Give a talk

While this HOWTO is under construction, you might find the SciVis meeting talk rubric useful in guiding your talk-giving technique.

The following points were dumped by Jadrian in an initial effort to flesh out this page. Please clean up.

• Know what your audience is and tailor your talk to this audience. Different audiences expect different talk structures, emphasis on different points, make different assumptions, know different background, etc. If you give a talk to two different audiences, it should not be the same talk, even if (to your mind) it's on the same subject.
• Be careful about terminology that means different things to different audiences. Either be very explicit about the definitions of your terms, use unambiguous plain-language terms, or just drop them entirely and figure out a different way to present your point. An example list of problematic terms includes "greedy", "Monte Carlo", "solve", "optimal", "energy".
• Pace yourself. Pause at the end of each section or after each significant point to implicitly or explicitly wait for questions. Count off to yourself to make sure you don't rush through this pause; subjective "presenter time" and objective "audience time" go at different rates!
• Show respect for audience comments. Note that this is different than having respect; you may have respect but still not convey it to your audience, which will alienate them from you. Here are some specific recommendations:
  • Foo
  • Bar
  • Baz
• Make sure that your committee and exam committee member are all there on time. Jadrian didn't have an exam committee member at all, and was fortunate that one came serendipitously. Ben Raphael was late, but knew and had had some issues with traffic that would have been difficult to avoid.
• Avoid excessive sales/marketing. Brooks: "Present to inform, not to impress; if you inform, you will impress." While it is important to avoid the question "who cares about this topic/problem?", it is also important to have your committee understand enough of the technical parts that they can draw on their collective wisdom to give advice.
• Answer questions with care. Rephrase the question, to make sure you are understanding the question that is being asked. During the presentation, try to answer briefly. Only go into a longer answer if the point brings up something you were going to present or something that you are willing to drop part of your planned presentation to include. With the committee alone, longer responses are good.
• Manage your time. Your presentation should end at 10 before the hour, regardless of a late start (likely) or interruptions (also likely). You will need 10 minutes for questions at the end before the non-faculty must leave.