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Slide Presentation
Criteria for Success SEARCH THE SITE:
1. The presentation starts with the larger motivation for the e.g. Article, Poster, CV 
work shown.
2. The research shown in the slides concretely connects to the
larger motivation.

“
A good
3. Experiments and their results are connected to the the larger
motivation. presentation
4. Each slide tells a message. starts by asking
5. Each slide gives no more information than is required to yourself, "What do I want
support the message. my very first question to
6. The title text stands on its own, and most other text supports be?" Construct your deck
the visuals. so that your audience
7. The audience will take away the messages that achieve the will, after hearing your
presenter’s goals. talk, be able to interact
with you in the manner
Structure Diagram you want them to.

Christopher
Foy
Communication
Fellow 2015-
2019
View Profile

OTHER COMMKIT TOPICS:

Applications
Graduate School
Statement of
Identify Your Purpose Purpose
Know your own goals as a presenter, and structure your presentation NSF GRFP Personal
based on your goals. This will make it easier for your audience to Statement
follow your logic and identify the most important points when NSF GRFP Research
providing feedback. Statement
Grant Application
For example, if your goal is to get feedback from your colleagues on Faculty Application
an experimental strategy, focus more on the experimental methods. Faculty App:
Compare the advantages and disadvantages to alternatives. Explain Cover Letter
why you think your proposed experimental design will give more Faculty App:
useful results than other experimental designs would. CV
Faculty App:
By contrast, if your goal is to communicate a new scientific result, Research
then you should focus on the results and broader implications Statement
rather than your methodology. Avoid talking about specific methods Faculty App:
(e.g., say “I imaged the magnetic field” rather than “I imaged the Teaching
fluorescence onto an EMCCD camera”). Say how your findings impact Statement
the broader motivation. Faculty App:
Diversity
In less formal settings, like a lab meeting, you can explicitly tell your Statement
audience what you’re looking for (e.g., “I’d appreciate critique of my
Professional
experimental methods”).
Communication
Cover Letter:
Analyze Your Audience General
Different audiences pay attention to different things. Engineers are CV/Resume
interested in innovations, scientists are interested in broader Elevator Pitch
scientific questions, venture capitalists want to hear about the real Composing Emails
world impact. Your presentation should speak to and excite your Professional Bio
audience. Written Communication
Abstract
That being said, you probably know the subject material in your talk
Thesis Proposal
better than anyone, so what feels to you like a natural starting point
Journal or
for your presentation could easily feel baffling to others. Your
Conference Paper
presentation should start with one point that everybody cares about
Paper:
and move step by step logically toward what you actually did and
Introduction
why. This may seem like a waste. However, if you spend too much
Paper:
time on background material, you only waste a few minutes. If you
Methods (EE)
spend too little time on background, your audience might not
Paper:
understand your work and the entire talk will be a waste.
Methods (CS)
Paper:
Additionally, when speaking you should constantly tie your current
Results
slide back to what you have already talked about. The audience
Paper:
needs to be reminded of the step by step story your presentation
Discussion/Conclu
has followed so far. A famous MIT mathematician writes about Visual & Oral
presentations: Communication
Figure Design
“Every lecture should state one main point and repeat it over and Poster
over, like a theme with variations. An audience is like a herd of Slide Presentation
cows, moving slowly in the direction they are being driven Virtual Presentation
towards. If we make one point, we have a good chance that the Research Qualifying
audience will take the right direction; if we make several points, Examination (RQE)
then the cows will scatter all over the field. The audience will lose Science Policy
interest and everyone will go back to the thoughts they
Introduction to
interrupted in order to come to our lecture.” — Gian-Carlo Rota,
Policy
“Ten Lessons I Wish I Had Been Taught”
Communication
Policy Elevator Pitch
Another way to help your audience understand you is to avoid
Policy Memo
jargon, keeping in mind that the same words or images can be
Policy Presentation
“useful detail” to one audience but “jargon” to another.
Congressional Hill
Meeting
Skills Letter of Support
Op-Ed
Connect your work back to broader motivations and
Public Comment on
hypotheses
Pending Regulation
At the beginning of your talk, develop the broad context for your
work and then lay out the motivating questions you aim to answer. Coding
The audience should understand how the answers to those Coding Mindset: An
questions will impact the broader context. overall approach to
creating code that is
When showing data, be clear about what that data has to say about easy to read, use,
those motivating questions. What do different experimental and reuse
outcomes mean for those larger questions? Coding and
Comment Style
Transitions between parts of the talk should also reference the File Structure
larger motivating questions. A weak transition like “After taking this Organization
data we see the following peak temperature” doesn’t help orient the
audience. A stronger version might be, “We see that the peak
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temperature is higher than predicted. Checking simulations we see
MIT affiliates: Want to talk with one of our
that this is indicative of a nitrogen defect.” A slower, more deliberate Fellows about your project?
transition will give your audience time to process what they just saw
and figure out how to connect that information with the rest of your
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talk.

“Introduce” your data

Make sure your audience will be able to understand your data
before you show it. They should know what the axes will be, what
each point in the plot represents, and what pattern or signal they’re
looking for. If you’re showing a common type of plot to an audience
that’s familiar with that kind of plot (e.g., a g(2) plot to grad students
who work on quantum information), there’s no need to worry. But if
you show the data before the audience knows how to read it, then
they’ll stop listening to you and instead scrutinize the figure, hoping
that a knitted brow will help them understand.

Example
A simple way to do this is to introduce a figure one part at a time.
For instance, in the example below I show simulated data. Then how
it is expected it to evolve. Then the actual data. By building your
slide up one piece at a time it becomes more comprehensible.

Try visually explaining unfamiliar data. For an audience

unfamiliar with reading ODMR curves, first show a slide
explaining how one can infer a magnetic measurement using
simulations (left). In this way you can clearly see the effect a
change in magnetic field produces. Then show the actual data
(right).

Each slide should convey a single point

Keep your message streamlined. Make a single point per slide. This
gives you control over the pace and logic of the talk and keeps
everyone in the audience on the same page.

The slide’s title should be the slide’s main takeaway. In other words,
the audience should be able to follow your story just by reading the
slide titles. Even if you completely forget what a slide is about, you
can just read the title to convey most of what you had to for that
slide.

Context in Weak title Strong title Why?

presentation
 Background “Thermal “Thermal It highlights
slide Images” Images show the most
that electronics relevant
suffer from point that
thermal motivates
management your work.
issues”

Data slide “Fluorescence “Fluorescence It states the

Measurements” measurements finding rather
show than the
temperatures method.
greater than
100 degrees”

Conclusions “Conclusions” Whatever the You said “In

slide main conclusion”
conclusion was with your
words, tone,
and body
language.
There’s no
need to
repeat it.

Strong titles tell a message. Strong titles tend to be full sentences,

since you need a full sentence to tell a message. Weak titles tend to
be nouns like “Background” or “Fluorescence Measurements.”

Here’s one way to figure out what your slide’s title should be: have a
friend look at it and say, “I don’t understand what the point of this
slide is.” If you find yourself saying, “Well, the thing I’m trying to
convey with this slide is X,” then X should be the slide’s title.

If a slide makes multiple points, try one of the following:

Remove points that don’t come up later in the talk.

Make multiple slides, each with their own message, title, and
content.
Make parts of the slide appear and disappear to display
different pieces of content that together support the title’s
message.

Emphasize visuals over text

When you put up a new slide, most people in the audience will stop
listening to you and start reading the words on the slide. People
understand simple visuals much faster than walls of text. Your
audience should spend their time listening to you, not trying to read
off your slide. Also, if your audience is reading you no longer can
focus and guide them and confusion increases.

If you’re reading lots of words off the slide, you’ve lost the
audience’s attention.

In the best case, a slide has only one complete sentence on it: the
title. It’s OK to use terse statements to support and highlight
secondary conclusions that aren’t already conveyed by the title. If
you have a block of text on your slide, try one of the following:

Replace the text with a picture.

Break up the slide’s content into multiple slides that each
make one point.
Take the text off the slide and put it into your presenter
notes.

Make each figure as simple as possible while still

conveying its message
The purpose of a figure is to convey a message using visual evidence
as support. Your audience usually gives you the benefit of the doubt
and assumes that whatever you show in the figure is important for
them to understand. If you show detailed data, your audience will
get distracted by these details and miss the forest for the trees.

A figure that’s effective in a presentation is usually not the one that

came straight out of Matlab or the one that you made for a paper.
Unlike when you’re reading an academic paper or scrutinizing your
own data, your audience doesn’t have a long time to pore over the
figure. To make the figure more effective, ask yourself what minimum
number of details need to be shown for the figure to make its point.
Remove anything that doesn’t help prove the point. Simplify data
labels, and add emphasis using colors, arrows, or labels.
 Simplify labels and add emphasis. The figure in the publication
(left) is a 3D rendering of the paper’s concepts. This is good for a
paper, but it isn’t so good for a presentation. The figure on the
right shows the same information but removes the unnecessary
dimension, simplifies the experimental setup, and is easy to
interpret. [Adapted from Chen, Edward H et al ., Nano Letters
(2013) doi:10.1021/nl400346k]

Avoid jargon, both textual and visual

One way to help your audience understand you is to avoid jargon.
Discuss the concepts in terms that anyone in the audience could
understand. Names of tools might be widely familiar, but they can
distract from the main point. For example, AFM (atomic force
microscopy) may not be a term that everyone knows.

Keep in mind that “jargon” doesn’t only refer to words, but can also
include equations, diagrams, or even units of measurement. While
these visuals may be standard in subfield, they will often need to be
simplified or reworked for your audience to readily understand.

Prepare for the talking part of the talk

It’s tempting to spend all your time preparing for a presentation by
working on the slides, but the slides are only a visual aid for the
presentation. The point of a presentation is to have a presenter!
Otherwise you could just make beautiful slides, print them out, and
have the audience read them.

Keep your credibility and the audience’s attention by avoiding

technical and procedural problems. Make sure that you can get the
projector turned on, that your computer will show the slides, that
you have your favorite slide clicker, that the slides look good under
this lighting, etc. Try to get to the presentation venue early that day.
Figure out where you’ll stand, how to get your computer and the
project synched up, and so on.
When actually presenting, stand still, face the audience, and keep
gestures to a minimum. Laser pointers are distracting and hard to
use. It’s better to make the important parts of the slide stand out on
their own. Never turn your back to the audience. If you have clean,
simple slides, this should happen automatically. Remember: this talk
is about you and your audience, not about the slides.

Before presenting, prepare for the question and answer part of the
talk. Figure out what questions you are likely to get and prepare
yourself to answer them. Prepare backup slides that are more
technical that address a specific point. When you hear a question,
wait patiently until the questioner has finished speaking. Then
repeat the question and take a breath before answering. This timing
will allow other audience members to understand the question and
will give you some time to formulate a cogent, coherent response.

Found this helpful? Feel free to spread the word by acknowledging

the Comm Lab on your presentation with our EECS Comm Lab logo.

Content adapted by the MIT Electrical Engineering and Computer

Science Communication Lab from an article originally created by the
MIT Biological Engineering Communication Lab.

CONTRIBUTORS

Christopher Foy

Chris Musco

MIT Communication Lab EECS Communication Lab

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