Presenting Slideshows for Beginners
A Beginner’s Guide to Creating Slideshows and Presenting to Any Audience
Slideshows
Slideshows have been the go-to presentation medium in professional, educational, and recreational lectures and demonstrations for years . Everyone has made one or at least has been forced to sit through a presentation or two. If you’re a 90’s kid, you probably started seeing them used quite often when you were in high school by your teachers and classmates. The process of creating a slideshow and presenting it to an audience requires 2 entirely different set of skills. These skills are usually shared when students are first taught how to use Microsoft PowerPoint (or Google Slides for a free alternative). However, these skills are either:
- forgotten due to lack of practice and opportunities to use them or
- not taught correctly from day 1
The result of that is poorly designed slide decks that rely on flashy images and transitions, walls of text on each slide, and a lack of narrative and “flow” to the presentation. I am no expert on the topic, nor will I ever claim to be, but I do have some experience presenting to groups of students as a former high school chemistry teacher. I will share my process and the reasoning behind some of the steps to help better explain why some slide decks are better than others.
Presenting a Story, Not a Presentation
The type of presentation that causes me near-physical pain is when the speaker is reading from a note card the entire time, or worse yet, turning their back to the audience and reading off of the slideshow! If the purpose of the presentation was to simply share results in a script/speech format, a pamphlet or email would suffice. Don’t make your poor audience sit through 10–15 minutes of listening to you say the same words that they have already read with their own eyes off of your slide.
You want to be telling a story. Stories captivate an audience and get them interested in what you have to say. You can include all the slide transitions and animations you want, but if your audience isn’t interested in your presentation, they most likely won’t even notice or care. Transitions and animations are just a cherry on top, a garnish on the side of your main entree: the content of your presentation.
Start your presentation with a little backstory. By introducing the audience to some background information on the topic, you can get everyone on the same page as you from the get-go. When you jump right into the content, your audience may not be mentally prepared to hear and immediately comprehend the findings of your research. This leads to our next topic:
Know Your Audience
As a data scientist, you will be presenting your findings to non-technical as well as technical audiences. You must keep in mind which audience you are presenting to while creating your slideshow. Make sure to periodically ask yourself, “Is this too much jargon?” or, more importantly, “Is this relevant to them?”.
To your non-technical stakeholder audience, you do not want to spend too much of your time explaining in detail your neural network and how each layer is constructed. You will end up spending most of that time confusing them with jargon. Once they hear a term they don’t understand, their mind could get caught up in trying to decipher the meaning using context clues. They could even stop listening to your presentation altogether.
For your technical audience, they don’t care as much about the findings as they do about the process. To get them interested in your topic, your starting slide should introduce the different models and methods you used in your research. Take this opportunity to really “geek out” and explain the nitty gritty details that only fellow data scientists and statisticians would care to hear.
Say More with Less
The worst slides are the ones with a wall of text.
Just like nobody likes wet socks , NOBODY likes to read a wall of text. When you sign up for a new service, you are typically required to read a user agreement form. That wall of text is skipped by everyone and their neighbor.
The same concept applies here. Not many people will choose to listen to you if you are reading the exact same words that they are seeing on the screen. The only difference is they can’t just scroll quickly through your presentation or suddenly walk out claiming they “agree” with everything you say before even hearing it. This leads to them quickly getting bored, either before or after they are done reading. The average audience member can read the same words much faster than you can speak them. As they wait for you to finish your script, their thoughts will begin to drift away from your topic and onto what they’re going to order for lunch after your presentation.
To keep your audience captivated and interested, keep your slides clean and minimal. This not only applies to words but pictures, transitions, and animations as well. As stated before, if they do not care about what you are presenting, they aren’t going to care about how Figure 1 did a backflip before spinning onto the screen.
Speak, Don’t Read
There is absolutely nothing wrong with using notecards or presenter comments to remind yourself of some key points. Notecards help you stay on topic and remind you to say the most important parts of your slide.
However, there are many things wrong with reading off of notecards the entire time without looking up at your audience even once. You were the one who did the research, made the slideshow, and wrote the words on the cards. You should be familiar enough with the topic where you only have to reference your cards card once or twice per slide (or even better, per presentation!). If you are reading the words on the cards for the first time during your presentation, both you and your audience are going to have a bad time. Always be aware of your body language and eye contact during your presentation.
Keep your audience captivated by maintaining eye contact with them as often as possible. Don’t stare into their soul, but look at their reactions to what you’re saying. Their body language and facial expressions can really help to calm your nerves. Do they look interested and attentive? Great, you’re doing an awesome job and there’s nothing to be nervous about. Keep it up and finish strong! Do they look bored beyond belief? Not so great, but you can still change that! Stop reading and start interacting with your audience. Get them to answer some easy questions about the topic or ask the group if they’ve had a similar experience to what you’re presenting. Once you get them relating to the topic and get their brain working again, you’ll have them right where you want them.
Practice Makes Perfect
I’m sure you have been told this at least once in your life. If not, congratulations for making it this far! If you are nervous about public speaking, the absolute best way to improve is to practice. Practicing your presentation beforehand, which is too often skipped by presenters, will help you not only better understand the content but also allows you to practice slide timings. Ideally, you want to be practicing in front of people who are a similar demographic to your audience (e.g. technical vs non-technical). Once you run through your presentation, have them give you feedback. Take their comments as constructive criticism, not as a personal attack towards you. They are trying to help you make your presentation better because you most likely asked them to. If you still don’t feel comfortable practicing in front of people, you can use a mirror or record yourself and watch it back. Be aware of your non-verbal communication. Ask yourself:
- Are you slouching?
- Are you reading from your notes?
- Have you seen your own eyes in the mirror since you started?
Keep practicing with a mirror or your phone/laptop camera until you can confidently run through your slideshow without awkward pauses or long periods of making little to no eye-contact. Once you can do that with ease, you’re ready! When you step up to make your presentation, just do it like you practiced. You know the material, you did the research, and you practiced until you hated the sound of your own voice. Own the moment and your audience will be captivated with what you have to say. Remember, tell a story and finish strong!
Originally published at https://scottokamura.github.io on September 10, 2020.