[HN Gopher] A long guide to giving a short academic talk (2022)
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A long guide to giving a short academic talk (2022)
Author : sebg
Score : 125 points
Date : 2024-06-17 08:04 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (benjaminnoble.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (benjaminnoble.org)
| DamonHD wrote:
| Good point that the talk is as much a sales effort as anything
| else...
| politelemon wrote:
| It's not what you say, it's how you say it.
| Ar-Curunir wrote:
| Obviously it's both. If you have something worthwhile to say,
| but say it poorly, people will find it difficult to care.
| Similarly, if you have nothing important to say, but present it
| in an engaging manner, people will be interested at first, but
| will cotton on to the lack of intellectual content pretty
| quickly.
|
| To make a lasting impact you need both.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Most conferences I've attended are so boring that I'd take an
| engaging speaker saying nothing over a poor speaker
| presenting something of consequence.
|
| There's really nothing I like about attending conferences and
| probably 1 in 100 speakers are both engaging and presenting
| something of value. The vast majority of them seem to be
| there to promote their latest book. Yet my employer seems to
| think they are important.
| ghaff wrote:
| For me, conferences are about:
|
| - The hallway track
|
| - Having some less-distracted time around some general
| topic of interest
|
| - Being made aware of things I might not have otherwise
| been made aware of
|
| But, by and large, you're not IMO going to "learn about $X"
| by going to a breakout. It might put $X on your radar as
| something worth spending a day looking at.
|
| By and large, I like (selectively) going to conferences but
| if someone has the mindset that they're a day of classroom-
| type sessions, they're probably less valuable. That's not a
| criticism. People just have different perspectives.
| Joel_Mckay wrote:
| Or one can quickly learn how to achieve clear presentations by
| indexing the common errata:
|
| "Chicken chicken chicken" (Yoram Bauman)
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yL_-1d9OSdk
|
| This should be required viewing for every academic author. =3
| datadrivenangel wrote:
| "Once you write the slides and script, it's time to practice... a
| lot."
|
| All great speakers are look great because they practice and
| iterate on the material and end up with polished presentations
| that they've given dozens or hundreds of times.
| ghaff wrote:
| I don't present nearly as much as I used to--and I'm mostly not
| great at doing serious practice runs (as opposed to mentally
| going through the material)--but I've often observed that my
| second or third time giving a presentation is usually a bit
| better than the first.
| parpfish wrote:
| practicing talks is great at highlighting two things:
|
| - helping you come up with natural, smooth segues between
| slides/ideas
|
| - making it clear if there's any missing background/detail you
| need to add or reorder slides. One of the worst things to do as
| a presenter is to realize this mid-talk and then start jumping
| through slides out of order
| bluenose69 wrote:
| To this list, I'd add one more thing: pay attention to talks that
| you see, writing notes not just on the material, but on things
| you liked and disliked about the presentation style, the slide
| format, etc. Avoid the things you dislike, and employ the things
| you like.
|
| This applies to all manner of things.
|
| You may notice that speakers who talk to the screen are
| unengaging. So avoid doing that.
|
| You may notice that strong speakers have a moment near the
| beginning when they grab the attention of the audience, and that
| this makes it easy to stay awake for the whole talk. So try to
| find a way to do that -- a way that fits with your own work, of
| course.
|
| You will certainly notice that talks that go overtime make for a
| terrible experience for everybody. So don't do that. (You'll need
| strategies. The simplest is to have "landing points" in the talk,
| so that if you see that time is running short, you can skip some
| material to get to a landing point. Obviously, the conclusions
| slide ought to be a landing point.)
|
| And so on. Learn from the impression that other speakers make on
| you.
| ghaff wrote:
| >You will certainly notice that talks that go overtime make for
| a terrible experience for everybody. So don't do that. (You'll
| need strategies. The simplest is to have "landing points" in
| the talk, so that if you see that time is running short, you
| can skip some material to get to a landing point. Obviously,
| the conclusions slide ought to be a landing point.)
|
| I won't say I've never gone a _few_ minutes over when there 's
| a break coming up and the audience is engaging. But, yeah in
| general, it's especially rude when the next speaker is waiting
| to get setup, and that time they're left with 1 minute to plug
| in will be the time something goes wrong.
|
| You should have a decent sense for pacing of the talk anyway
| but, as you say, you should also know which material lends
| itself naturally to "in the interests of time, I'm not going to
| spend a lot of time on this topic today but we can talk
| afterwards if you're interested sort of thing."
|
| Conference talks are also different lengths and they've tended
| towards shorter over time. So, even if you can adjust on the
| fly to some degree, consider not using the same deck for a 30
| minute talk and a 50 minute one. (I'm actually a fan of talks
| that are on the shorter side in general.)
|
| I have mixed feelings about Q&A in the session itself in
| general for a lot of reasons. But you need to keep things from
| getting too diverted or getting down the "more a comment than a
| question" path. (Which is part of the mixed feelings--it's hard
| to cut off without seeming a bit rude.)
| tsumnia wrote:
| I've used this approach for slides and websites. Any time I see
| a great design, I'll take a screenshot and save it in a folder
| called "PowerPoint/Web Ideas". I'll even include some shots
| from typography style music videos. Then whenever I have some
| free time and am bored, I'll try to recreate it in PowerPoint.
|
| Most of the designs are TOO MUCH for teaching slides, but its
| fun practice since making slides is sort of my job. But the
| practice gives me a better understanding of what I can do with
| presentations, building templates, messing with color theory,
| etc. There's a science/art to making a good lecture
| presentation and I'm enjoying the artistic expression, while
| still being educational task.
| michaelrpeskin wrote:
| also part of paying attention to other talks...I always make a
| reference to one or two talks that just happened or one that I
| know will be coming up.
|
| It's one more point of context for the audience, and people
| always love it when others talk about them.
| parpfish wrote:
| Unfortunately in grad school I noticed a lot of cargoculting
| bad presentations. People would copy people that were good
| scientists but bad presenters because "that's what good
| scientists are doing".
|
| Related: there's a worry that if you make the presentation too
| easy to understand, people won't think you're smart.
| Inscrutable presentations must mean that the presnter is a
| genius operating on a higher level /s
| Mathnerd314 wrote:
| > if you want others to read your work, you cannot simply publish
| it and assume others will find (and cite) it. You need to sell
| it.
|
| The LLM's will read it. Currently they will not cite it, but
| there is some work on linking knowledge representations with
| source material. If this could remove the need to sell it, I
| think academia would be much better off. The best researchers are
| not necessarily the best presenters.
| dr_kiszonka wrote:
| And the most successful academics aren't necessarily the best
| researchers.
| anonymousDan wrote:
| Regarding the q & a, a few tips.
|
| Somewhat obvious, but try to anticipate what questions might be
| asked, and come up with good responses in advance. In addition,
| you can potentially create backup slides to support key points.
|
| Make sure you understand the question(s). Feel free to ask the
| questioner to clarify. It's also fine to try and paraphrase their
| question and ask if you understand them correctly. In fact I
| recommend doing this even when you're pretty sure you understand,
| since it (i) buys you time to think of a response (ii) helps
| others in the audience who might not have heard (iii) is
| especially useful if the presentation is recorded and the
| questioners don't have a mic.
|
| Try to keep your responses brief and to the point. This gives
| time to more people to ask questions. Rambling on and on when a
| short answer would suffice often makes people think you don't
| know what you are taking about. In a technical presentation it's
| often much better to simply say "that's not something we've
| considered, interesting", or "that's something I'd need to think
| a bit more about" than to try and bluff. But obviously you don't
| want to do this for every question.
|
| If someone is being really awkward and/or you really can't seem
| to answer this question, better to suggest taking it offline to
| avoid hogging the whole q & a period.
|
| Try not to get too defensive.
|
| When practicing your presentation, ask people to be as picky as
| possible and make you think on your feet. Hopefully the actual
| questions you get will be easier.
|
| IMO handling the q & a well is almost as important than the
| presentation itself. It's a real shame when I see some
| interesting work with a good presentation and the reviewer then
| undoes it all by not being able to respond well to basic
| questions.
| nestorD wrote:
| Here is my own list of recommendation (written down to give
| interns):
| https://nestordemeure.github.io/writing/guides/presentation/
| Beldin wrote:
| > _every talk is a job talk_
|
| Absolutely. A subset of the people in the audience are tenured or
| tenure-track academics. These folks get grants for postdocs.
| Moreover, they may be on a hiring committee. Even better: if you
| leave a favorable impression and a colleague of theirs has a job
| opening, they might recommend you.
|
| Treat (academic) presentations as job talks. Good impressions
| open doors, not just in the immediate future but also further out
| than that.
| fsckboy wrote:
| Is your audience receptive to what you have to say? are they
| curious and inclined to believe you? Tell them your conclusions
| right up front, so if they don't hear anything else you say, they
| learned what they need to know. It will also help focus their
| attention as you proceed.
|
| If instead they are apt to push back on what you plan to say
| (because it would eliminate their jobs/research for example),
| then instead you start by building a case with a series of steps
| they will agree with till, having led them down that primrose
| path, you reveal to your new allies the inescapable conclusion.
| They'll still push back, but they will at least have learned what
| you have to say.
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