The Craft of Scientific Presentations

1. The Craft of ScientificPresentations [Feynman] developed into an accomplished and inspiring teacher and lecturer, who gave virtuoso performances full of showmanship, humor, with his own inimitable brilliance, style, and manner. Jagdish Mehra

2. Because presentations are expensive, one should consider whether a presentation is truly needed Cost in salaries of audience Cost in time for presentation Cost in time to prepare presentation

3. Presentations have several advantages over documents Work can come alive for audience Work C A Presenter can read audience and react B D C ? ! ? Presenter receives instant reaction !

4. Presentations also have several disadvantages ? ? ? Speaker has limited chance to catch errors audience Audience cannot reread text has one chance to hear Audience cannot look up background material

5. Presentations can be viewed from three stylistic perspectives Structure and Speech Visual Aids Delivery Archives, Cal-Tech

6. who are they? what do they know? why are they here? what biases do they have? You begin preparing a scientific presentation by analyzing your constraints audience to inform to persuade to inspire to teach formality size time purpose occasion

7. As with documents, the structure of presentations should have clear beginnings, middles, and ends B e g i n n i n g E n d i n g Middle

8. Beginnings prepare the audiencefor the work to be presented Shows importance Defines work Work = A + B Maps presentation Gives background B C A D

9. The middle presents the workin a logical order pre-combustion methods combustion methods post-combustion methods

10. In the middle, you make smooth transitions between major points pre-combustion methods combustion methods combustion methods post-combustion methods

11. The ending summarizes main points and places those results in the context of the big picture point 5 point 6 point 7 point 8 point 1 point 2 point 3 point 4 point 1 point 7 Summary Big Picture