Organising your presentation slides

Before you even open your chosen software to start designing anything, you must first answer two questions. The answers to these two questions need to be in your mind as they will inform the choices you make when you put your talk together. The first of these questions is absolutely paramount:

1) Who is my audience?

and

2) What is my message?

Talking to high-schoolers or undergraduates
In this situation, your audience is highly unlikely to have the same baseline of knowledge as you have. Therefore, making your content too complex and advanced will leave them feeling confused. You will probably have to skip all jargon, spend a lot more time introducing key concepts, simplify technical diagrams, and forgo equations altogether. This will leave less time for the rest of your content, so you will want to only briefly talk about your methods in a simplified way so that you still have time to talk about your results and conclusions.

Knowing your audience is the most important part of planning your slides
(Luis Quintero/Pexels.com)

Talking to peers outside your subject area
In this case you will probably be able to get away with being both briefer and more technically detailed in the background section, depending on the baseline level of your audience. Unexplained subject-specific jargon is the bane of this type of audience, but they will be able to understand it if you explain it sufficiently well. Finding someone who fits the profile of your intended audience and having them read your slides before you present it will help you to identify jargon you might not even think of as jargon.

Talking to subject experts
If you’re going to a conference or workshop for specialists in your field, you can likely skip over a lot of the background in favour of focusing more on the details of your methods and results. You will still need to include some background on the specifics of your area, but specificity and detail are key for this type of audience. Making your talk too general will dissatisfy and annoy them into asking much “harder” questions to verify that you actually know what you’re doing, or even worse, they might disengage entirely and ask you no questions at all. Half of the point of going to a conference is getting people talking about your work: as Oscar Wilde famously wrote, “there is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about“.

Identifying the Message

Sometimes, when you put your slides together, it can help to work backwards. Identify the one key message that you want your audience to remember after your talk is over, and make sure that everything you include (or exclude) on your slides is relevant to your message. You may have a summary slide that is full of conclusions, but the message should be coherent: whether your message is generally positive, generally negative, or that “there’s not enough evidence to draw a conclusion yet”. Of course, I do not propose leaving out things that are relevant (but inconvenient) to your results – that would be deceptive. Rather, I am suggesting that since most conferences give you a strict time limit you should be focused in what you present.

Say, for instance, you run one major experiment and one smaller experiment on the side. The major experiment gives you most of your results, while the smaller one is more of a curiosity but the results are interesting. Many people would be tempted to try and present both experiments in the same talk – but then, how do you decide how much time to devote to each one? Which one is more important? You can see this happen frequently at conferences where someone will use up 3/4 of their time and not even get to the second part. They’ll suddenly panic, jump immediately to the second part (usually skipping over half their results from the first part to do so) and rush through it. In the end, neither of the experiments is given the attention it deserves and the audience is left wondering what message they’re meant to take away.

The 10-12 minute time limit (or if you’re lucky, 15 minutes) is strictly adhered to because academics at a conference are always looking forward to the next coffee break. OK, that was mostly facetious (although after a full day of paying attention to talks you really do need the coffee breaks). It’s true though that there are other aspects of a conference just as important as the talks, so the chair has to keep everything running according to the schedule. At especially large conferences you will normally have parallel sessions, so not adhering to the schedule means that people can miss out on specific presentations they wanted to see.

Organisation of your slides

Now that we’ve addressed the “who?” and the “why?”, let’s have a look at the “what?”. The general rule when putting slides together is that you should aim to allow for approximately one minute per slide. The rule is necessarily flexible since some slides don’t need a full minute, and some slides may need slightly longer, but it is a good guideline to ensure you don’t end up with 40 slides for a 10 minute presentation. Four slides per minute is just 15 seconds per slide. Trying to include that much content is unnecessarily stressful for both you (as the speaker) and the audience.

1) The Title page
While you’re waiting to begin presenting your talk, this is the page that the audience will see on the screen. It should include the entire title of your talk, your name, and the name(s) of your supervisor(s). If you have other collaborators who have made significant contributions, or co-authors on any paper the talk might be based on, it is customary to include their names too. Make space to include the logo(s) of your funder(s) and the logo of your University (and any other University or Institution that might be giving research assistance, lab time, funding, or equipment). If your talk is first in the programme, this slide may be on the screen for a while, so make it look nice – including an attractive figure from one of your publications (with the appropriate reference) will direct the audience to check out the paper while waiting for things to get going. Always use an opportunity to promote your work – that’s why you’re at the conference!

When you start the talk, even though this content is on the slide for people to read, and they’ve probably read it, take a moment to introduce yourself by name and repeat the title of the talk. This puts you firmly in charge of the situation. Besides, talks are not always given by the person who put them together, so it also helps to introduce you to people in the audience who don’t know you yet.

2) Table of Contents
Many people leave this slide out because the format is so obvious, but there are benefits to including one, even if it seems counter-intuitive at first to spend time on something “unnecessary” when you have a time limit. Firstly, it serves as a very brief introduction of what you’re intending to talk about, which eases the audience into the talk and gives them confidence that you know what you’re doing. The audience can then relax and enjoy themselves. Secondly, by not immediately launching into the content of your talk you give yourself a little breathing room. By introducing the “order of business” first, before having to remember details, you take some of the pressure off yourself and can perform better over the course of your talk.

3) Context
After you have given the audience a brief general introduction of your talk, but before you launch into the details, it’s extremely important to spend some time at the very start of your talk to explain the context for your work. Essentially, you want to pre-emptively answer the question “what is the point of this work?”. If you just jump straight into the details without first addressing this question, everything you tell the audience will be followed by them thinking: “yes, but why do we care?”. Answer the question before they have a chance to ask it, and they will be fully on board with you for the remainder of the talk.

4) Introduction/background
Now that the audience understands why your work is important and necessary, you can begin to introduce the key concepts they will need to be able to understand it. The number of slides you will need depends on who the audience is, and how much background knowledge you can assume they already have. Use as many as are required to be sure that the audience will be able to follow your methodology and appreciate your results, but don’t use any more technical detail than you really need or you’ll be eating into time better spent elsewhere.

5) Methods
It’s common in the sciences for at least part of the methodology or experimental set-up to be the novel and unique part of their work. The number of slides you need to spend here depends on how technical you can be with your audience, but again you should only use as many as you need to communicate the important parts of your research. This section may be longer than your results if you’re very early in your research (and don’t have many results yet), or if you want some feedback from experts about your experimental set-up. Actually, it can be quite common in more technical/engineering fields to go conferences for this exact purpose, so don’t worry if you haven’t got many results to present yet.

6) Results
Depending on where you are with your research, this is likely to be the most important and interesting section to your audience. Make sure that you minimise the number of figures per slide so that each one can be seen and given proper consideration by the audience. If your figures were originally styled and printed for use in a paper or other publication, you may need to re-print them with larger fonts, thicker line sizes or revised colours to account for the fact that on a fuzzy projector screen, small text and pale, thin lines on a graph may not be very visible. Especially to people sitting at the back of a room.

When you come to a slide that contains a figure, make sure you introduce it properly – tell the audience what the x and y axes represent before telling them what the figure itself shows. Again, people sitting at the back (or with poor internet connections if you’re at a virtual conference) may not be able to see the axis text very clearly and you want to keep people engaged.

7) Conclusions
This should ideally be no more than a single page of bullet points summarising your talk and the conclusions of your work. Keep them brief and to the point, otherwise the audience may feel confused about the take-home message. Some people like to swap this page with their acknowledgements, or skip back to this slide after they are finished so that the audience can have the conclusions on screen during the question and answer section. No matter what order of slides you choose, you want to make sure to reinforce the key points the audience should remember.

8) Acknowledgements
On this page, you should include the people without whom you would not have been able to complete the work; namely your supervisor(s), collaborators and funders. Some people choose not to use this slide if all of this information was included on the title page, but it’s just as common to have both. Some talks have nice pictures of the collaborators together, which is nice for adding some visual interest and rewarding the audience for their attention.

9) Optional extra slides
After the end of the slides you have in your talk, you may also want to include extra slides with additional figures or extra information. These can be helpful during the Q&A section if people ask you questions about things which you have worked on but didn’t necessarily want to include in your talk for the sake of keeping under the time limit. Some people have dozens of these types of slides at the end (usually that they made for other talks).

Things to remember…

1) No matter what kind of audience you are presenting to, always treat them with respect. They are intelligent people, and not having the same subject knowledge as you doesn’t make them stupid. Take the time to give them the basic background they will need in order to understand your message. If your goal is to communicate something, then it doesn’t matter how well you think you explained something, if the audience can’t follow you.

2) Although it can feel like a long time, when you’re actually on the stage and presenting, 10 minutes is no time at all. Focus on what’s most important about your work so that you can:

• Keep your message clear and easy to remember;
• Not be forced to skip over important results;
• Avoid confusing your audience with seemingly irrelevant early details; and,
• Avoid the anxiety of having to decide on-the-spot which details should be left out.

Keep it simple. Less is more.

3) It’s better to keep things plain and focused, rather than sprawling and messy. If you can’t hit the exact timing for your talk, it’s better to err on the side of “too short” than too long. A 10 minute talk delivered in only 8 minutes allows for two extra minutes of discussion and questions. It’s a bigger problem if you take too much time and leave no time for questions at the end. Academics like to be able to ask questions and they’ll be annoyed if you don’t let them.

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