How to Give an Academic Presentation

Public speaking is an art that takes a lot of practice to get good at. Being a good public speaker is what separates the wheat from the chaff, so it’s crucial that you gain this skill during your academic journey. Here are some guidelines.

  1. Never read from a script. It’s the most frustrating thing in the world as an audience member. If you’re reading from a script, why don’t I just read that same script myself and save us all some time? This breaks all engagement with the audience.
  2. Don’t memorize a script. In the same vein, you shouldn’t just memorize a written-out script. You need to be able to think dynamically. It’s okay to have a few words or phrases in your slideshow notes, but these should just help accelerate your context switching.
    1. Items 1 and 2 are particular temptations for non-native English speakers. I truly empathize with that. However, if you never force yourself into this discomfort, you’ll never learn and improve. You have to rip the band-aid off.
  3. Avoid “um.” This is the hardest one for me (and most people). It takes an intense amount of effort to avoid filler words. But if you can achieve that, or at least minimize the usage to a handful of times, you will stand out.
  4. Make eye contact. Look audience members in the eye. Don’t look at any individual for too long, though, because that’s creepy.
  5. Use gestures, and refer to the slides/whiteboard directly. Your body language should exude confidence. Laser pointers can be helpful if you don’t overuse them.
  6. Make a joke or two. It helps keep audience members engaged.
  7. Use dynamic inflection. Monotone speakers are boring.
  8. Speak loudly. You should be loud enough for the people in the back of the room to hear you clearly.
  9. Slow down. When you’re nervous, the tendency is to talk too fast. Then you realize that everybody knows you’re nervous, and then you talk faster. It’s a vicious cycle. Slow down and breathe.
  10. Test out the A/V equipment before you start. There’s always time to test out the presentation equipment before your presentation’s start time. Take advantage of that opportunity to sort out any kinks. You don’t want to be that person who gets up there and can’t get their laptop’s display output to be detected. It’s awkward.
  11. Have a backup plan. If your laptop were to be dropped from a 10-story building right before your presentation, what would you do? Have a copy of your presentation hosted in the cloud, somewhere easy to access. Check with a friend or conference organizer to make sure that you can borrow someone’s equipment in case something happens.
  12. Don’t go over time. If it’s a formal, one-off presentation, you have a specific time limit. In this case, you should practice and time yourself to make sure that you respect the time limit. Leave a few minutes of buffer for questions. If you’re doing a group presentation, each person should have individual time limits that are agreed upon, and you should hold each other accountable. My pet peeve at research conferences is when everybody goes 5-10 minutes over time. Over the course of a whole session, this throws off the entire schedule. Therefore, it’s an act of disrespect to all the other presenters and attendees.
  13. Be prepared for questions. You could give an amazing presentation, but if you can’t answer questions about the content, it leaves a sour taste in the mouth at the end. You should be able to explain any detail in your presentation at a higher level of detail. If somebody asks a question that requires a very lengthy answer, or if there’s a back-and-forth of several follow-up questions, try to summarize your answer but offer to discuss it privately afterwards. My go-to phrase is, “I’d be happy to continue this discussion offline.” This respects the time limit.
  14. Know your audience. It’s okay to assume a certain level of background knowledge if you’re talking to an audience of experts, but not if you’re talking to a general audience. You need to adapt your material to the audience. But still, don’t tune the entire presentation for the average. A good rule of thumb that I heard once is the 70/20/10 rule: 70% of your presentation should be understood by everybody in the audience; 20% should be understood by a handful of expert audience members; and 10% should be understood by nobody in the audience. This last 10% needs to still be accurate, obviously, but the idea is that you present some small amount of material that is new to everyone, and that encourages them to do further exploration on your topic afterwards. This is what leads to interesting follow-up questions. In a conference setting, the sign of an excellent presentation is if you compel people to actually go read your paper.
  15. Define most acronyms/initialisms early on, and consider verbally repeating the definitions later on. This is part of knowing your audience. You don’t want an overly jargony presentation, but you do want to use acronyms/initialisms when they greatly increase the efficiency of communication. For example, if I’m giving an hour-long lecture on TCP to undergraduates, I’ll explicitly say “Transmission Control Protocol” maybe a dozen times. If I’m giving a presentation on video streaming to a group of experts, I’ll never define TCP explicitly. If it’s a mixed audience, I’ll land somewhere in the middle, writing out the acronym on the slides and saying it once or twice.