How to give a talk
(that doesn’t put your audience to sleep)
Ramesh Raskar
MIT Media Lab
Overview Slide
• I will start with a statement that is too general
• Mention terms I haven’t explained yet
• I will talk about related work about topic you
don’t know yet
• Tell you more about things you have no idea
• I will show you results after you have already
lost me
• I will conclude with conclusion
Getting Started
•
•
•
•
Don’t start with an OVERVIEW slide
Start with a question or motivating example
Give the zeroth order idea in one sentence
Show the ‘magic’
– Conclusion goes first !
– Make the audience wonder how you will get there
– then on the next 2 slides after magic trick
• Gauge your audience and adapt. If you're not good at gauging,
just stick with your original presentation plan.
Curve of Excitement
Audience
Interest
People are excited
even before you
start because you
have a great
title/abstract
Teaser results,
people are
wondering how
you got there
You have shown
the ‘magic’ with a
question or
motivating
example
Cool results
Nitty gritty of the
math/algo/implem
entation. You are
losing some
people but its ok.
But there is more.
Wait and see how
next year I will
show you more
cool stuff. Go see
my website.
‘Whats in it for
me’ You give
audience
something they
can use with
‘Future Directions’
Time (or Slide #)
Curve of Boredome
Audience
Interest
Your Intended
Curve
People are
excited
anyway
No clue what the
title/abstract,
jargon words
Real Curve
We don’t
know the
context of
the theory
Start with meaningless
‘Overview’ slide
Discuss future directions
Share results which you
were trying to keep
secret till the end
Describe second order
details
Related work
Too late to
share those
cool results
Describe theory Audience is
lost because
they don’t
know ‘why’Time (or Slide #)
The S curve of excitement
• The flipped S-curve of audience excitement vs. time
line of your presentation. –
• First few units on the time scale should have content
that causes maximum excitement.
• Then audience excitement level goes down as you get
into details and explanations. It stays a constant low for
the duration of your explanation
• The ending should be 'wow' again.
• In essence, the audience is really listening to you only
at the beginning (and bit at the end) unless you engage
them in an interactive activity or have a unusual
happening in the middle.
Motivation
Motivate the context or application
Why is what you are doing important? Why
should people care? This could be audience
background based
Setting up the problem/approach
• Overview diagram of the project should be at
the beginning and not at the end.
Blank slides force people to focus on the
speaker. You could also hit 'B' in Microsoft
power point to make the screen go blank. ‘B’
again to show your presentation.
If you are digressing from the slide, audience
may get confused by what is on your slide.
Hit ‘B’.
• Have a photo/figure/sketch
on every slide
• The image can be unrelated
• If you run out of ideas for a
photo on each slide, just
search for the keyword
online (here I searched
‘unrelated;)
Last Slide
• Never end with a ‘Thank you’ slide !
– This is the slide that will be up for a long time during Q&A
– Last slide should be
• Summary of your talk
• Website for further info
• State problem. State conclusion. Contact info. Nice pictures
– Don’t end with Acknowledgement slide
• Appreciated but not useful to most of your audience
• Ack slide can be one before ‘Summary’
– How to encourage questions in Q&A
• This slides should have take home points and conclusions
• State some open questions at the end of the last slide.
Thank you Slide
• Never end with a ‘Thank you’ slide !
• Last slide should be
– Summary of your talk
– website for further info