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  • You're probably tuning into this talk because you're interested in improving your speaking skills

  • and you know, let's face it, none of us really have had a lot of explicit training

  • in presentation as scientists.

  • So, ok, we're not experts. We may not be experts at public speaking,

  • but I would actually suggest to you that we are all experts at listening to talks.

  • Think about the number of hours that each of us has sat in a chair, in a lecture room,

  • in a seminar, in an auditorium, listened to journal clubs, to all kinds of talks,

  • we've spent hours and hours and hours listening to talks.

  • So we're experts at knowing what a good talk is because we know what we want delivered as an audience member.

  • So, if you think about it, why do we go to a talk?

  • Well, we're interested, obviously, in learning some about interesting and novel science.

  • We are going to listen to speakers who we think are credible and knowledgeable

  • and doing novel work.

  • We are responsive to speakers who are enthusiastic and who just keep us awake

  • and we want a talk that is well organized, clear,

  • a talk that we can follow, a talk that's not laden down with jargon

  • and a talk that gives us enough background to understand

  • what's going on, we want to be able to see the data, understand it, interpret it

  • and then make our own decision about the science.

  • So, we're all experts at listening to talks, why can't we just translate what we know

  • we want as an audience member into how we give a talk as individuals.

  • Let's think about something; how many times have we each seen a slide like this.

  • We've seen it a zillion times, right, we're sitting there, in a chair,

  • listening to a seminar, a slide like this comes on.

  • And we have no idea of what to look at.

  • Are we supposed to read all of this text?

  • Are we supposed to look at this figure, or that figure

  • or that figure?

  • We're overwhelmed visually and we've all seen this slide a thousand times.

  • Now, I just want to make a quick disclaimer.

  • This was not my work and I'm not suggesting for a second that the authors of this really gorgeous paper

  • would have shown a slide like that.

  • But, if I were giving a journal club on that topic, I might have produced a slide like this for you

  • in trying to tell you about these data.

  • So, when we think about what we know instinctively is just a disaster, why do we keep doing it

  • again and again and again?

  • I think that we need to know some basic rules about power point

  • and how to structure a talk

  • in order to enable these visuals to work effectively

  • as we're teaching, as we're speaking about our own science,

  • as we're presenting journal clubs.

  • So, what I'm going to do is first of all go through some basics about power point

  • and then we're going to think about how you structure a talk

  • in order to lead a member of the audience through the data

  • in a way that they will understand each piece that you're presenting and

  • be able to really understand what the take-home message is.

  • First of all, what font should you use?

  • It turns out that some of the default fonts in power point and keynote

  • are exactly wrong. The font you should use is a Sans Serif font.

  • What is a Sans Serif font?

  • San Serif fonts are fonts without little doober-hicky lines

  • and stuff at the bottom of letters.

  • And that's to be contrasted with Serif fonts, which have all the little doober-hickies at the bottom of each letter.

  • So, why do you use one and not the other?

  • Well, visual psychophysicists have discovered that using a Sans Serif font when you're projecting text

  • onto a screen like this makes it easier for the audience to read the text

  • quickly. These fonts down here, the Serif fonts, this is the font if you have novel you were going to read it in bed,

  • it's very easy to read.

  • And that's why books are printed with Serif fonts,

  • but you should choose, and there are a range of choices that you can make,

  • one of the Sans Serif fonts for your scientific presentations.

  • How big should your font be?

  • Again, be careful of some of the default font sizes.

  • One of the defaults in Power Point is astronomically huge,

  • bigger than this one right here, it's like 42.

  • It's way too big! You don't need that.

  • So, the range of font sizes that you should use are shown here.

  • Anywhere from 18 down to 36, with one exception.

  • We often, in our scientific presentations, will want to insert a reference to a published paper,

  • which isn't really the focus of the slide, but we want to have it up there

  • for scientific accuracy.

  • So, under those circumstances, you might use a 14 point

  • font, to put your reference at the bottom of the slide.

  • Other than that, just work in this range and you'll be good.

  • Avoid using capital letters. This makes it clear why.

  • It's actually really hard to read all capitols.

  • And secondly, in this age of email, I think we all know that capitalizing everything

  • is the visual equivalent of shouting at someone.

  • So it's just not polite. In addition, when you're thinking about titles

  • or how you would actually capitalize words,

  • use a sentence format. In other words, don't capitalize every word

  • of your title or your text down here.

  • Having capitals of every word slows down the eye and makes it difficult to read.

  • So, remember, the text and the slide is really there for the audience to be able to read quickly

  • and easily.

  • Color schemes are really important and thinking about the background of your slides.

  • Now, we've all seen a lot of slides that have

  • very fancy backgrounds and in fact,

  • you want the simplest possible background.

  • For example, a plain white background with dark letters,

  • either black or blue.

  • That works very well; it's high in contrast

  • and the only thing that appears on the slide is the information that your audience needs

  • to understand this slide in the context of your talk.

  • Avoid using the fancy patterned backgrounds.

  • You don't need your company or university logo

  • on every slide. You do not need a DNA double helix

  • running down every slide.

  • All of that is extraneous. Maybe it might appear on your first slide,

  • but then get rid of it.

  • Streamline it down to as simple as possible and think about the contrast of letters.

  • So dark against light works really well,

  • light against darks works very well. A black background with white letters

  • or bright yellow. Again, high contrast, easy for the audience to read.

  • When should you use which? Well, if you were to give a talk

  • for example, at a very large symposium, with hundreds of people,

  • a very big room, psycophysically, and in terms of the projector,

  • the contrast is greatest if you use a dark background

  • and light letters, under that context.

  • So it's easier to project at high contrast.

  • If you're teaching in a small room, or you're in a circumstance where you're worried about people staying awake,

  • then I would use a white background, with dark letters.

  • That is actually more effective.

  • However, you do want to think about your science.

  • For example, in my science, I use a lot of fluorescence, photomicrographs, where I actually prefer a dark background

  • because the contrast, I want people to be dark adapted so they can really see my data.

  • So in one of my scientific seminars, regardless of whether I'm in a small room or a big room

  • I use a black background.

  • It just works better for my science.

  • There are certain color combinations that you should avoid. Red/green is bad:

  • this is incredibly difficult to look at. In addition, a large fraction of the population is red-green color blind

  • and finally, red is really angry color. I actually saw an entire seminar once

  • with the background color of the slides that was red and

  • I was so agitated by ten minutes into the talk, so avoid that.

  • Other color combinations can be equally bad

  • and this is bad not because the colors are unpleasant

  • but because the contrast here is not big enough

  • for an audience member to actually read

  • the letters against this background. This is important because in science we're often

  • creating, for example, these cartoons, of, for example, of a signal transduction pathway,

  • where you want each protein to be a different color.

  • So we're always looking for a new color for a new protein as we're going through

  • a flow of talk, but we want to make sure that each protein that might in fact be this blue color

  • would then have a label on top of it that's high contrast. For example, for this, it might be black instead of green.

  • Let's think now about how to lay out a slide visually in Power Point

  • so that it's really easy for an audience member to follow the content of your talk.

  • First of all, I strongly recommend that every slide a heading at the top

  • and the best heading is actually a statement, a simple sentence

  • that says in plain english what the bottom line of the slide is.

  • Now you might say, Sue, excuse me, this is not a statement, and you're right

  • ok, busted, this is really going through an outline for this particular talk, but in my science talks

  • every slide is headed by a statement.

  • If you're going to include text in a slide, it's very important to just limit the amount of text.

  • I really, strongly urge you to use no more than two lines of text

  • in a text block. Why is that?

  • The minute you show a big block of text like this, I have lost you as an audience member.

  • You don't know at this point whether you should be reading all of this stuff or listening to me.

  • And if you as an audience member are now distracted and confused about what you should be doing,

  • I as a speaker have lost control of my talk.

  • So, don't use things like this, there's one exception, there might be a wonderful quotation that you want to include in your talk.

  • For example, a quote from The Double Helix or a quote from the beautiful writings of Ramon y Cajal

  • if you're a neurobiologist. And under those circumstances it's great to include the full text.

  • What I recommend you do if you do include a quotation, is rather than read it word by word,

  • instead sort of paraphrase it as you're going along.

  • You might say, well, the reason for limiting blocks of text to just two lines is

  • if it goes on forever, people in the audience are going to have to make this huge effort

  • to read it and that will preclude them from paying attention to what you're saying.

  • So, you can paraphrase a quote, that's very effective, unless it

  • is very poetic and you want to do a dramatic reading, and that's fine too.

  • Lists should be short; try to limit your lists to just three items.

  • Avoid like mad long lists and if you're going to have a list,

  • I strongly recommend that you use the animation feature in PowerPoint

  • to unveil your list one at a time.

  • So, when you're talking about item one in your talk,

  • that will appear. And only when you're ready to talk about item two

  • does that second item appear

  • and likewise, when you're ready to include item three, that will come up as well.

  • Be very generous in a slide with empty space.

  • It's more effective, it's more powerful for the audience.

  • And this is why. If you start to just load your slide with stuff,

  • it's visually overwhelming and often, you can get into a situation,

  • we've all been in seminars before, where something is very, very, very close to the edge of the slide

  • and there's a slight misalignment between the projector

  • and the screen that then results in stuff getting cut off.

  • And we've all been at talks, where someone says "oh, I'm sorry, If you could have seen the slide,

  • then you would have been able to read it."

  • Well, just leaving some space at the different edges, the boundaries of the slide

  • and don't forget about leaving some space at the bottom.

  • If you're in a room where everyone is sitting at the same level,

  • people in the back are trying to see over one another's head,

  • so if you're stuff is too close to bottom, some people in the back can't see it.

  • So, leave space on all three sides and a little space at the top, again for the misalignment problem.

  • Ok, let's think about the style of these slides. I urge you

  • most wholeheartedly to include a simple image

  • on every slide.

  • What, most slides? No, every slide.

  • In every slide of one of my scientific presentations, there is an image.

  • Why is that? Here's the deal.

  • We audience members who are listening to a talk take in and process information

  • in quite different ways from one another. Some of us

  • are readers and that's the reason for having a sentence at the top of each slide.

  • Some of us are going to take in information by reading.

  • Others of us are very visual. If we have an image on the slide,

  • then that appeals to the vision, we're primates, we're very visually oriented

  • so we communicate through pictures.

  • And the third way we talk in information is by listening.

  • The ideal, the perfect power point slide represents an absolutely

  • synchronous match between a simple statement at the top,

  • a simple visual and what you as a speaker are saying.

  • So that the same content is being delivered through all three channels

  • at the same time, without any distractions.

  • Make your slides simple, limit the number of stuff you included in each slide

  • and just make one or two points from each slide.

  • Now, we've all heard this rule, maybe most of us have heard a rule,

  • how many slides should you show in a particular scientific presentation?

  • And the rule that I learned and the rule that perhaps you learned as well,

  • the rule is you show one slide per minute.

  • So, if you're giving a twenty minute talk,

  • you show twenty slides. I would argue now

  • that that might have been true when slides were actually on film

  • and difficult to manipulate and there was no such thing as animations.

  • Now that we have tools like PowerPoint and Keynote,

  • that enable us to build content progressively in slides and to have things that are simple,

  • simple points, that we can easily change from talk to talk,

  • that rule doesn't really hold anymore.

  • And I don't think there is a firm rule, I think it really depends on the amount of information

  • that you're delivering in a talk.

  • So, make your slides simple,

  • don't worry about this one slide per minute rule and rather, get feedback from, as you practice a talk,

  • get feedback from your colleagues

  • about whether you're overwhelming people

  • with too much data and number of slides.

  • If your slides are simple, you can show more than one per minute.

  • We have all seen talks where a slide like this comes up

  • and what does the speaker do? The speaker does this,

  • the speaker says, "I know this slide is really busy, but, the only thing I really want you to look at

  • is this set of data right here".

  • We've been there, right? I've been there, you've been there.

  • What has the speaker just told you?

  • The speaker's just said, I'm too lazy to have created a slide

  • that is actually tailored for what I want to show you.

  • And we as audience members are looking at all of this stuff,

  • we, even if we're told to look at this, I mean, how many of us behave?

  • I, personally, I'm looking this and I'm wondering about that,

  • so the speaker has not only shown a little bit of disrespect,

  • and laziness to us, in my opinion,

  • but in addition, the speaker has lost us as audience members

  • because we're now wandering around the slide

  • and wondering, we're having our own thoughts.

  • So, if you're going to show a slide like this, simply take the data that

  • you want to show, eliminate everything else and put that up.

  • And then explain the data completely.

  • Explain to the audience what the axes are, what each color is, and remember

  • that this is the very first time that anyone in the audience has seen this particular graph.

  • You've seen it a thousand times, you get it intuitively, like that,

  • but they won't. So, just show the data that you want to explain

  • and explain the data that you show.

  • In other words, here's the simple rule:

  • if you're not going to take the time to explain it, get rid of it completely.

  • It doesn't belong there.

  • I want to show you an example of a figure that I used to show in one of my scientific presentations.

  • And it's a brain and it's got some protein and it shows the distribution of those proteins in the brain.

  • It's a pretty simple figure, the content doesn't matter to us.

  • But I want to show you what this figure looked like before I put it into the talk in this format.

  • Here's what the figure looked like in the actual paper that I took it from.

  • It had all of these extra labels that were extraneous,

  • I was never going to explain

  • that MGE stands for the medial ganglionic eminence because it's not relevant to the talk

  • so, what did I do? I took this figure,

  • I put it into Photoshop and I got rid of all of that,

  • leaving only a little landmark, the eye, to orient the audience to what we were saying.

  • So, you can take complex figures, export them, and simply them

  • in order to fit perfectly with your presentation.

  • We have all seen a lot of, especially with the introduction of Keynote,

  • some very fancy transitions between slides.

  • What do me mean by transition? Well,

  • in my talk so far, when I've advanced the slides, you simply see the new slide.

  • Remember when Keynote came out and the first time you were at a talk

  • and the speaker advanced to the next slide

  • and the slide formed a box, and the box rotated in 3 dimensions and then a new slide appeared

  • and you thought "Oh, that's really cool, that was wild!"

  • and then the speaker got their advance and they advanced to the second slide and

  • the slide then did a big spiral and then the new slide appeared

  • and by the third or fourth time that the speaker did that, you felt nauseated.

  • We, yeah, so avoid these fancy transitions, they are not in service of the talk.

  • There is an exception though.

  • There are some transitions that actually illustrate

  • in a very subtle way, actions. Here's an example.

  • This is a slide that I've shown in some of my presentations

  • that have talked about the migration of neurons in the developing brain.

  • And in this particular talk, the point I wanted to make was that we would take out neurons

  • from a very small region and culture them. So, I used a very simple wipe transition. Watch this,

  • it's subtle but, there's the transition.

  • It actually wipes from one side to the other. That sort of mimics the act

  • of taking something out of the brain and putting it into culture.

  • So, that's a sensible use, another sensible use would be if you're going to zoom in on something,

  • if you're going to zoom in on this region, you might use a zoom transition.

  • Apart from that, just advance from one slide to the next with a simple transition.

  • Don't drown the audience with data.

  • What makes a talk memorable is when a speaker communicates

  • a couple of take-home messages in a way that presents just enough data

  • to be convincing, but not so much data that the audience is just flooded with information

  • and can't process it.

  • Less is more and here's a way to think about it. Those of us who are biologists

  • are used to culturing cells in minimum essential medium.

  • Just enough of the critical nutrients and elements and vitamins,

  • that a cell needs to survive and nothing extra. Minimum essential medium.

  • Now, if you take out any one of those elements in the medium,

  • the cells will die. Adding more doesn't add any value to your culture.

  • So, if we think about minimum essential media, we can also think about

  • minimum essential data. Just the data that you need

  • to convince the audience of the credibility of your science and no more.

  • That's really difficult and, I think, that's the most difficult decision that we have to make

  • in terms of presenting a seminar. What is just enough?

  • And where's the line between just enough and not too much.

  • For that, experience helps a lot, but also getting feedback from your colleagues,

  • when you're practicing your talk,

  • to ask people, can I get rid of this? What can go?

  • Don't ask what can I add, ask what can go? To make this convincing and thorough,

  • and yet not too much.

  • So, I think we all realize it's really easy to use PowerPoint badly,

  • right? So, we've seen a zillion examples like this, of people presenting journal clubs or seminars

  • you see a slide like that, we as audience members,

  • are visually overwhelmed, we're lost, we don't know what to look at

  • we can't read this stuff, it's too much to read, we're distracted.

  • The minute a slide like this goes up, the speaker has lost the audience completely.

  • So, it takes a lot of work, don't get me wrong, it takes time

  • to use PowerPoint or Keynote effectively in a seminar because you have to think carefully

  • about what you need to present, what you NEED to present,

  • not what you want to present,

  • not what you'd love to present, but what you need to present

  • and to present it using clear, simple graphics

  • and clear, simple text. So, in fact, let's go through an exercise.

  • Let's take that previous slide, from this lovely paper from JCB,

  • which I actually presented for a journal club many years ago.

  • Let's take that previous slide, which is figure 2 from that paper,

  • and let's see how we can break it down into its minimum essential components.

  • The first decision that we have to make in terms of looking at all the data in this figure

  • is what stays and what goes. What's the minimum essential data?

  • What are, excuse my grammatical error there, what are the minimum essential data?

  • that we need in order to present in our journal club.

  • And we might decide at that point that this particular part of the figure, panel b, can go.

  • It's not essential, but everything else is.

  • So, how do we present that? Well, let's deploy our PowerPoint rules

  • in this context. First of all, I'm going show you how I'd present panel a. Look at it for a second,

  • it's got some results in a gel and it's got some images of cells.

  • How might I do that? Well,

  • here's the first figure, here's the first slide in presenting this figure.

  • Notice that there's a sentence at the top, and then I've taken the data

  • from the figure and I've added some stuff over here.

  • I've added two labels that help the audience

  • understand immediately that this is a PCR product and this is actually a Western blot.

  • So I've added some stuff to be helpful to the audience, but I've simplified

  • their focus, so there's a good match between showing this and having the text.

  • And what I would be saying if I were actually presenting a journal club.

  • And then, using a simple animation,

  • I would then unveil the rest of this panel.

  • And I've added something for this audience down here,

  • showing you that this is actually a photomicrograph of MDCK cells.

  • So that's panel a, presented in really two parts,

  • using a simple animation and some additions.

  • The next thing I might want to show actually comes from panel c,

  • of that figure. And I've added a bunch of stuff here to be audience friendly.

  • First of all, notice that there's a sentence at the top, a statement of what's going on.

  • I'm showing just one simple panel, I've added a label,

  • and I've added this statement to help the audience that

  • we're looking down at the surface of these cells.

  • from the lumen.

  • I've also added some color coding so that they know what proteins are visualized

  • in different colors. That wasn't in the original figure, I added that

  • because who is this slide for? It's for the audience.

  • The audience needs this. And then using an animation, we'll then show a side view

  • of the same cells, that' s the control cells. Now watch what happens.

  • Two things happen; the sentence at the top changes,

  • cause there's a new message, and we've added the contrasting view

  • of the cells that have this particular protein knocked down.

  • Let's now think about the last part, a new sentence that really states that

  • this protein is essential for these cells to form little microvilli

  • and in the absence of protein, they don't.

  • So, now we've presented that complicated figure in a few parts using some simple animations

  • in a very audience-friendly format.

  • So, what's the bottom line with PowerPoint?

  • Make simple slides, simple slides, that make one or two points.

  • Build your content progressively using animations, rather than present everything all at once.

  • Just show one, PowerPoint and Keynote, they're all about control.

  • They're controlling what people see, what you're saying, and what they're reading

  • and have all those match at the same time.

  • And remember, if you're not going to talk about it, just leave it out.

  • If you're not going to explain it, it doesn't belong there at all.

  • It goes. Ok, that's what I wanted to tell you about PowerPoint, I hope that's helpful.

  • And now we want to transition into thinking more broadly

  • about how to structure a talk.

  • So that its organization is clear to the audience.

  • And I think about it as almost taking someone by the hand

  • and walking them through the science, right,

  • and saying, here's what I want you to see now

  • and here's the path that we're following, here's where we've just been

  • and here's where we're going.

  • So, a good talk is like a good paper, it has a structure,

  • right, a good talk starts out with a big question

  • and then we build content over time, we go through the meat of the talk

  • and then we end with a conclusion that basically reaches back out to the big issues that we started with.

  • Same way as we write a paper, why are so bad at actually doing this at talks?

  • Well, if we discipline ourselves to do it, I think we can do it better.

  • I'd like to show you an example from one of my own seminars

  • of how I actually structure an introduction to define the really big question

  • and then give enough background information

  • to enable the audience to be able to follow the meat of the talk

  • in the middle.

  • And as I'm doing that, I also want to show you a trick that I've learned

  • that I think is extraordinarily effective at giving good talks.

  • And that's an idea that I call something like a home slide

  • or a home image. It's a picture,

  • maybe a cartoon, an image of some sort, that is going to signal to the audience

  • that you're at a point in the talk where you're going to make a transition.

  • It's a little signal to the audience to perk up

  • because you're going to tell them where you've just been,

  • what it means and where you're going next.

  • So, as I show you the introduction to one of my talks,

  • I'm going to build up into a home slide that you'll see a little bit later,

  • is going to come up again and again and again

  • at transitions. You might feel a little bit jarred

  • because now the background of the slide is going to change from white to black

  • and this jarred feeling that you might experience

  • is one of the reasons that I think it's actually quite important in a talk

  • to keep the same color background throughout the entire thing.

  • So, here we go. So, here's the first slide from my standard seminar and notice first of all

  • that my name and institution appear right here.

  • Why is that? Well, because people in the audience may be taking notes

  • and they might want to write down your name

  • and they'll want to know how to spell it correctly,

  • so it's a courtesy to them.

  • So, as I start in my talk, I start to discuss

  • a kind of analogy between the brain, which is what we study

  • and a computer chip, because each of them has to make really specific connections with one another,

  • the brain during development and the computer chip in a factory.

  • And I make kind of a joke and see if people laugh and

  • gauge the humor level of my audience at that point.

  • And then I show the audience the cells that I actually work on, the actual circuitry of the brain

  • that my lab studies, in the cerebral cortex

  • and then I frame the major question that my lab is interested in,

  • which really has to do with the question of how it is that these individual neurons in the brain know

  • what kind of connections to form, what are the molecular mechanisms

  • that guide those choices about cell fate and connectivity.

  • At this point then, I introduce the two cell types that the talk will focus on,

  • two sets of neurons that you'll see have different colors

  • and then I introduce two questions that the talk will address

  • during the course of the next however long it is, maybe a forty-five minute seminar.

  • One question having to do with the fate of the yellow cells

  • and another question having to do with the fate of the blue cells.

  • And that, basically then, launches me into the actual data part of the talk.

  • This particular image right here is the "home image"

  • or the home slide that I was referring to

  • just a minute ago.

  • And as you'll see, this image is going to reappear again and again and again

  • in my talk during transitions. And we'll see just in a couple of minutes how that can get played out

  • and how it can be extraordinarily effective in enabling the audience to follow a talk.

  • Ok, so, now we've built up an introduction and we're ready for the middle, right?

  • So, we're ready for the middle of the talk, which is the meat.

  • But, there's a problem. And that is that

  • audiences have fairly limited attention spans.

  • This is an interesting graph, so let's look at a little bit of data.

  • This is a plot of the percentage of a class that's paying full attention to a lecturer

  • over the time during which the lecture is being delivered.

  • Ok, there's some good news, right?

  • The good news is right here, in your introduction, people are actually kinda tuned in and listening.

  • And here's the bad news, which is that ok, let's face it,

  • depending on how compelling the lecturer is,

  • it might be here, or it might be way down there,

  • but the bottom line is that at no, under no circumstance are you ever going to get

  • 100% audience attention for your entire talk.

  • Why is that? Well, think about being a member of the audience.

  • Why does this happen? It's because we're human! We have thoughts,

  • we have thoughts that intrude on our attention span,

  • we have thoughts about, oh my gosh, did I remember to load that gel or turn off the power supply,

  • we have thoughts about whether we actually are going to be on time getting the kids from daycare,

  • we have thoughts about someone we just met,

  • you know, we have all these random thoughts that intrude,

  • so we're human and we're going to space out.

  • We then, as speakers have two choices,

  • one is we could say, eh, ok, someone spaced out, take no prisoners, you spaced out, forget it.

  • You're just never going to understand anything else I say.

  • Or, we can just acknowledge the fact that the audience is human,

  • that every single member of an audience is going to tune out at some point.

  • And we can build in a mechanism within our talk to enable them to catch up.

  • So, obviously, I kind of recommend the latter.

  • So, if the middle is the meat of the talk and it's the time when the audience is going to zone out at some point,

  • why? Because they're just people! Well, what are we going to do about it?

  • What I suggest you do is to visualize the middle of the talk in the following way.

  • You're going to have a series of episodes, or data dives,

  • that you're going to present

  • little stories, and as you're presenting a particular story, you're going to start at a level

  • that's fairly untechnical and you might actually get pretty deep into the data.

  • To a level that's really going to appeal really just to specialists in your fields.

  • Now, if we were to give a talk and start presenting our data, and we've all been at seminars where people do this,

  • where we just go down into depth and then we just do data, data, data, data, data, data, data, data

  • and then we conclude and it's over, we've lost people along the way.

  • So, this structure, this visual structure here, is a way of planning your talk

  • so that you can think about diving down into data and then coming up for air

  • and it's at these transition points between data dives

  • that you use your home image to basically let the audience members

  • catch up and know where you've just been,

  • what you're concluding from that part of the data,

  • and where you're going to go next.

  • So, let's look at an example of one of those data dives from one of my seminars.

  • You've already seen the introduction to the seminar, you've already seen how I introduced

  • my home slide. At this point in my talk, I've gone through a review of the literature,

  • the first data dive and I'm now beginning part two of the talk.

  • And here's the beginning of that section. So, once again, you see

  • this home image and you see the two questions.

  • We're half way through the talk, but I'm summarizing part one

  • and getting ready to introduce the second set of questions.

  • At this point, then, I now start to explain that as we focus on the blue cells,

  • that we're going to be looking at the role of a separate protein

  • that is actually expressed in a subset of neurons within the different layers.

  • And then I explain that we've generated knock-out mice in which we've inserted

  • a reporter into the cells that normally express this protein

  • so that we can see their axonal connections.

  • And now, we don't really need to focus on the data, but look, there's a sentence,

  • at the top that basically says what I just told you,

  • then we see a simple figure from the controls

  • in which I would point out that what I want the audience to look at

  • are the blue axons that label the connections between the two hemispheres.

  • That's in the control, then we look at the mutant, the thing I'm going to emphasize

  • is the absence of those connections here.

  • Now, we're going to look at it from the side, same stuff, sentence, two simple images,

  • words will match the content, were I really delivering the seminar to you.

  • And then, I tell you what I told just told you.

  • I just told you that the blue cells express this protein, that they form this type of connection

  • and then I say, you know, in the first part of the talk,

  • I told you about another pathway.

  • So, you might be wondering, what is the relationship between these two pathways?

  • So, then I will go on to actually test that connection, by presenting more data

  • that would then build up into a small conclusion slide

  • showing you that this protein represses the expression of this gene.

  • So, simple graphics that really emphasize the bottom line,

  • the story that I'm telling you, with the minimum essential data.

  • Ok, so we've gone through the meat, thinking about data dives, coming back, making transitions.

  • Now let's think about how to conclude a talk.

  • Here's the good news, is that as you say

  • and now, in conclusion, look what happens to the attention level of your audience.

  • It's like, oh, it's over, hey, I better see what I just saw.

  • So, that's good news, now you've got one more really good chance to deliver your take-home to the audience effectively.

  • There's a danger to this though, as well, and that's the danger of hearing

  • for example, forty minutes into a talk someone say, "Oh, to conclude",

  • and our, we're like, "oh, good, you know, actually, they're ending twenty minutes early, that's great,

  • I can actually get a little bit more work done today."

  • So, they say in conclusion, blah blah blah, blah blah blah, and then, they say

  • "and now in part two of my talk" and what's our response as an audience?

  • We're like, "oooh, dude, no". Why is that? It's because it was a false ending.

  • And it got us all excited. So, if you're going to conclude part one of your talk,

  • do the audience of favor of saying,

  • to some sum up this first part of the seminar, and that way you won't create a false expectation.

  • But, the good news is, you will perk up interest as you signal your conclusion,

  • and that means that you have one last chance to really reiterate your specific conclusions

  • and most of us remember to do that.

  • But it's easy to forget to sort of back out to the big picture.

  • And return to the beginning, to have your talk come full circle,

  • so that you're really ending by revisiting the big questions

  • that you introduced at the very first part of the talk.

  • So, again, here's how I would do it in my talk, just as a visual

  • example of how one might think about this.

  • Concluding up, now, sentence at the top, the same diagram that you've seen before,

  • about this repression and now adding other things you haven't seen in the data,

  • but I would add that, just to remind them,

  • that at least one of these mechanisms works through the modulation of chromatin,

  • they would have seen that slide already.

  • I would then connect it back to the first part of the talk

  • and talk about a little switch that had gotten set up.

  • I would then refer back even earlier to a part of the talk that you didn't see,

  • now going back to the really big picture,

  • questions about how different types of neurons emerge over time.

  • Many of these questions are still unanswered and therefore represent a frontier in my field.

  • I would then wrap up by acknowledging, of course, the colleagues that have contributed to the work over time

  • and then, here's a trick,

  • as you get to the very end of your talk,

  • rather than leaving up your acknowledgements slide,

  • have your conclusion slide appear at the very end.

  • For the question and answer period.

  • Why is that? Well, it helps the audience.

  • Remember everything is in service of the audience and I actually have the misfortune

  • of working on three genes, all of which have names that end in two and none of which are memorable

  • by anyone who doesn't work on them.

  • So, by putting this picture up, I'm enabling the audience to actually ask intelligent questions.

  • First, you know, if they're struggling to remember which gene they had a question about

  • and secondly, when I'm answering a question,

  • I can actually use the visuals to explain my answer.

  • And that turns out to be very helpful.

  • So, I really recommend that at the end of your talk,

  • during Q and A, put your summary slide back up again.

  • It's helpful for you and for the people attending your talk.

  • Ok, so what have I just told you about organizing a great talk?

  • First of all, use PowerPoint wisely.

  • Have very clean, minimal slides.

  • Secondly, start out with a broad introduction, so that everyone in the audience

  • understands the big questions that are compelling in your field

  • and then introduce the specifics gradually,

  • giving them just enough background information so that they can follow the data,

  • but not so much that they're overwhelmed.

  • Third, think of the talk as consisting of these episodes,

  • or little data dives, in which you're going to go

  • at a point into your data, remember the minimum essential data,

  • and then you're going to go into some depth, but then you come up for air

  • and allow the audience to regroup, see where you've just been,

  • frame the next question, and then get there logically, rather than just going through data, data, data, data,

  • which was just going to leave people in the dust.

  • A very effective way of making these transitions explicit

  • is to design a home slide or a home image

  • that is a signal to the audience that you're at a point of transition

  • and they will perk up and it will help them to understand the flow of your talk.

  • And finally, your conclusion here is just the opposite of the introduction.

  • You start more specific with what you've learned, but then end up broad again.

  • So, is this all you need to know to give a great talk?

  • No way! Right? I mean, these are just some basic rules or suggestions or advice

  • about how to create slides that are user-friendly, audience-friendly,

  • and how to structure your talk so that it's well organized and very, very clear,

  • and simple for an audience to follow.

  • But there are a lot of things that go into giving a great talk.

  • There's the whole performance aspect of speaking.

  • There's the actual scientific content,

  • but at least in terms of performance, you can practice that,

  • you can and should rehearse your talks.

  • In fact, the entire time, from the first day of graduate school, all the way, well into being a tenured professor,

  • at Stanford, I rehearsed every talk, every lecture,

  • every journal club, that I gave.

  • Every one of them. And finally, I got so comfortable with speaking

  • I don't actually have to do it anymore.

  • But that means rehearsing, out loud and often in front of an audience,

  • dozens and dozens and dozens of talks,

  • get feedback and practice the way you're going to speak.

  • Have the words rehearsed and get some input from your colleagues

  • about whether you've identified effectively

  • the minimum essential data for the talk.

  • Secondly, have yourself videotaped.

  • Go and watch yourself and see what you do.

  • See if you're gesturing naturally and so on.

  • So, those kinds of aspects of delivery are much more effectively done one on one,

  • rather than through a format like this.

  • Another great resource that I highly recommend is a wonderful book, by Michael Alley,

  • called The Craft of Scientific Presentations.

  • If you're going to have just a single book on scientific presentations in your bookshelf, I personally would recommend this one.

  • It's a terrific model and it's actually the basis of a lot the information that I've presented to you today.

  • Well, that's it! Thank you so much, I hope this has been helpful

  • and I wish you every success with your talks in the future.

You're probably tuning into this talk because you're interested in improving your speaking skills

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スーザン・マコネル(スタンフォード大学)。効果的な科学的プレゼンテーションのデザイン (Susan McConnell (Stanford): Designing effective scientific presentations)

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    Stone Young に公開 2021 年 01 月 14 日
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