R – PsychEng / ShuLab powerpoint tips

In order of importance (ease of implementation)

• Slide numbers
  • Have slide numbers on each slide (usually bottom right)
  • On at least the first if not each slide, write slide number as x/n, where x is the current slide number and n is total number of slides
  • Why: Allows host/audience to pace/allocate time
• Font size
  • Use minimum font size of 24, including in your figures/tables
    • This depends on the actual font used, but 24 minimum words on all fonts
    • Why: If it can’t be read, why show it?
• Full sentences neither required/ideal on powerpoints.   Why?
  • The occasional full sentence (by itself) is ok, but slides with multiple full sentences are not ok.
  • People shouldn’t have to choose b/w reading your slide and listening to you
  • Examples of extraneous words unnecessary even in non-full-sentence bullets AKA stop words (A, An, The)
  • Exception: when you must make exact quotes, e.g., of text stimuli, in which case, bold/underline key parts
  • Other exception: When you don’t know what you’re talking about and need to read entire sentences off your slide to be remotely accurate (avoid by mastering what you will present)
  • Final exception:  When your pronunciation of English (or whatever presentation language) is so challenged that people will be relieved to stop listening to you and read your slides instead (avoid by working to improve said language)

• For lab meetings, for each citation introduced:
  • (at least one slide per citation)
    1. title of work
    2. names and affiliation of authors (both department and university/institute)
    3. the major methods
    4. the main findings
    5. why you selected this of all work (given how old the work may be/how obscure some of the affiliations are).
• Loudness – be sure you’re loud enough to be heard.  Simply put, “If you can’t be heard, no one will listen to you”.
• Overall philosophy:
  • Your talk should be for the benefit of your audience, so try to put yourself in their shoes/seats
    • What do they already know, what might they care about?
    • How can they most easily absorb the information you aim to convey?
    • Only last, what do you hope to get out of your talk? You’re more likely to get it by dealing with the above first.
• Title slide
  • Have an informative title slide (not “My seminar”) that ideally informs where talk will go/end
  • For conference talk, use title, author names and affiliations as listed on paper
•  Font
  • Absolute minimum size: 24 point
    • You may be able to read microscopic text from infinite distances, but not everyone can or will bother to make the effort, so if you want a surefire way to aggravate your audience without saying a word …
  • Style: Choose sans-serif (e.g, helvetica) over serif (e.g., times)  Why?
    • Your bullets shouldn’t be so long one needs serifs to help read along a line as they would a book.
• Full sentences not required/ideal on powerpoints.   Why?
  • People shouldn’t have to choose b/w reading your slide and listening to you
  • Examples of extraneous words unnecessary even in non-full-sentence bullets AKA stop words (A, An, The)
  • Exception: when you must make exact quotes, e.g., of text stimuli, in which case, bold/underline key parts
  • Other exception: When you don’t know what you’re talking about and need to read entire sentences off your slide to be remotely accurate (avoid by mastering what you will present)
  • Final exception:  When your pronunciation of English (or whatever presentation language) is so challenged that people will be relieved to stop listening to you and read your slides instead (avoid by working to improve said language)
• Bullets consistent in grammatical structure/ “parallel” to each other, e.g.,
  • Do not use too-small font
  • Do not use full sentences
  • Do not use randomly structured bullets, or a sentence randomly split into multiple bullets, e.g.,
    • Here is a full sentence that
      • I will split
      • nonsensically into bullets
      • just to adhere to the “no
      • full-sentences” rule.  Didn’t
    • that just inspire
    • so much confidence in my competence?
• Bullets hierarchically consistent, i.e., subsets of a bullet should be indented from that bullet, not haphazardly below it – see example below.  Why? Your slides convey (your) mental consistency and discipline (vs. sloppy thinking).  If bullets are numbered, ideally alternate numbering scheme b/w numbers/letters as you would section numbering.

1. Colors

a. red

b. blue

c. green

vs.

1. colors

1. red

2. blue

3.5? green

• Dual-mode presentation
  • Assume one deaf and one blind person in the audience:
    • Don’t show things you don’t talk about
    • Don’t say important things you don’t show, e.g., terminology, category names, etc.
• Figures
  • Do not use legends (these are for papers) – label graph bars/curves directly
  • Color code your bar graphs intuitively, e.g., red/orange/yellow for “bad”, purple/blue/green for “good”
    • Don’t try to wow the audience with the aesthetic beauty of your abstract (arbitrary) color choices.
• Tables
  • Do not use Tables if a Figure is at all possible (include error bars)
  • Exception to use table: When you don’t have enough data points for non-misleading figure (e.g., bar charts)
• Slide numbers out of total on each slide, e.g., “1 of 30”. Why?
  • It helps people pace themselves/their attention span
  • BTW, most of my ppt files have over 100 slides, but since I won’t present all of them, I don’t want to panic people, so I manually set (x of actual # slides presented)
• Pictures
  • Try to choose non-copyrighted images to help you make a point (better than a pile of words)
• Animation
  • Animation (gradual introduction of content) onto a slide helps people digest busy slides
  • But, you have to know your talk well to not mis-predict what is coming up in your transitions
  • Do not animate for the sake of animating, i.e., making a room-full of people wait while your bullets appear a letter at a time (with or without unfortunate choice of sound effects, e.g., machine gun).
•  Conclusions first: A trick my former supervisor shared, why?
  • Intelligent people are impatient (even if they’re good at suppressing direct expression of this)
    • motivate them to find out what led to your amazing conclusions that you present first (don’t try to keep them in suspense).
    • or, enable them to conclude they should take a mental break until the next presentation starts without feeling any frustration for being tricked into listening to yours.
•  Questions: Ideally, rephrase questions before answering them.  Why?
  • Clarifies what you’re answering to others who may not have heard the original question
  • Confirms with the asker whether you understand the question
  • Buys you time to come up with a super great answer.

see also this: https://hbr.org/2018/05/5-ways-to-project-confidence-in-front-of-an-audience