Physics 730: Graduate student seminars

Professor: M. N. Kunchur

Room: PSC 409, time: Friday 1:25pm

Guidelines for giving talks:

·        Connect with the audience. Try to gauge their level (in advance, to the extent possible).

·        During the talk itself try to judge whether the audience is following what you are saying and adapt to them, i.e., don’t go in there with a fixed agenda of showing a certain number of viewgraphs/slides regardless of whether the material is being digested or not.

·        Include a generous introduction. Don’t jump into the details of your own work before ample groundwork has been laid. Along this line, don’t use terms that have not been adequately defined earlier.

·        Keep the message simple. You want to get across one or two key points, not tell them about your entire life’s work. People’s attention span and patience are lower than speakers often assume.

·        Avoid long detailed calculations and technical minutia. You are not trying to prove you can do math, nor provide a detailed recipe for some experimental procedure. Interested members of the audience can ask questions at the end of the talk. Tedious details make the talk boring, so get to the punch line—the audience wants to be informed and entertained!.

·        Don’t go over time (unless it is an informal gathering of collaborators). The people in the audience have a life and other appointments.

·        Writing on slides should be large and clear. Keep the slides uncluttered and simple.

·        It is sometimes appropriate to give an outline at the beginning of the talk, especially for a very short (e.g., conference) talk. But for longer talks, don’t give a “table-of-contents” at the beginning of the talk. A suspense novel or thriller movie doesn’t give you a list of people who will be murdered and at what times, similarly your talk should have some drama and suspense. The plot should propel itself, each new concept should be necessitated and motivated by its preceding discussion.

·        Speak slowly and clearly, don’t mumble to yourself. Make eye contact with the audience, never speak with your back to them (people need to see you facial expressions and the hearing impaired need to see your lip movements). Also look at all the people in the audience, not just your host or your friends.

·        Consider the location of the projector and screen and plan where you will be standing or walking during the talk—avoid blocking the view or casting a shadow on the screen.

·        Sometimes a long solid pointer may be more effective than a laser pointer (because the audience can follow a connected path from you face to the end of the pointer). However this is a thing of the past. Make sure the laser pointer has fresh batteries and casts a conspicuous spot.

·        Finally, leave the conclusions/summary on the screen after you are done—this gives people a chance to continue reading it while you are answering questions.