Helpful Hints
for Giving a Good Scientific Presentation

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Giving a Scientific Talk
Courtesy of Dr. Gilbert Chu, Stanford University School of Medicine

The Golden Rule:  Talk unto others as you would have them talk unto you.

The Ten Commandments:

1. Don't talk without rehearsing. (Even Seinfeld rehearses, and he has nothing to say.)

2. Don't say too much. (The human brain sleeps when overwhelmed.)

3. Don't wiggle the laser pointer. (Inducing nausea is not good.)

4. Don't mumble with your back to the audience.

5. Don't show slides with a font smaller than 14.

6. Don't show more than 1 slide per minute.

7. Don't use abbreviations without defining them. (This is not the government.)

8. Don't show data without the punchline on top. (It took centuries to decipher the Rosetta stone.  Your audience has 1 minute.)

9. Don't use invisible color combinations.

10. Don't show slides upside down. (Marking the slides in the lower left corner and loading them correctly is not rocket science.)

Hints for making good slides

1.  Use a good set of contrasting colors: yellow on black, yellow on blue, orange on black, orange on blue, white on black, white on green, white on blue, or white on red.

2.  Limit the slide to one (1) main idea.

3.  Standardize the slides throughout -- font sizes, font face, colors (eg., mutant data in yellow bars, wild type in white bars consistently throughout different graphs).

4.  Use bold face characters.

5.  Testing materials for legibility:   To be sure your material will be legible, look at the slide at arms length.   If you can still read the slide, so can the people at the back of the room.

6.  Limit the slide to as few words as possible:  Maximum of 15 to 25 words, 6 to 7 lines of copy and leave space between each line equal to two lines of copy.

7.  Always use duplicates in your presentation if you need to refer to the same slide more than once.

8.  Number your slides in correct sequence.  Mark the lower left hand corner when the slide reads correctly to you.   That mark should be visible in the upper right hand corner with the first slide in the back when loaded properly in the slide tray.

9.  Use a horizontal (landscape) orientation format.  Vertical slides are often cut off since most screens are landscape and the slide projection is maximized for that orientation.

10.  Use the whole slide, but leave some blank space.

        
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