Tips for Giving a Good Talk

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Tips for Giving a Good Talk CS 190 Winter
2002 Dr Eamonn Keogh Computer Science
Engineering DepartmentUniversity of California -
RiversideRiverside,CA 92521eamonn_at_cs.ucr.edu Mo
dified from the notes of Edward R. Tufte, Craig
S. Kaplan, Eamonn Keogh and others
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Outline

• The CS 179 presentation
• Why CS 179 students must give a presentation
• What your presentation should be about
• Advice on giving talks
• General advice
• Organization
• Making clear overheads
• Avoiding common pitfalls
• Conclusion

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Why CS 179 students must give a presentation

• As a practical matter, I cant spend more than
  two hours grading each project. This is an
  opportunity for you to draw attention to the high
  quality of your work
• You can learn from your fellow students (you
  will still have some days to polish your work!)
• Giving clear presentations is part of the design
  process!

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What your presentation should be about

• Since we have very limited time slots, I
  recommend you focus on one aspect of your work.
  For example
• Generating realistic random spatial queries for
  testing Rtrees
• Elicitation by interviewing, our questionnaire
  based approach
• Documenting code with the XYZ tool, some lessons
  learned

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• Show up early. You may have a chance to head off
  some technical or ergonomic problem
• Have a backup plan. If your lecture is based on
  a PowerPoint presentation, have overhead backups
  of each page
• Check out the room ahead of time. Before your
  talk, check out the room, and make sure it has
  everything you need
• Never apologize. Most people wouldnt have
  noticed the issues for which youre
  apologizingand it just sounds lame
• Invest in a laser pointer. They are inexpensive,
  and are extremely useful
• Rehearse timing. This is the most common sin

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Overheads I

• Use large fonts. On your Power Point
  presentation, use the biggest fonts realistically
  possible. Small fonts are hard to read
• Use highly contrasting colors.
• Avoid busy backgrounds. Keep the background
  simple. Too much in the background makes the text
  hard to read.
• Avoid using red text. Red text is often hard to
  read.
• AVOID ALL CAPS! All caps look like you're
  shouting.
• Include a good combination of words, pictures,
  and graphics. A variety keeps the presentation
  interesting.

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Overheads II

• Be terse
• The sales forecasts show an increase on the
  horizon.
• Sales heading up
• Use bullets or numbered items appropriately
• Test your overheads days before your talk!

• Goals
• Ease of use
• Reusability
• Reliability

• Outline of our method
• Design
• Implementation
• Testing

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Overheads III

• Begin with an introduction slide (Who you are,
  why you are giving a talk, the title of the talk)
• Next, give an outline (roadmap). For such a
  short talk, you might want to combine this with
  the above
• State your point (one simple slide)
• Demonstrate your point (a few slides)
• Review your point (one simple slide)
• End with a slide that reviews the entire talk

• We introduced the TSP problem
• We explained why it is an important problem
• We explained why it is a hard problem
• We introduced a new heuristic to solve TSP
• We empirically demonstrated the utility of our
  approach

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Annoying Personal Habits(This means you)

• Playing with jewelry
• Licking and/or biting your lips
• Constantly adjusting your glasses
• Popping the top of a pen
• Playing with facial hair (men)
• Playing with/twirling your hair (women)
• Jingling change in your pocket
• Leaning against anything for support
• Fillers ah, um, and and
• Starting every sentence with the same word
• Sticky floor syndrome
• Avoiding eye contact
• Lack of enthusiasm

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Conclusions

• We have explained why CS 179 students must give
  a talk
• We have motivated the need for a high quality
  talk
• We have seen various tips on creating high
  quality overheads
• We have seen various hints on avoiding common
  pitfalls

Questions?