Presentation guidelines
 

The following guidelines were used at ITC'2000 to improve the quality of presentations. We would like to encourage ETW'01 speakers to follow the same guidelines. Please note however that there are some major differences between the two events. At ETW'01 we have during the workshop only the informal digest available, which doesn't contain all the papers. Since ETW is a workshop, deeper and longer discussions are very welcomed.

At the ETW'01 location we will have whiteboards, overhead projectors as well as video projectors together with laptops. For those of you who would like to use videoprojector with a laptop, please send your presentation materials before the conference to the conference organizer. Please prepare your slides as a MS Powerpoint presentation or as a PDF file and send before Sunday, May 27 to the address etw01@ida.liu.se.

Converting a paper into a talk

As an author/speaker at ITC, you will use two media to transmit your ideas: a published paper, and a companion verbal/visual presentation. Each medium has its own characteristics.

Since your formal paper may be read in the digest, you should use your presentation as a "discussion" rather than a "reading". Verbal presentations read from a technical paper come across as lifeless and boring. Therefore you need to prepare a separate script for your talk.

Your talk must be designed for listeners who are watching you and your presentation, not for readers. Readers set their own pace, controlling the rate they absorb input according to their individual needs. Listeners don't have this advantage. You will control the pace at which your audience must absorb ideas.

For this reason, printed paper and technical presentations require different methods, different language, different illustrations - different ways to present argument and proof.

The precise language and style used in written papers are not suited for oral presentation. Long sentences, when spoken, cannot be followed. A listener can't pause to reflect on a complex idea without falling behind the speaker. Nor can a listener look ahead and anticipate what you will be saying next in order to place an idea in context. Since there's no chance to look up definitions, unfamiliar terms may lose a listener. Technical abstractions or complicated formulae can lead to complete confusion.

It follows that the script for a talk requires a different approach from a paper. Because your paper has been selected for ITC, your audience will grant that you are technically proficient and that your work has a basic adequacy. Many of them will have read your paper in the Proceedings. They will expect to hear you discuss your techniques, talk about your approach, and support your conclusions.

You should be less formal, less analytical in speaking to your subject. Your voicing, gestures, and personality should give life to your words. Emphasis and inflection become tools as important as words. We do not converse the way we write: words fall in a different order; sentences are simpler and shorter, words and points are repeated to aid memory and understanding. An emphatic pause almost requires a listener to absorb the preceding point.

Organizing Your Talk

An ITC formal technical session has three or four papers and lasts one-and-a-half or two hours. You will have 30 minutes for your task. About 22-25 minutes of this time is allotted for your presentation; the remainder will be used for questions. Plan to use all of your allotted time. A presentation that is too short is as undesirable as one which runs over. Adjust and trim your time in your rehearsals.

Put Across a Few Key Points

The audience has a professional interest in your subject. They want to find out how your ideas will affect their work. Or better, how they can use your ideas for their benefit.

In your relatively short time at the lectern, you can transmit only a few key points to the audience, so concentrate on what is most significant. Hold to relatively simple relationships. Your audience can confirm your more complex points by reading your paper. Explain with familiar examples or analogies. Compare your new material with existing technology that is well known to your audience. Resist using jargon: your jargon may not be as widely used as you think. If you must use a word that may not be familiar to the audience, define it.

Follow a Simple Outline

  • Introduce your problem. What led to your work? What were your goals?
  • Describe your solution. Tell how you did it.
  • Why is your solution a good one? What are its disadvantages or limitations?
  • Suggest other applications.
  • Do you recommend further development along the lines of your work? Why? Or why not?
  • Summarize what it all means.

    Tell your story in a straight line. Make one point lead to the next. Understanding is better when the subject is simply organized.

    Planning Your Slides

    Since good technical talks are an effective mix of verbal and visual elements, spend about as much time on your slides as you did on your paper.

    Plan a series of slides that progressively discloses your subject, building from cause to effect, simple to more complex, questions to answers. Don't bury your points in too much detail. Use your slides to assist your words and keep you on track.

    The text of your slides should be concise. Each slide should express only a few closely related ideas, tersely stated. Too much detail prevents understanding! Too much detail prevents reading!

    Words have limitations. Graphs, drawings, and photos can often explain what language cannot, so illustrate what you can't verbalize. Illustrate what takes too long to describe. Illustrate what you want to emphasize.

    How Many Slides?

    Use the minimum number of slides that will allow you to convey the essence of your paper to your audience. You have 22-25 minutes for your presentation. Experience tells us that most ITC talks to well with between 15 and 25 slides.

    What to Illustrate

    You have been working on the subject of your paper for months. What is perfectly clear to you must be made clear in minutes to people unfamiliar with your work. Your slides help you do this. Use your slides to hold attention, enliven, clarify, restate, explain, and interpret. Ears have trouble accepting numbers and abstractions. Quantities and relationships must be visually compared. By adding illustrations to your spoken words, you add understanding to what you are saying and enliven interest in your presentation.

    Consider these graphic ways to make points clearly and quickly when you plan your presentation:

  • Introduce Key Items - Outline slides focus attention on key ideas and orient the audience. An outline of your major topics should be your second slide, just after the title.
  • Trends - Line graphs show trends or correlations effectively.
  • Comparisons and Proportions - Bar graphs are best for comparing magnitudes. Pie charts are good for showing relative parts of the whole.
  • Symbols - Symbolic diagrams and flow charts are useful if not too detailed. Use standard symbols if possible.
  • Structure and Relationship - Simple schematic diagrams effectifely convey the structure of systems or relationships of objects. Show only what is necesssary to explain how a thing works.
  • Tables - Don't use detailed tables. Tabular data are more legible and more easily compared on graphs or charts. If you MUST make a table, keep it simple and include only items that you will mention.
  • When you Digress from the topic of the slide, use a blank slide, colored and shaded, not white, to darken the screen. Never say one thing orally and something else visually on the screen. It confuses the audience.
  • Duplicate slides - Use duplicate slides when you need to refer to a slide more than once.







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