7 ms·

How to give a great scientific talk

155 points by hownottowrite 8y ago

bluenose69 8y ago
My instructions to students always include the following. 1. Tell people why the work excites you. 2. Make sure that everyone in the room learns something.
- Beldin 8y ago
  In addition: the slides are not the story. Make sure your slides support your story, and make sure they do not distract from the presenter.
- chrisseaton 8y ago
  What if the work doesn't excite you but it's still important to do?
  - xkcd-sucks 8y ago
    In academic research you'll be eclipsed by the truly obsessive people
probably_wrong 8y ago
While I don't disagree with the general points given here, I feel this is how to give a great talk, not necessarily a great scientific talk. There's an interesting point buried here (emphasis mine): > Presenters often fail because they try to deliver too much complex information. Language and content, normally, has to be designed with the non-specialist SCIENTIST in mind. “You have to think about the least knowledgeable person in your audience THAT YOU CARE ABOUT REACHING” says Rubenson. If you are presenting a breakthrough in compilers in a compilers workshop, maybe you don't want to start your talk explaining what a compiler is. Step 0 of every presentation should be "know your audience", and if your audience is expecting complex information you will have to get into details at some point. That doesn't mean that elitism is a good thing. I think both beginners and professionals should walk our of your talk understanding something new. And a good scientific presentation should be also a good presentation. But with limited time (major conferences implemented 20 minutes talks this year), you need to set your baseline knowledge somewhere.
- raister 8y ago
  I guess, as a defence mechanism, people embbed complex (almost impossible to understand during the talk) information in their slides, avoiding hard questioning afterwards. It was not once or twice that I have witnessed that during conferences and workshops. People are afraid to be ridiculized in public, or seem incompetent in front of a large audience. We won't be seeing that to change in the short run, unfortunately.
  - thanatropism 8y ago
    Or they have a single slide deck for many occasions and sometimes overestimate the audience. I've seen this a lot (as an overestimated student) in my first year of grad school -- these were all budding researchers, right? Generally in life I tend to overestimate people's technical level -- maybe not of computers, which change a lot, but basic statistics and finance, general knowledge, etc. This is why: "brains" only get you so far in life, but being an intellectual-type person one wants to believe that those more succesful than you are even brainier than you. Some people work out their arms so much their legs are comparatively small. These people are not about to become star athletes. I wonder if they look at olympic sprinters or soccer players and think "what great arms this guys must have, I wouldn't want to wrestle with them".
  - crispyambulance 8y ago
    > ...as a defence mechanism, people embbed complex (almost impossible to understand during the talk) information in their slides... Yes, this happens a lot, and it has the effect of alienating those who actually need to hear the talk and coming off as pandering or cloying to those that already know the material. One thing I suggest to folks, if there is some insecurity about not covering "everything", is to make some slides on detailed sub-topics that aren't included in the main talk but are intended to be used when/if there's a follow-up question. If the speaker is careful, they can even "bait" their talk to implicitly suggest follow-up questions for which a detailed auxiliary slide has been prepared.
    - sitkack 8y ago
stareatgoats 8y ago
Incidentally, yesterday I came across a great scientific talk that I think checked all the boxes here, and then some. 100k views+, but deserves an even larger audience IMO, could clear up some of the confusion about climate (the facts parts): Dan Britt - Orbits and Ice Ages: The History of Climate https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yze1YAz_LYM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yze1YAz_LYM Obviously, I think this is a great talk since I find the topic interesting too. There is probably not much you can do if your audience is uninterested in the first place.
rotorblade 8y ago
I also find this a useful resource when preparing a talk (slides-based): David Tong's "How to make sure your talk doesn't suck" www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/user/tong/talks/talk.pdf
sampo 8y ago
Unrelated to the posted article, but native English speakers might have a small disadvantage in getting understood, because they don't always know which word choices are less known among those who learned English as a second language. And native British English speakers can have a larger disadvantage in getting understood, among people who know English well but are not used to British accents. I was recently in a workshop where I had no trouble understanding the talks given by Chinese, Finnish, German, Indian, Russian, Swedish and whatever speakers. But a native British person, I really had to concentrate because they spoke fast and with a heavy accent. American accents I always find easy, though. http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/20161028-native-english-speakers-are-the-worlds-worst-communicators http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/20161028-native-english-spe...
- lou1306 8y ago
  > American accents I always find very easy, though. That might possibly be due to the hegemony of the American movie/television industry? In my case, I know that a majority of the English-spoken entertainment I consume is American-made, so much that British English now gives me a distinct, "exotic" feeling.
  - sampo 8y ago
    There is this observation that British and American singers sound much alike when they sing. They lose most of their accent, and they just sing in "neutral English". And that neutral English is much closer to American than British. So I'm inclined to think that the British just have more of an accent than Americans. The British accent contains more intonations, which one cannot use when the intonations are dictated by the music. "Why British Singers Lose Their Accent When Singing" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DQ8RdLtZWlc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DQ8RdLtZWlc
    - chrisseaton 8y ago
      I can't understand why people would think a non-geographic-specific American accent would be 'neutral' compared to any other. What does 'neutral' even mean? The letter sounds as in the written version of a word? American accents have as many weird dropping of sounds, adding of extra sounds, and other little curiosities compared to the written version as any other accent does. For example a non-geographic-specific American accent pronounces 'water' as 'warder', 'butter' as 'budder', and 'duty' as 'doody' - it's definitely taking things away and adding things and not just being neutral.
Rainymood 8y ago
Tell them what you are going to tell them, then tell them, then tell them what you told them. My key advice is to gear the talk to the audience and context. A TED talk will have a completely different presentation style than an academic conference where people might be actually interested in the more nitty gritty details.
- crispyambulance 8y ago
  > Tell them what you are going to tell them, then tell them, then tell them what you told them. I see this a lot in talks and even in canned presentations and I don't recommend it. I think it comes from people padding their talks to fit within a certain time frame. Or perhaps, some speakers have realized that enough audience members utterly tune-out during the talk and need to be reminded of what the talk was about just as they're waking-up and getting ready for the next meeting. Somehow it got drilled into people that this is a necessary structure, but it is not! Much better, I think, to remove material from the talk to the point where the speaker is making one, maybe two interesting assertions that are supported succinctly. Every talk should leave time for discussion.
  - blt 8y ago
    This specific aphorism is given as advice by some well known MIT public speaking guy. I think people take it too literally and make an outline slide that's like "motivation, problem statement, method, experiments." So useful...
porpoisely 8y ago
If people are interested in some good scientific and philosophical lectures, I found the ones by Royal Institution to be interesting. Haven't watched all of them, but the ones on memory and neuroscience were particularly good. https://www.youtube.com/user/TheRoyalInstitution/videos https://www.youtube.com/user/TheRoyalInstitution/videos
j7ake 8y ago
Uri Alon gave excellent advice on how to give a good talk. I feel Uri Alon gives much more specific details on how to structure the talk, body language, and most importantly how to handle questions. https://www.cell.com/molecular-cell/fulltext/S1097-2765(09)00742-4 https://www.cell.com/molecular-cell/fulltext/S1097-2765(09)0...
carusooneliner 8y ago
The best way to make your talk memorable is to focus on substance over style. Work hard on giving something new for the audience to chew on. Without interesting content the audience will tune out no matter how well you structure the talk.
jrauser 8y ago
For scientific/technical talks specifically, a truly useful technique I learned from The Craft of Scientific Presentations[1] is the assertion-evidence slide. This type of slide has a complete sentence at the top that makes a substantive assertion. Then the rest of the slide contains evidence for that assertion usually in the form of a diagram, chart or table. This type of slide is the backbone of a scientific presentation. Generally, Alley's book is extremely useful. [1]: https://www.amazon.com/Craft-Scientific-Presentations-Critical-Succeed/dp/1441982787 https://www.amazon.com/Craft-Scientific-Presentations-Critic...
kkylin 8y ago
All good points, but there are a couple mistakes I often see people (not just beginners) make that did not get mentioned: 1. State the problem (and convince the audience it matters) before rushing to present a solution. 2. Know the background of your audience, and figure out how well they need to know the background to get something out of your talk. And to the grad students: sometimes, when one only has 10-15 minutes to give a talk, it is hard to give one that makes sense to junior members of the audience and still speak to the experts. Don't give up! and don't be shy about asking speakers questions afterwards. Sure, there are some people who think they are too important to talk to grad students (or even faculty) they don't know. The worst you get from asking such people a questions is you get brushed off (don't worry, they're not likely to remember who you are, and it's not likely to have a negative impact on your career). But more often people are happy to go into details, and/or put you in touch with the postdoc / grad student who knows all the gory details, etc. etc.
- Joeri 8y ago
  State the problem (and convince the audience it matters) before rushing to present a solution. Exactly. A presentation that is about a "what" or "how" often should start with the "why". The audience needs to care about what is being presented, and often the best way to do that is to remind them why they should care. Amusingly, this is itself also a talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPYeCltXpxw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPYeCltXpxw
janwillemb 8y ago
> practice +1. Practice out loud, rewrite, practice out loud again, rewrite, repeat, repeat, repeat. Also: let a real person listen to your talk at least once while rehearsing. (Tip: use spouse, if available)
- caillancm 8y ago
  For very important presentations, recording yourself can be useful too. It can be excruciating to watch it again, but it forms part of a powerful iterative loop.
julienchastang 8y ago
Toastmasters International was mentioned in the article. I just finished my Toastmasters “competent communicator” a few months ago. Here are some of my tips for public speaking in general: 1. Breathe! This is easier said than done when you are caught in an anxiety driven feedback loop where your breadth gets more shallow making you even more anxious. Halt this process by taking deep breadths. 2. Limit caffeine. Caffeine exacerbates feelings of anxiety especially in public speaking scenarios. 3. Beware of ruminating and catastrophic thoughts. You don't need to fight or eliminate them. In fact, doing so may make anxious feelings worse. But in a kind and compassionate manner towards yourself, just acknowledge they are there and the role that anxiety may play in those negative thoughts. Moreover, if you really do screwup the presentation, with some time no one will remember. We can recall great speeches but rarely terrible ones. 4. Attend a local public speaking club such as toastmasters (plug here for Speakeasy II here in Boulder, Colorado). Regularly speaking in front of audiences will take you through the desensitization process and over time giving a speech in front of a group of people will seem not so scary.
- oh_sigh 8y ago
  How do toastmasters feel about performance enhancing drugs, like beta blockers?
  - julienchastang 8y ago
    I have never heard of performance enhancing drugs ever mentioned in toastmasters.
xamuel 8y ago
Bar absolutely none, the SINGLE most important thing is: practice!! Rehearse with a stopwatch, modify, and repeat until it stops sucking.

155 points by hownottowrite 8y ago

My instructions to students always include the following. 1. Tell people why the work excites you. 2. Make sure that everyone in the room learns something.

Beldin 8y ago
In addition: the slides are not the story. Make sure your slides support your story, and make sure they do not distract from the presenter.
chrisseaton 8y ago
What if the work doesn't excite you but it's still important to do?
- xkcd-sucks 8y ago
  In academic research you'll be eclipsed by the truly obsessive people

probably_wrong 8y ago

While I don't disagree with the general points given here, I feel this is how to give a great talk, not necessarily a great scientific talk. There's an interesting point buried here (emphasis mine): > Presenters often fail because they try to deliver too much complex information. Language and content, normally, has to be designed with the non-specialist SCIENTIST in mind. “You have to think about the least knowledgeable person in your audience THAT YOU CARE ABOUT REACHING” says Rubenson. If you are presenting a breakthrough in compilers in a compilers workshop, maybe you don't want to start your talk explaining what a compiler is. Step 0 of every presentation should be "know your audience", and if your audience is expecting complex information you will have to get into details at some point. That doesn't mean that elitism is a good thing. I think both beginners and professionals should walk our of your talk understanding something new. And a good scientific presentation should be also a good presentation. But with limited time (major conferences implemented 20 minutes talks this year), you need to set your baseline knowledge somewhere.

raister 8y ago
I guess, as a defence mechanism, people embbed complex (almost impossible to understand during the talk) information in their slides, avoiding hard questioning afterwards. It was not once or twice that I have witnessed that during conferences and workshops. People are afraid to be ridiculized in public, or seem incompetent in front of a large audience. We won't be seeing that to change in the short run, unfortunately.
- thanatropism 8y ago
  Or they have a single slide deck for many occasions and sometimes overestimate the audience. I've seen this a lot (as an overestimated student) in my first year of grad school -- these were all budding researchers, right? Generally in life I tend to overestimate people's technical level -- maybe not of computers, which change a lot, but basic statistics and finance, general knowledge, etc. This is why: "brains" only get you so far in life, but being an intellectual-type person one wants to believe that those more succesful than you are even brainier than you. Some people work out their arms so much their legs are comparatively small. These people are not about to become star athletes. I wonder if they look at olympic sprinters or soccer players and think "what great arms this guys must have, I wouldn't want to wrestle with them".
- crispyambulance 8y ago
  > ...as a defence mechanism, people embbed complex (almost impossible to understand during the talk) information in their slides... Yes, this happens a lot, and it has the effect of alienating those who actually need to hear the talk and coming off as pandering or cloying to those that already know the material. One thing I suggest to folks, if there is some insecurity about not covering "everything", is to make some slides on detailed sub-topics that aren't included in the main talk but are intended to be used when/if there's a follow-up question. If the speaker is careful, they can even "bait" their talk to implicitly suggest follow-up questions for which a detailed auxiliary slide has been prepared.
  - sitkack 8y ago

stareatgoats 8y ago

Incidentally, yesterday I came across a great scientific talk that I think checked all the boxes here, and then some. 100k views+, but deserves an even larger audience IMO, could clear up some of the confusion about climate (the facts parts): Dan Britt - Orbits and Ice Ages: The History of Climate https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yze1YAz_LYM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yze1YAz_LYM Obviously, I think this is a great talk since I find the topic interesting too. There is probably not much you can do if your audience is uninterested in the first place.

rotorblade 8y ago

I also find this a useful resource when preparing a talk (slides-based): David Tong's "How to make sure your talk doesn't suck" www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/user/tong/talks/talk.pdf

sampo 8y ago

Unrelated to the posted article, but native English speakers might have a small disadvantage in getting understood, because they don't always know which word choices are less known among those who learned English as a second language. And native British English speakers can have a larger disadvantage in getting understood, among people who know English well but are not used to British accents. I was recently in a workshop where I had no trouble understanding the talks given by Chinese, Finnish, German, Indian, Russian, Swedish and whatever speakers. But a native British person, I really had to concentrate because they spoke fast and with a heavy accent. American accents I always find easy, though. http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/20161028-native-english-speakers-are-the-worlds-worst-communicators http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/20161028-native-english-spe...

lou1306 8y ago
> American accents I always find very easy, though. That might possibly be due to the hegemony of the American movie/television industry? In my case, I know that a majority of the English-spoken entertainment I consume is American-made, so much that British English now gives me a distinct, "exotic" feeling.
- sampo 8y ago
  There is this observation that British and American singers sound much alike when they sing. They lose most of their accent, and they just sing in "neutral English". And that neutral English is much closer to American than British. So I'm inclined to think that the British just have more of an accent than Americans. The British accent contains more intonations, which one cannot use when the intonations are dictated by the music. "Why British Singers Lose Their Accent When Singing" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DQ8RdLtZWlc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DQ8RdLtZWlc
  - chrisseaton 8y ago
    I can't understand why people would think a non-geographic-specific American accent would be 'neutral' compared to any other. What does 'neutral' even mean? The letter sounds as in the written version of a word? American accents have as many weird dropping of sounds, adding of extra sounds, and other little curiosities compared to the written version as any other accent does. For example a non-geographic-specific American accent pronounces 'water' as 'warder', 'butter' as 'budder', and 'duty' as 'doody' - it's definitely taking things away and adding things and not just being neutral.

Rainymood 8y ago

Tell them what you are going to tell them, then tell them, then tell them what you told them. My key advice is to gear the talk to the audience and context. A TED talk will have a completely different presentation style than an academic conference where people might be actually interested in the more nitty gritty details.

crispyambulance 8y ago
> Tell them what you are going to tell them, then tell them, then tell them what you told them. I see this a lot in talks and even in canned presentations and I don't recommend it. I think it comes from people padding their talks to fit within a certain time frame. Or perhaps, some speakers have realized that enough audience members utterly tune-out during the talk and need to be reminded of what the talk was about just as they're waking-up and getting ready for the next meeting. Somehow it got drilled into people that this is a necessary structure, but it is not! Much better, I think, to remove material from the talk to the point where the speaker is making one, maybe two interesting assertions that are supported succinctly. Every talk should leave time for discussion.
- blt 8y ago
  This specific aphorism is given as advice by some well known MIT public speaking guy. I think people take it too literally and make an outline slide that's like "motivation, problem statement, method, experiments." So useful...

porpoisely 8y ago

If people are interested in some good scientific and philosophical lectures, I found the ones by Royal Institution to be interesting. Haven't watched all of them, but the ones on memory and neuroscience were particularly good. https://www.youtube.com/user/TheRoyalInstitution/videos https://www.youtube.com/user/TheRoyalInstitution/videos

j7ake 8y ago

Uri Alon gave excellent advice on how to give a good talk. I feel Uri Alon gives much more specific details on how to structure the talk, body language, and most importantly how to handle questions. https://www.cell.com/molecular-cell/fulltext/S1097-2765(09)00742-4 https://www.cell.com/molecular-cell/fulltext/S1097-2765(09)0...

carusooneliner 8y ago

The best way to make your talk memorable is to focus on substance over style. Work hard on giving something new for the audience to chew on. Without interesting content the audience will tune out no matter how well you structure the talk.

jrauser 8y ago

For scientific/technical talks specifically, a truly useful technique I learned from The Craft of Scientific Presentations[1] is the assertion-evidence slide. This type of slide has a complete sentence at the top that makes a substantive assertion. Then the rest of the slide contains evidence for that assertion usually in the form of a diagram, chart or table. This type of slide is the backbone of a scientific presentation. Generally, Alley's book is extremely useful. [1]: https://www.amazon.com/Craft-Scientific-Presentations-Critical-Succeed/dp/1441982787 https://www.amazon.com/Craft-Scientific-Presentations-Critic...

kkylin 8y ago

All good points, but there are a couple mistakes I often see people (not just beginners) make that did not get mentioned: 1. State the problem (and convince the audience it matters) before rushing to present a solution. 2. Know the background of your audience, and figure out how well they need to know the background to get something out of your talk. And to the grad students: sometimes, when one only has 10-15 minutes to give a talk, it is hard to give one that makes sense to junior members of the audience and still speak to the experts. Don't give up! and don't be shy about asking speakers questions afterwards. Sure, there are some people who think they are too important to talk to grad students (or even faculty) they don't know. The worst you get from asking such people a questions is you get brushed off (don't worry, they're not likely to remember who you are, and it's not likely to have a negative impact on your career). But more often people are happy to go into details, and/or put you in touch with the postdoc / grad student who knows all the gory details, etc. etc.

Joeri 8y ago
State the problem (and convince the audience it matters) before rushing to present a solution. Exactly. A presentation that is about a "what" or "how" often should start with the "why". The audience needs to care about what is being presented, and often the best way to do that is to remind them why they should care. Amusingly, this is itself also a talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPYeCltXpxw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPYeCltXpxw

janwillemb 8y ago

> practice +1. Practice out loud, rewrite, practice out loud again, rewrite, repeat, repeat, repeat. Also: let a real person listen to your talk at least once while rehearsing. (Tip: use spouse, if available)

caillancm 8y ago
For very important presentations, recording yourself can be useful too. It can be excruciating to watch it again, but it forms part of a powerful iterative loop.

julienchastang 8y ago

Toastmasters International was mentioned in the article. I just finished my Toastmasters “competent communicator” a few months ago. Here are some of my tips for public speaking in general: 1. Breathe! This is easier said than done when you are caught in an anxiety driven feedback loop where your breadth gets more shallow making you even more anxious. Halt this process by taking deep breadths. 2. Limit caffeine. Caffeine exacerbates feelings of anxiety especially in public speaking scenarios. 3. Beware of ruminating and catastrophic thoughts. You don't need to fight or eliminate them. In fact, doing so may make anxious feelings worse. But in a kind and compassionate manner towards yourself, just acknowledge they are there and the role that anxiety may play in those negative thoughts. Moreover, if you really do screwup the presentation, with some time no one will remember. We can recall great speeches but rarely terrible ones. 4. Attend a local public speaking club such as toastmasters (plug here for Speakeasy II here in Boulder, Colorado). Regularly speaking in front of audiences will take you through the desensitization process and over time giving a speech in front of a group of people will seem not so scary.

oh_sigh 8y ago
How do toastmasters feel about performance enhancing drugs, like beta blockers?
- julienchastang 8y ago
  I have never heard of performance enhancing drugs ever mentioned in toastmasters.

xamuel 8y ago

Bar absolutely none, the SINGLE most important thing is: practice!! Rehearse with a stopwatch, modify, and repeat until it stops sucking.