A Guide to Presenting

SLIDE 1

Ok, presenting. We all have to do it because we need to get our research out there

into the world. And if you want to teach, anyone here expecting to teach at some

point? Well then, you need to be able to present well. You could have the most

significant breakthrough discovery in the history of your field and yet if your delivery

at a conference is dull and unimaginative and your manner of speaking puts people

to sleep, then all of your work is for nothing. It doesn’t matter how brilliant you are on

paper. If you put people to sleep or worse, confuse them, in a presentation, then

your brilliance will never be known. I spent a term once showing up at a lecture hall

where the lecturer ahead of me always ran long and I always saw at least a half

dozen people sleeping on their books.

SLIDE 2

There were all sorts of interesting slides on the screen of what looked like

archaeological digs and quotes and he had even done drawings on an overhead

projector.

SLIDE 3

And yet, students were asleep. And I’ve sat through really disappointing conference

papers where the material was probably really cool – they had great titles – but the

speakers were so uninspiring that I checked out and daydreamed.

We’ve all had that experience. And so today, I am going to talk about how to not be

those people. I am an actor. My whole life has been about getting up in front of

people and performing for them. And that is the meat of my talk today. That what you

are doing is performing for people. What’s that you say? I’m a serious researcher, I

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won’t stoop to performance. My material speaks for itself. Fine. But if that’s what

you’re thinking, then this is more important than ever because you, my friend, will be

the one who can hear snoring while you’re up here driving people to despair with

your power point slides.

SLIDE 4

So, first and foremost, presenting is a form of performance and all performances can

be approached in similar ways. You must prepare what you are going to say – you

need a script. You must rehearse – if you don’t practice, how do you know if it’s any

good? And finally, you must say it clearly, with good diction and volume – a good

performer needs no microphone. I will also talk about the structure of the

performance in terms of things like those dreaded power points so as to save you

from some very common mistakes.

Ok, you’ve had a paper accepted to a big conference and you will be speaking to a

whole lot of people about your subject. What’s the first thing you need to consider?

The audience.

SLIDE 5

Who is going to be watching you? That tells you how you need to be structuring your

talk. Are they people studying similar areas to yours? Are they a multi-disciplinary

group? Are they students?

SLIDE 6

Who is watching is far more important than anything else because that tells you how

to write the presentation. People from your field won’t need as much

contextualisation because they already have it – they study what you study. But a

mixed group will need context so that they can understand your ideas and points. If

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you are making a specific argument, then you need to carefully lay that out so

everyone understands your position. In a group of like-minded folks, this is less

necessary – they know the argument. You still need to remind them of the important

points, but it need not be in the same depth as the mixed group would need. And if

you are speaking to students, you shouldn’t assume any prior knowledge at all. So if

this was a lecture to a class rather than a conference speech, then you need to be

far more basic in your thinking. A useful thing to consider when determining how

your work should be pitched is to ask yourself if your audience is going to have any

idea what you are talking about. This is actually a common error that highly

experienced speakers and teachers make. They forget that once upon a time, they

had no knowledge of their subject. But years of research and reading has made

them absolute experts. The problem is that they forget that their students are in the

same place they were 20 years ago. So they pitch their whole presentation to the

wrong crowd. Well researched colleagues will love the speech, but 1st year

undergrads fall asleep because they don’t understand. So it’s vital to ask yourself

who your audience is going to be and will they have any idea about what you are

going to talk about. So today, for instance, I knew I was talking primarily to post-

graduates who might have some experience presenting and even teaching. But the

odds that any of you have taken a class in presenting are low and given that many

people teaching this stuff are not performers but are just other teachers, they might

not have had any idea about performance as a skill. They might say things like – you

need to use gestures! But of course, what gestures? Why? I suppose if you studied

Victorian melodrama and learned about gestures there it might somehow be relevant

here, I’m dubious. I once heard someone say, lean forward! Lean forward? To scare

the audience or something? Huh?

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Anyway, my point is that you need to think about your audience so that you can craft

a presentation that will interest them and keep their attention.

Once you’ve done that, and it doesn’t take long, you can then think about the actual

content of the talk. Now, someone might have told you to just, say, read out the

paper that got published. Sounds logical. It was clearly a good paper because it was

published.

SLIDE 7

However, did the conference remit mention anything about how long the

presentation should be? They tend to. How long is the average journal paper? 8000

words, 5000? Do you know how long it takes to say that many words out loud?

Here’s the thing. Unless you are the keynote and have 40 minutes to speak, then

you must think very carefully about time. On average, you get about 20 minutes with

time left over for questions so that the whole thing is about 30 minutes. How long is

that in words? Well, a talk I gave at a conference in Lincoln was 5500 words long

and lasted 40 minutes. Then I gave a paper at Lancaster that was only 2200 and

was just over 18 minutes. What’s worse, is that a 45 minute lecture on audience

reception was only 3100. So it’s not an obvious thing to figure out how many words

equals how many minutes. But the thing to remember is that the paper you published

is probably way too long for a conference. Besides, and this is the really important

thing, your paper, while brilliant when read quietly to yourself over a nice cup of tea

or two, out loud it’s probably duller than the dullest thing that was ever dull. Because

in addition to length, the other consideration is how the content is provided. To

expand on this, how you say things is different from how you write them.

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When we write, we can be very erudite – show off, in a sense, our knowledge and

our ability to use big words. Now, I’m not going to go into my absolute distaste for

that kind of writing. That’s a different talk. But the thing is that when we write we can

be far more exciting in our use of language. We can take the time to really craft

something elegant. But when time is short, and more importantly, we are talking,

then that skill is of little use. Big words confuse people when we speak. If they don’t

know the word, people stop listening for a moment to try to get it. And in that time,

you’ve continued talking. So now they’re lost. Also, we don’t write the way we talk.

Which is a good thing. But when we speak, we need to be clear, but also more of

ourselves. When writing, we are absolutely not ourselves. Some are gifted enough to

have a very distinctive voice – which we should all strive for – but until then, we write

to be read, not listened to. It’s like Shakespeare. Reading him is a slog for most

people because he was writing plays, not novels. Plays are meant to be performed

so that’s why Shakespeare is best when his work is on stage. The same principle

holds true for presenting. Write your presentation for speaking out loud. Notice how

relaxed I sound when I’m talking, that’s because I wrote it that way. I speak in

parentheticals and use a lot of what might be called lazy or slang-y language. I start

sentences with And. I use the word So to make a point. I do that when I talk. I would

avoid it in writing, but I’m writing my presentation to be heard. So I make it

conversational – like that. People understand information best when it’s in a

language they can easily understand. Present that way! Now, I’m not suggesting

writing it as a stand-up routine, or leading with a joke, God help us. But I am saying

that the best presentations are easy to understand and the audience feels like you’re

just talking to them about this cool idea of yours. The more you obfuscate, the less

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they comprehend and the less they comprehend, the less they will have attended to

your work. Of course, don’t speak in emoji’s or ever say things like LOL. That’s a

great way to have everything you’ve said dismissed as pointless.

So what to do? You have a great paper, or idea for a paper and you know how long

it needs to be for the conference and you need to be conversational in your

presentation. Any thoughts on that? Mostly, you’ll need to craft your presentation

from scratch. If it’s a paper you’ve already written, you probably need to cut it down

for time, but also to make it something for people to listen to. If it was a long paper,

you might be hitting just the high points. That’s okay. Tell the audience this is what

you are doing. But you still need to do enough re-writing to ensure it is crafted for

your intended audience. Essentially, you will be writing a whole new paper.

Now, I need to shift sideways for a moment here because you may have noticed that

I keep talking about writing your presentation. You will see quite a few lecturers and

speakers who seem to be presenting material from what appear to be a few notes or

an outline rather than from a prepared text. And you might think, hey, I can do that. It

looks so much more professional and I really do know what I’m doing. This is a very

dangerous approach that will likely end badly. Unless you have been giving the

same talk for years, this method is problematic, not least because it requires a very

high level of improvisational skill and deep understanding of the material. And you

must have an amazing internal clock or carry a timer with you because the tendency

to go over time is very common. Mostly, it’s very easy to get lost and forget a very

important point or digress too much or just suck. The best presentations are written

out ahead of time so that every important point gets made and every idea is clear.

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Essentially, you are writing a script that you will follow because that ensures that the

audience will understand everything you have to say.

Which brings me to the next aspect of presenting – REHEARSE!

SLIDE 8

Once the paper is written, read it out loud. Many times. Hear what you are saying.

Does it make sense? Is it grammatically correct? At this level it should be, but it

amazing how something that makes sense written down sounds completely odd

spoken out loud. Does it sound like you or a robotic version of you? The less natural

it sounds to you the less it will to the audience. So re-write if it’s clunky. Rehearsing

also gives you the opportunity to get familiar with your script so that when you are

presenting, you won’t need to be completely tied to the paper in front of you – you

can look up, which I will discuss more a bit later. Now, I do not recommend

rehearsing in front of a mirror. I don’t know why people do that. I think it’s to see what

your face is doing, but I still don’t get why that would help. Most people’s mirrors are

in bathrooms which have weird acoustics and are very small. You need to work in a

larger space so that you can fill it vocally and get used to speaking with volume.

Since most papers get presented in smaller rooms, you won’t have a microphone so

you need to get comfortable speaking louder than you are probably used to. The

simple act of filling the space, as we actors call it, can feel like shouting which is very

strange. You need to practice this so it no longer feels that way. I don’t recommend

practicing in front of others until you are very confident in the material and your own

familiarity with it. I often re-write several times before I think it’s ready to show

anyone. I read it out loud at my computer with an on-line stopwatch running. This

ensures I know how long it takes and means I can re-write on the fly. The stopwatch

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also adds an element of pressure as the closer I get to the maximum time, the more I

know I might be running long and need to cut something.

Once you are comfortable with the timing and the script, then you can show it to

friends and family or someone who is willing to let you practice on them. Try to do it

as close to the way you would on the day. So stand. Preferably behind something

like a table. Oh, and print your paper out. Don’t read it off of a screen or tablet. Paper

never crashes. And don’t use note cards. I remember being taught to do that in

school and thinking it was cool. I have a stack of note cards with stuff on them. But

note cards are small and so people tend to end up squinting at them and then losing

their place, and sometimes dropping them and now what? No. Print it out, double

spaced, pages numbered. This works every time. When you’ve performed for your

chosen audience, ask for feedback. Was it all clear? Did you get bored at any point?

How did I look while doing it? Listen to what they say and if necessary, make the

fixes. But do rehearse, a lot. The more you practice, the better you will be when it

counts. And if you do it so much that you find you’ve memorised it? Even better. Still

have your script with you, but having it memorised means you have the freedom to

fully perform your presentation.

You might have noticed that I haven’t said anything about visual aids. Power Point.

The reason for that is multi-fold. One, you need to complete the script before you

decide what visual aids you might need. A well written text needs no help. But you

might really feel that pictures or graphs might be necessary to help the audience fully

understand your ideas. And that’s the key. Does the audience need help? If so, can

you better explain it in the talk or does there really need to be a visual? My PhD

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research was quantitative, so I needed to show a lot of graphs when I presented it.

Therefore, I needed to show slides.

SLIDE 9

But I also just gave a talk on emotion regulation where I used none. And it was the

last presentation in a day of them. People were so pleased that I wasn’t using the

screen.

SLIDE 10

So be very careful and think hard about whether you need anything because there

are some very deep traps that you can fall into that can really ruin a brilliant

presentation. Let’s talk about them, shall we?

Why do we use visual aids? To support our material. But how do you decide what

needs supporting? Most people think quotes provide support for arguments and they

do. But should they be put on a slide? Why not? The problem with anything written

being put on a slide and projected on a screen is that the audience will read that

rather than continue listening to you. And the longer it is, the worse this phenomenon

gets. Here’s a long quote on a slide.

SLIDE 11

It’s really long. And as the speaker, I need to either leave time for everyone to read

it – and who knows how long that might be – or, I need to read it out loud. But if I do

that, why have the quote on a slide at all? If you need to put words on a slide, keep

them short.

SLIDE 12

They should punctuate what you are saying rather than saying it for you as it might in

an article to be read. Is video okay? Sure, but be conscious of time and be sure that

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you provide the proper context for it. Short clips can be very effective, but you must

be sure it’s clear why you are showing it. Pictures, however, are great. They say a lot

without distracting the audience. They can help to emphasise a point or provide

context. So pictures are useful.

SLIDE 13

But be careful. And avoid using fancy animations. Swirling and fades are not as cool

as you think. And those cool move around the screen programs that look like you’re

awesome with tech like Prezi? That’s all they are. A way to show off your tech skills.

Those apps are no substitute for good content. And they take a long time to put

together and make sure they work and what if the tech where you are presenting is

old and it won’t run? Or worse, runs slowly? Keep it simple and only use what you

absolutely must. We get very excited about technology and all the bells and whistles,

but most of the time, it just gets in the way.

All of this leads me to the third aspect of presenting and that is to do with how you

actually present.

SLIDE 14

This is the hardest of all of them to get to grips with because as is fairly well known,

the number fear that human being have is not snakes and it is not spiders. It is, in

fact, public speaking. How many of you find yourselves getting nervous at the

thought of giving a presentation? My own acting students freak out when they have

to present. Why? They’re performers. But they think that something else is going on

and that it isn’t a performance so they get filled with fear. But, if you have written a

good paper, and rehearsed it a lot, then you are already way ahead of the game.

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That practice makes you more comfortable and can give you the confidence to

present well. However, there are still some things to keep in mind.

First, you need to think about what you look like. Are you dressed well? Who are you

presenting to? Will they be dressed well? Think of it like a job interview and dress

accordingly. This might seem a bit over the top, but the audience will be far more

likely to listen and give the respect you deserve if you look the part. Sure, once

you’ve established yourself you can dress down and be the eccentric academic

you’ve always wanted to be. But that will take years. So until then, look smart.

Next, stand up straight and look at the audience. Even if you look above everyone

rather than making eye contact, that’s okay. Looking up means they can see your

face and hear you better. And, since you’ve practiced so much, you won’t lose your

place when you look back down at your paper. You can look at the screen if there is

a slide that needs to be explained. Turn three quarters and you can talk about it. This

is also a good to use your arms and direct attention. We might call this a gesture. But

it’s not. It’s indicative – look at this interesting information, you are saying. If you are

really comfortable, you can even move around. Leave the safety of the table or

lectern and get closer to the crowd. By doing this, you are creating some variety

while also drawing the audience’s attention to you. This will keep them more

engaged with what you are saying.

But then there is the business of gestures and such. Waving your arms around for

emphasis only works if you actually have something to emphasise. Remember,

Hamlet told the players not to saw the air when speaking and this is so true. Any

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movement you make should come from the text and need to communicate more

clearly. Most of the time, the words will do all the work. But you might want to spread

your arms or wave or point to something. If so, it should be a natural part of the talk,

not something pre-planned – that will look fake. And really, you’ll only be a position

to make some kind of gesture when you aren’t tied to the text on the page. So it

needs to be memorised because that allows you to walk around and talk to the

audience which means your hands are free to move around.

But far more important than movement is your voice. It’s the thing everyone is

listening to and if they can’t hear you or understand you, then all of this other work is

for naught. Now I’ve been living in Yorkshire for the past 6 years and I can tell you

that the number one problem I encounter is understanding my students. And this is

all down to diction – enunciation. No matter where you are from, most people are

really lazy in their diction. We drop sounds, cut off ends of words, don’t move our

lips, talk with our mouths full, you name it. And if we cannot speak with clarity, then

the audience stops listening. And worse, they might think you’re dim. It’s a real

problem in this country and many others where there are stereotypes that develop

around certain accents. So here, northerners are considered less intelligent because

the accent is so think. In the US, it’s people from the deep south. Something about it

makes people sound unintelligent. They might be brilliant, but once people here the

accent, the assumption is that this is a country bumpkin and therefore not worthy of

my time. Now, I don’t want to imply that you should get rid of whatever regional or

national dialect you have. Not at all. I’m merely saying that you need to work on your

diction. All of you. Because I guarantee that each of you has some kind of laziness in

speech that could be improved.

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So what to do? How do I improve my speech? Well, you could pay a lot of money to

a voice coach. But you really don’t need to do that. Instead take some time to

become conscious of your own voice. Listen to yourself and try to spot those

moments where you aren’t clear. Just knowing that you drop articles or run words

together means that you can change it – even if English is your second language. So

that’s where you start – notice where you aren’t coming through clearly. Next, think

about consonants. All of those wonderful sounds that aren’t vowels – turns out,

vowels take care of themselves. But the T, the S, the K, the M, the P – all of these

get dropped by speakers and can easily be found again. Most people don’t use their

lips enough and that leads to messy speech. So re-acquaint yourself with them.

Right now, everyone squeeze your lips together. Now open wide. Squeeze and

open. Blow a raspberry with your tongue and lips. Now just the lips. Feel how floppy

they can be? Try this, Z sound – zzzzz. Now try it as an S – ssss. Now try it on an M

– mmmm. Then an N – nnnnn. You should feel a nice vibration in your head when

you do these and also notice how your tongue changes position when you shift.

Next, try a good precussive sound – Puh,puh, puh. Then with a K sound – Kuh, kuh,

kuh, then B – buh, buh, buh, then G – guh, guh, guh, then T – tuh, tuh, tuh and

finally the D – duh, duh duh. Each of these sounds are the ones you need to speak

clearly because when you can pronounce these sounds with specificity, then the

words will follow.

Let’s try some phrases so you can really get a feel for what to be doing. Let’s start

with something simple –

SLIDE 15

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The tip of the tongue to the back of the teeth. The only way for this to work is to

actually move the tongue to the back of the teeth. Feel It? Try it again. This is

actually a great way to warm up before presenting. It reminds you to move your lips

and tongue with precision. Let’s try something more complex. A tongue twister, if you

will.

SLIDE 16

Red Leather Yellow Leather. Start slowly. Feel each sound and get them right. It’s

not about speed it’s about precision. Here’s some S sounds –

SLIDE 17

She sells seashells at the sea shore. Take your time. Now the real challenge, and

this one does my students in every time –

SLIDE 18

She stood at the window inimicably mimicking him, welcoming him in. It’s a doozy,

but it forces you to really concentrate on the correct pronunciation of the words and

that is what diction is all about.

Of course, we still need to hear you. And volume can be a real issue for some

people. When we get nervous, our throats tend to tense up which reduces the

amount of air that we take in which means we get quiet. So the one thing I always

tell my students, and anyone else about to present in public is BREATHE.

SLIDE 19

How many of you know how to breathe? All of you. Really? Tell me, where is your

centre? Where should you be breathing into, on your body? Show me. It’s all about

the diaphragm, right? And where is that? Yep, right under your rib cage. The

problem with that is that if you focus on breathing there, you don’t get enough air –

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it’s too high and you end up passing out. Instead, I want you all to stand up and

place a couple of fingers on your belly buttons. Then find the spot about two inches

below that – for many people it’s where we wear our trousers. That is your centre. If I

cut you in half with a chain saw, you’d be in two equal parts and that is where you

want your breath to go. Keeping your fingers there, inhale through your nose and try

to move your fingers outward. It means expanding your belly. Struggling to feel it?

Ok, everyone turn to the person next to you. Say hi. Now, show the person where

your fingers are. New friend, place your fingers on that spot and press – not too

hard, but enough that the other can feel the pressure. Now, person being pressed,

inhale through your nose and try to move the fingers. Pressers, can you feel

anything? If so, good. If not, add a little pressure. Now switch. Where you all felt the

movement, that is where you should be breathing all the time. It means you get the

most air and your voice will be well supported. It means you need to focus on the

breath and relax in a way that allows the air to get all the way down there. Once it’s

there, you should have no trouble filling a classroom or really any space where you

will be speaking. And by combining the diction exercises with this new way of

breathing, everything you say will sound so much better.

The other things to pay attention to in speaking are speed and expressiveness.

Speed is important because you really don’t want to speak too quickly. This is why

rehearsing with a stopwatch is so useful. If you find yourself rushing because time is

ticking away and you’re not to the end, then you need to think about editing more

strictly. You need to be ruthless with your writing and only cover the absolute

necessities in the time you’re given. There’s always a perceived need to tell the

audience everything because all of your research is awesome. But you have to draw

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the line somewhere. Cramming in more and then talking really fast is just as bad as

being dull – people stop listening if they can’t keep up. So you want to be calm and

clear in the presentation. Think conversationally. Pause, occasionally, so that ideas

can sink in. Take a sip of water. But don’t feel the need to crash through your talk as

fast as you can. Again, that’s why rehearsing is so necessary.

The expressiveness part of speaking is a bit more of a challenge. Especially when

reading from a paper. Many of us are just not that comfortable reading out loud. It

was hard at school and might still be. Sadly, the only way to get better at it is to do it.

And, again, that’s why rehearsing your presentation is so vital. You will become more

expressive the more you do it. We’ve all sat through a presentation where the

speaker had no personality and droned on and on and their voice never changed. It

might even have been hard to tell if there was any punctuation because it was also

flat and lifeless. Of course there are also those speakers who think they need to be

really expressive in order to make their points and end up just looking crazy, like this

guy.

SLIDE 20

Hilarious Politician – Worst Speech Ever (Youtube)

This guy seems to have decided that showing his passion would get him elected. He

even appears to written notes about when to be passionate on his text. Don’t be this

guy. Seriously. It’s never a good idea to try to plan when you are going to talk louder

or more excitedly. You’re presenting research, not running for office. So when you

read it out loud, read like you’re just talking to people you know.

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SLIDE 21

As I said before, be conversational. It’s far more relaxed and interesting to listen to if

you can do that. So really expressiveness comes naturally. You know your work and

you know what’s important in what you are saying. So if you practice enough, you

will naturally speak in a more expressive way. But it all goes back to what I’ve been

saying from the beginning – you need to write the presentation to be spoken out

loud, not read quietly to ones’ self. You need to make sure that you are hitting just

the most important aspects of your research and not everything you know. Keep it

clear and concise. In fact, a really short paper that inspires lots of questions is far

more interesting than something longwinded and devoid of anything that creates

curiosity. Keep any visual aids simple – no long quotes, no long video, avoid

pointless animation. Be strong and clear in your voice by breathing. And most of all,

you need to practice presenting it.

SLIDE 22

Rehearse, rehearse, rehearse. The more familiar you are with your material, the

more you can be a secure, interesting, and maybe even entertaining speaker.

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