Getting a good grade for a well presented presentation is very satisfiyng. The acknowledgement that hard work has paid off and everybody sees it. However, good grades don’t come easy. Paper presentations usually take a lot of hard work and preparation if you want to do well.
Please read my award winning “10 steps to improving your presentation” guide, in order to succeed.
The oral presentation of a paper is normally limited to a 10-minute presentation of your research. Recognize the constraints that are imposed on your presentation:
1. The short time of only 10 minutes (with an additional 3 minutes for questions).
2. The limits on the attention and comprehension of your audience members which are listening to many presentations each day, some of them are outside their area of expertise.
3. The context of the current session in which people may enter and leave at a time causing distractions and a kind of a less-than-ideal listening/learning situation.
Therefore, it is recommended that in preparation of your talk you:
1. Decide on a limited set of a number of the significant ideas you want your lisening audience to code, comprehend, and remember.
2. Minimize all details (of data analays, procedures, and literature review) when highlighting the main idea you want to transmit.
3. State everything clearly in simple, jargon-free terms that are the point of the research is, what you have discovered, and what you think it may mean—its methological, conceptual, or practical value.
4. Employ a lot of redundancy in repeating important ideas to further enhance comprehension and recall.
5. Write out your presentation as in a mini-lecture (with a listening audience in your mind), starting with a solid outline that you should expand into a narrative.
6. Practice delivering it aloud and confident in order to learn it well, to make its length fit in the time allocated, and to better hear how it sounds.
7. Get feedback from tape-recorded replay of your delivery and from critical colleagues who are listening to it.
8. Don’t read your paper. Speak your ideas directly to the audience, referring—if necessary only—to a solid outline of key points and transitions.
9. Try to speak to the audiance loud enough, clear enough, and with sufficient enthusiasm to hold the attention of your entire audience.
10. State your final conclusions and sum it up at the end on time.
You should distribute copies of a printed version of your paper with details of the research and/or a sign-up sheet on which interested people can request the paper.It is an honor to have the opportunity of being in the spotlight with an audience of peers giving you their time and attention. You have an obligation to them (and to your profession) to use that occasion wisely and well.
