![]() ![]() But unlike in a paper where you can define it and people can look back if they forget what it means, there is no way to "look back" in a talk. They are often the most important nouns in your presentation. It's easy to fall into a bad habit of using acronyms. In that case, take care to define it more than once through the course of your presentation, and reinforce your teaching of the jargon word with context.Īcronyms and initialisms are a special class of jargon. Sometimes a jargon word is unavoidable it may be the focus of your presentation. ![]() But if a word is not familiar to your audience, it will obfuscate rather than clarify. Words are wonderful things, and our subspecialties have a lot of vocabulary that is dense with information. Identifying your audience allows you to identify what words are jargon and what are not. To the relatively uninformed, you should at least answer: what is the question behind your work, and why is it important? What did you learn, and why does it matter? At the same time, to the well-informed, you should convey how your work has added to or broadened or contradicted what has come before it. Really good speakers are ones who manage to communicate something to everybody in the room, no matter who they are or how much they already know. An experimenter? Pitch your talk to a theoretician. Are you an astronomer? Pitch your talk to a geologist. If you do not provide the people in your audience with information that they require in order to understand you, it is the same as telling them that you do not care if they understand you or not.įor a scientific conference, I suggest targeting your talks at an audience that is familiar with the scientific process, but whose subspecialty is entirely different from yours. The wider an audience you are addressing, the more context you will need to provide to them. Who are they, and what can you assume about what they already know about your topic? Is it an audience of your peers within your subspecialty? Is it space scientists more generally? Is it scientists and engineers? Is it a funding body? If it's the public, do they come to the room knowing a lot about space? Or is it a general audience? Here are some questions to guide you in preparing a good talk. Work to deliver them a presentation that is designed for them, to inform and interest them in your work, to leave them pleased that they spent that 5 or 10 or 50 minutes of their valuable time listening to you. If you don't have time to read, I can summarize my advice in three words:Įach one of the people in your audience is another person, like you. Here's a recording of me giving this talk at the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory at the University of Arizona on February 5, 2018. I am available to give talks at universities on this topic. This post is a revised and updated version of one I wrote in 2013. If you're a scientist who's interested in improving how you present your science, read on. I used to complain about bad presentations at conferences but I realized that (1) I hate complainers and (2) as a professional science communicator I should probably quit complaining and actually offer people some help with communicating better. It's a shame, because science is awesome. Bad presentation often gets in the way of good science.
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