Presentation of your work II

A very trivial advices, which has a lot of hidden reasons to give – your should try and conduct the presentation before the real one at home. You should not react on this: “Of course .. it is obvious” since the following reason will probably be not as obvious as you think:

Direct reasons: such in advance test will help you to understand what you are going to say because ad hoc talk could easily move you to some other topic or you will find that you miss some important data. So the in advance training will a) let you to build up a plan of the talk; b) let you to understand what expressions you will be using in order to make your talk absolutely correct and make others understand what you are talking about; c) find definitions and terms to be used.

Indirect (or hidden) reasons : such training talk shows whether you meet the time requirement or your talk tends to be long and frustrating. Practise shows that you will have to cut from 20% (for experienced) to 50% (for beginners) of what you thought initially you will be saying. So you need to find how much exactly you have to cut in order to avoid cutting during the real talk risking to cut too important issues then.... and obviously you should repeat the talk in order to identify whether the new speech meets requirements. It will be fine to have approximately one training for presenting an article and 3-4 for presenting your doctor work.

If the presentation is a presentation of PhD thesis then you should also try to show slides (not only make a talk) in order to synchronise your talk and slides and balance time you spent on one or another slide. Moreover you could find it to be hard to understand what your are showing / explaining using your slides. Then you will have either to rebuild your slides or (may be) use more than one screen. Two screen technique is spreading more and more among lecturers. There are several reasons why two can be used. For example some lecturers will show on the second one the previous slide so you will not loose the talk logic. The second method will allow parallel presentation in order you, for example, would like to show the original and modified text and so forth. Finally you could decide for two screens if you want allow to follow both the general level logic (on one screen) and the details logic (on another).