How to give a good 15 minute talk by Scott Keogh

  • Do keep the message of your talk very simple, have only a few main points.

  • Do think and plan carefully about the structure of your talk - make sure it follows a logical progression.

  • Do be very prepared for your talk, practice, practice, practice.

  • Do plan on about four minutes each for intro, materials and methods, and results/discussion. If you have to trim - trim M&M.

  • Do plan on about one slide per minute.

  • Do speak slowly and clearly.

  • Do have a joke or two ready if you are feeling confident, people like to laugh but be prepared to go on if they don't.

  • Do have very good text slides, keep them simple.

  • Do have good study species slides, at least 20% of total slide number.

  • Do have conclusions slides.

  • Do make sure that the people in the back of the room can see what's on your slides.

  • Do state your aims clearly and explain WHY you have done the research and the SIGNIFICANCE of the research.

  • Do try to reach as wide an audience as possible and reflect this attitude in the way you present statistics and complicated results.

  • Do make sure that every slide means something.

  • Don't read your talk if you can help it. If you are well prepared and have practiced you won't have to.

  • Don't use a laser pointer until you have practiced using one, be slow and deliberate with your movements.

  • Don't use the shadow of the pointer to point unless you say that's what you're doing.

  • Don't apologise for mistakes in your slides, just explain.

  • Don't show complicated tables or DNA sequences - tables are talk death. If you have to show tables, keep them very simple and only show the data that you are actually going to talk about.

  • Don't ever start explaining a slide by saying "I know you can't read this but....".

  • Don't go overtime.

  • Don't say "Now this is really interesting.....", just make it self-evident.

  • Don't use more than three colours, and make sure they are highly contrasting.

  • Don't say "that's it" at the end, have an ending prepared.

  • Don't say "more work is required" because it always is.

  • Don't show raw data.

  • Don't go too much into well known methods.

  • Don't end with a slide of a sunset because that always annoys me!