How to present: Oral
How to present your oral presentation
A beamer and Microsoft Office XP PowerPoint facilities will be available for your presentation.
Tips & Tricks
Structure
1. Title: Make sure the title of your presentation covers the contents of the presentation. Draw the attention of your audience with your title.
2. Introduction: The introduction starts with what is known, followed by what is unknown. Remember: just give simple, necessary background information to explain your research question. Remember to repeat key terms.
3. Hypothesis/ Research question: It is very important to state your hypothesis/research question as clear as possible! Use a separate slide for it. State your experimental approach for anwsering your research question.
4. Materials and Methods: Explain what experiments/techniques you used in order to answer your research question. State the function of every technique/measurement and if necessary, explain why you have chosen certain techniques. Remember to keep confined to essential details.
5. Results: Only report results that are relevant for your research question. Give percentages rather than exact data when possible. If possible, use graphs for your most important findings.
6. Conclusion: Give the answer to your research question. With this, repeat the question you stated in your introduction. Do not use more than one or two slides.
7. Discussion: Explain the answer to your research question. If relevant, state some conditions that could have influenced your data.
8. Future prospective: State the future prospective of your research shortly.
9. References/funding Powerpoint The function of PowerPoint is to support your presentation. Your slides should be orderly and clear to obtain this goal as best as possible:
- Use subheadings following your structure.
- Use a large fond-size. (rather to big than to small)
- Use a simple fond without serifs. ( for instance arial of verdana)
- Do not use red on blue or any other dark background colour.
- Use key terms instead of whole sentences on your slides.
- Do not include too much information in one slide: keep it orderly and simple.
- Make sure you have neatly looking slides; avoid typing errors and messy slides.
- Avoid using research terms which are too difficult. Use general terms during your presentation. Do not use synonyms for these words, which would make your presentation unnecessarily difficult.
- Speak slowly and be loud enough. This seems logical, but it would be too bad if your audience cannot follow your presentation because they cannot hear you.
- Speak towards your audience instead of towards your PowerPoint presentation.
Some last pointers by John Cleese:
“ the 5 P's”
- Proper
- Preparation
- Prevents
- Poor
- Presentation
