ve learned that the key obstacle is that many speakers don’t have a firm idea of what they want to say. Nor have they thought through questions like: What can the audience understand? What is achievable in a limited amount of time? What information is superfluous? These organizational issues vex speakers far more often than technical issues or stage fright.
To overcome these problems and develop a compelling presentation, I implore biomedical researchers to follow these eight steps:
1. Figure out what you can achieve
Realize that a slide presentation is not a ...
