Chief Scientist Notes: ARM Presentations—Striving for Excellence

You can be a good scientist and give bad presentations, but if you apply the same quest for excellence to your presentations as you do to your science, there is no reason you can't be excellent in both areas. Increasingly, I see slides so packed with material, and in such small font sizes, that they cannot even be read from the front row without binoculars. Too many of us sit in silent shock as people face the screen, read their slides verbatim, and give us eyestrain from watching the little red laser dot dancing around figures with unreadable axis labels-all the while omitting to explain what is being plotted.

We spend several hundred dollars flying presenters to the Science Team Meeting to give short talks. At that price, every talk should meet high standards of excellence. There was a time, believe it or not, when the DOE labs competed with each other to design the best, most readable, most memorable slides. Stories of this competition abound in the book by Alley (The Craft of Scientific Presentations). Information about Alley's book, and many examples of good slides, can be found on his website. Alley's presentation captures some of the best ideas for slide preparation and is, in my mind, a minimum pre-requisite for giving an ARM talk.

I once wrote some guidelines for student presentations, which are summarized below. My single top recommendation, and the one from which most others flow, is to cultivate empathy for your audience. Don't do things to them that you wouldn't like done to you. Ask yourself, what irritates you in presentations? Then, don't do it!

Here is my own personal irritation list, roughly in order of priority:

Reading slides verbatim, usually with the presenter's back to the audience.
Too much information on a slide. The tendency to cram too much text and too many graphs on a slide is seemingly irresistible for many scientists. RESIST IT!
Rushing, especially with color contour plots. Certain kinds of visual information are very dense and require study to understand the intended message.
Unreadable font sizes. This is especially annoying on graph labels and legends, since speakers frequently forget to explain what is being graphed in their rush to move forward. The minimum font size is 18 pt, preferably 20 pt.
Vertical axis labels oriented vertically, requiring a 90-degree head rotation to read. If you leave vertical axis on the graph, put a (horizontal) label above the graph saying what is being plotted.
Bad font choice. Avoid serif fonts. Use a simple sans serif font. Don't use all caps, and don't capitalize every word.
Cramming all the graphs onto the same slide. This creates a viewing nightmare as the audience's eyes quickly flick from one graph to another, trying to see what is the same and what is different. If you want to show multiple graphs all in the same format and of the same size, put each on a separate slide (if you drag the graph files to an empty slide, they will perfectly center themselves so you don't need to worry about alignment); then just flip back and forth with the arrow keys, creating a kind of animation where, for example, curves can appear and disappear.
Movies that don't work because the presenter doesn't leave PowerPoint and plays the movie directly using QuickTime Player, Windows Media Player, or whatever. My own trick is to open all the movies in advance, at the size I want to show them (full-screen or whatever), then open the PPT file last so it hides all of them. When I get to a place in the PPT file where I want to show a movie, I put a slide saying "Show movie so-and-so" then
- on a PC, I escape from slide show mode and open the movie, which I have previously minimized in advance onto the taskbar;
- on a Mac, I press F9 to activate Expose and select the movie from the array of disjoint windows (no need to exit PPT slide show mode on a Mac).
Graphics that don't appear on screen because the presenter copied and pasted them in native format (BMP for PC, PICT for Mac) rather than converting them to JPEG or GIF.
Laser pointers. These are too ephemeral; they jiggle and cause eyestrain. An alternative is to use PowerPoint to draw thick red ellipses around things you want the audience to focus on; make the circles appear using animation (and disappear when you are done with them).
Eye-tiring bright slide backgrounds. I try to use a light blue, or a dark blue with yellow and/or white text.
Anything that seems random and therefore jarring; e.g., random animation type, random text coloring, random slide organization, random font choice. Pick a style and stick to it religiously, so the audience can focus on content and not on style.

To follow up on the last bullet, I can't overemphasize the need for CONSISTENCY. You can make all slides more or less consistent by setting as many parameters (font size, line spacing, etc.) as possible in the Master Slide, then saving that slide as a Template. Then just open that template when starting a presentation.