PhD Seminar
Hints for Giving Presentations (A)
Anatomy of a Talk
Jeff Offutt
http://www.cs.gmu.edu/~offutt/
Always Start a Talk With
Something the Audience
Already Knows
A good talk will have
1. Introduction that begins by restating something the
audience already knows
2. Presents new material in increasing levels of difficulty
3. Closes by relating each level to the previous level
4. Concludes by relating the entire talk to something the
audience knew ahead of time
© Jeff Offutt
2
Generic Outline – 4 Levels
Intro
Entire
Audience
Entire
Audience
Conclusions
General
Knowledge
Context &
Overview
General
Knowledge
Deep
Knowledge
Deep
Knowledge
Results &
Discussion
Specialists
Deep
Weeds
© Jeff Offutt
3
Introduction
• Introduce characters: Motivate your work
– What is your problem ?
– Why is it interesting, important and exciting ?
– What is its context : How is it different from other
research ?
• Give a teaser for your results — why should we
listen to the rest of the talk?
– Don’t need a full outline, but let audience know enough
so they want to listen to the rest
– Summarize surprising results early
© Jeff Offutt
4
Guts of the Talk
• Explain what you did
– Don’t be comprehensive — convey the big picture
– Use pictures, 1-2 examples, etc.
• Convey one technical nugget
– Show one neat concrete thing that came out of your
work
• Analysis
– Did your work solve the problem ?
– What are the important broad implications of your
work ?
© Jeff Offutt
5
Conclusions
• Summarize your project with one or two key
points
• If your audience remembers one thing from your
talk, you have succeeded
– Again, this is different from a classroom lecture
• If they remember two things, you’re doing really
well
© Jeff Offutt
6
Some Specific Advice
• Average 2 minutes per slide
• Think carefully about the audience and what they
know
– You have to do this before your talk
• Use pictures
• Put at most five major bullets on your slides
– Slides for a classroom lecture usually have a lot more
information — they are also used for reference
• People should be able to read slides quickly — and
then listen to you
© Jeff Offutt
7
Can You Do This in 20 Minutes?
• Advertisers pay $2.5M for 30 seconds during Superbowl –
they must be pretty sure they can tell a compelling story
in that time
• A Big Bang episode is 22 minutes long
• Make your points directly, avoid unnecessary details
• Organize your presentation
• Practice!
– Without an audience
– In front of your project group members
– In front of friends not familiar with your project
© Jeff Offutt
8
Summary
Those are the basics
Next we’ll talk about habits
during presentations