In this week’s blog, resident blogger Beth Price gives her best/worst tips on turning your research into a presentation, just in time for conference season!

Conference season is around the corner, and the dreaded annual review isn’t far behind for those of us who aren’t January starters. With that in mind, and having only just missed April Fool’s Day, with the posting of this blog, here are 5 top tips for how to give a terrible, unforgivably bad, presentation. 

1. Ignore Your Audience

It doesn’t matter whether you’re presenting to a panel of experts, a group of fellow PhD students, or an entirely non-academic audience with a passing interest in your topic area, one presentation will suit everyone! One person’s so-called “jargon” is another person’s word-of-the-day, so don’t worry about explaining your complex ideas in a way which the specific audience can connect with. This is especially true when it comes to presentations which might count as “outreach”; how are non-expert audiences going to learn about new research if you dumb it down? 

When you’re more confident with giving presentations, you can even take this principle one step further. If you have to take questions at the end, that doesn’t mean that you need to answer them! Instead of listening to the audience’s questions and answering them in clear and concise ways, just repeat what you said during your presentation in exactly the same way. 

2. Don’t Structure Your Work

Some might say that you should give an outline of your research as part of your presentation. I say that isn’t necessary, and would actually be a bad thing. Why reveal what your research objectives are at the beginning of your talk? It’s much better to save that for later as a dramatic reveal. Similarly, your audience doesn’t need to be drawn in with an interesting anecdote or compelling context. They can figure out why you’re interested in your research well enough as long as they pay attention to your whole talk. 

Your research should be memorable enough as it is, so don’t worry about any fancy techniques like telling a story or even following a chronological order. If it suits you to jump around between points or to skip back a couple of slides to expand on a point you made five minutes ago, then do it! The audience is there to listen to you, and they’ll keep up if they’re interested enough.

3. Try To Include Every Detail of Your Research

A PhD takes at least three years of full-time work, and obviously you want to show off all of your work when you get to present it to people. As long as you’re the one with the slide clicker and the microphone, the audience is going to listen to you, so make the most of it. Make sure you talk about every part of your research from your first inkling of an idea to where you are up to (but not necessarily in that order). Why not share an anecdote or two (or three) about every stage of the process? That’s a great way of humanising your research journey. 

Every part of your research is important, so you should try and cram it all into your presentation. Good research is nuanced as well, so don’t try to streamline any of it or gloss over something which could be important. This is particularly true if you are part-way through your project; what you think is a minor detail now could turn out to be really important later, so make sure you include it all in your presentation.

4. Make Sure Every Slide Has Loads of Text

One of the most basic elements of giving presentations is slide design, and there are a few key principles you should adhere to. The most important of these is that your slides should have all of the text your audience might need. People are often visually focused, and giving them a slide to read will help keep them focused on your presentation. Putting lots of detail into the text on your slides and using full sentences is also helpful because it means that if you forget anything, you can just read from the slide and get back on track. 

Font, colour, and images are the other three important components of your slide design, and the best tip for these is that more is always better. Use different and funky fonts to highlight your different points. Use different colours to make your points stand out, or just because you like those colours. Make sure you use images to illustrate every point you’re making as well, just to ensure that your audience has understood everything. 

5. Read From a Script

Don’t worry about making eye contact with your audience or being responsive to their energy. You have so much detail to cover in your presentation and the best way to make sure that you don’t miss anything out is to read from a script. Your script could be a brand new piece of writing, or you could save time and simply read your thesis or article out loud. This will save you time not only because you don’t have to bother writing anything out, but also because you won’t need to practice beforehand! 

By this point you know your research inside and out, so why waste any more time going back over it? You also don’t have to worry about tone when you’ve already written it out, just read it however you wrote it a few months ago and your presentation will all flow together. An added bonus of using a script is that you don’t have to spend time looking at your slides during the presentation. Instead, you can solely focus on the word you’re saying and the wisdom you’re sharing. 

And there you have it, our top 5 tips on how not to give a presentation! Please go forth and make better presentations, the world has already seen too many rubbish ones. 

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