technical paper presentation examples

Technical Presentation

Structure diagram, criteria for success.

• The presentation starts with the motivating problem for the research and why it’s being presented.
• Every slide shows something relevant to the motivating problem.
• Every slide shows no more information than necessary to convey the message.
• Slide titles stand on their own; other text supports the visuals.
• The audience takes away the presenter’s desired message .

Identify Your Message and Purpose

Identify your message and goals as a presenter and use them to organize your presentation. Your message is what you wish to convey to the audience, and is your primary goal. Other goals could include eliciting feedback, receiving a job offer, etc. Use your goals to structure your presentation, making it easier for the audience to follow your logic and identify important points that support your goals.

For example, if your goal is to communicate a new scientific result, focus on the results and broader implications rather than your methodology. Specific methods should take a back seat (e.g. “I measured key material properties,” rather than “I found the thermal decomposition temperature and profile”). Spend more time focusing on what the result means, and how it can be used.

Alternatively, if your goal is to elicit feedback from colleagues on an experimental apparatus, focus more on the experimental methods. Compare the advantages and disadvantages to alternatives. Explain your assumptions, base models and why your proposed experimental design will give more useful results than other designs would.

In less formal settings such as lab meetings, you can explicitly tell your audience what you’re looking for (e.g., “I’d appreciate feedback on my experimental methods”).

Analyze Your Audience

Understanding your audience is of paramount importance for a successful presentation. Highlight how your goals overlap with what audience cares about, so they receive your message. A well-designed presentation will steer the audience’s attention such that you can lead them to the exact point that you want them to take away.

Different audiences have different goals for attending a presentation, and therefore pay attention to different things. For example, at the same talk, an engineer may be interested in using your result to solve their problem, a scientist in the broader scientific advance, a venture capitalist in its impact as a novel product, and clinician about how your device could improve their patients’ care. The introduction of your presentation should speak to the range of backgrounds and experiences in your audience.

That being said, often an audience consists of people with similar backgrounds and interests. Therefore, identify whether jargon is appropriate for an audience, and to what extent. Consider whether other methods, such as images or analogies, are more appropriate to convey concepts that would otherwise rely on jargon.

Plan Out the Presentation

Presentations are constrained by the fact that they progress linearly in time, unlike a written piece of communication, where the reader may jump forwards and backwards to get at the information they seek. Outline the content of the entire presentation first, then begin to design the slides, rather than jumping straight into them.

Lay out the order in which the content needs to be presented to achieve your goals, such that your message flows from point to point, topic to topic. This order may be very different from the structure of the journal paper you’ve already written.

Start by motivating your work with a problem that everyone cares about. Then develop your message step by step, from the background to the final message, so the logic flows clearly.

In many cases (depending on the audience), it might be most appropriate to reveal your conclusions up-front, so that the audience can tie everything else in the presentation back to supporting those conclusions. For instance, technology-focused program managers or engineering sponsors are likely most interested in your results, which will determine whether they are interested enough to pay attention to your process and justification. By contrast, certain scientific communities appreciate being taken through your scientific process to develop their own conclusions before you present yours.

Because the audience cannot immediately see a presentation’s structure like they can with a paper, it is often a good idea to provide a high-level roadmap of the presentation early on. At key points throughout the presentation, remind them of where they are on the roadmap.

Connect Your Work Back to the Broader Motivation

At the beginning of your talk, develop the broader context for your work and lay out the motivating questions you aim to answer. The audience should understand how your answers have an impact on the broader context, and why a solution was not immediately possible without your work.

At the next level down, when showing data and results, make sure it’s clear what they contribute to answering the motivating questions.

Anticipate Questions

If your audience is following along with your presentation, they’ll likely have questions about why you made certain decisions or didn’t make others. Sometimes, the questions could arise from what you’ve said and presented. Other times, they’ll arise from a listener’s knowledge of the field and the problem that you’re working on.

While you design your presentation, think about what kinds of questions may come up, and identify how you will address them. For less formal talks, you can anticipate interruptions to discuss these questions, whereas for more formal talks you should make sure that none of the questions are so big that they’ll preoccupy your listeners. For big questions, decide if you’ll explicitly address them in your talk. For smaller ones, consider adding back-up slides that address the issue.

Remember – while you know all of the information that is coming up in your talk, the audience probably does not. If they develop a question that doesn’t get addressed clearly, they could get distracted from the rest of the points you make.

You can use questions to create strong transitions: “seed” the listener’s thought process with the questions you’re about to answer in an upcoming slide. If a listener develops a question, and then you answer it immediately after, your message will stick much better!

Each Slide Should Convey a Single Point

Keep your message streamlined—make a single point per slide. This gives you control over the pace and logic of the talk and keeps everyone in the audience on the same page. Do not be afraid of white space—it focuses your audience’s attention.

The slide title should identify where you are on your roadmap and what topic the question the slide is answering. In other words, the audience should know exactly where in the presentation and what the slide answers just from the slide title.

Strong Titles Tell a Message

Strong titles highlight where on the roadmap you are, and hint at what question the slide is answering. Weak titles tend to be vague nouns that could be used across many slides or presentations. A rule of thumb is your title should be a clear, single-line phrase illustrating the importance of the slide.

Note that different mechanical engineering fields have different preferences for titles that are phrases versus full sentences. In general, design, system, or product-focused presentations tend to have short titles that only highlight what the speaker is saying, allowing audiences to focus more on the body of the slide, which is usually a figure. In other fields, a strong title might instead be a full sentence that states a message.

Emphasize Visuals

When a new slide is presented, most people will shift their attention from what you’re saying to the slide. People can often interpret figures and listen, but not read text and listen simultaneously. The more words on the slide, the less control you have over your audience’s attention. If you are reading words off the slide, you’ve lost the audience’s attention completely—they’ll just read the slide too.

Use brief statements and keywords to highlight and support the slide’s individual point. Slides are a visual medium, so use them for figures, equations, and as few words as possible to convey the meaning of the slide.

If you have a block of text on your slide, ask yourself what the takeaway message is, and what is the necessary supporting material (data, analysis). Then, identify how text can be reduced to still support your point clearly. Consider…

• Replacing text with figures, tables, or lists.
• Eliminating all but key words and phrases, and speaking the bulk of the text instead.
• Breaking up the slide into multiple slides with more visuals.

Replace blocks of text with easy-to-read pictures, tables or diagrams.

Left: The original slide provides specific information as text, but makes it easy for both speaker and audience to read directly off the slide, often leading to a distracted audience.

Right: The improved slide conveys the same information with a simple graphic and keywords, conveying the chronology more clearly, and allowing the reader to speak the same information without reading off the slide.

Simplify Figures

The purpose of a figure is to convey a message visually, whether it be supporting evidence or a main point. Your audience usually gives you the benefit of the doubt and assumes that whatever you show in the figure is important for them to understand. If you show too much detail, your audience will get distracted from the important point you want them to gather.

An effective presentation figure is often not one made for a paper. Unlike you scrutinizing your own data or reading an academic paper, your audience doesn’t have a long time to pore over the figure. To maximize its effectiveness, ask yourself what minimum things need to be shown for the figure to make its point. Remove anything that doesn’t illuminate the point to avoid distraction. Simplify data labels, and add emphasis to key parts using colors, arrows, or labels.

Additionally, presentations offer different opportunities than papers do for presenting data. You can use transitions on your slides to sequentially introduce new pieces of information to your slide, such as adding data to a plot, highlighting different parts of an experiment (or equation), or introducing text concepts as bullets.

Simplify data, simplify labels for emphasis.

Top: Academic referees and peers would prefer to see the complete theoretical model and experimental data (top), so they can interpret it for themselves. In addition, in papers, space is limited, while time to digest is not.

Bottom: But in a presentation, simplifying the data makes it easy to focus on the feature of interests for the presentation, or even at that moment (different regions may be highlighted from slide to slide). Slides provide plenty of space, while time is at a premium. [Adapted from Wind-Willassen et al., Phys. Fluids 25, 082002 (2013); doi:10.1063/1.4817612]

Introduce Your Data

Make sure your audience will be able to understand your data before you show it. They should know what the axes will be, what points in the plot generally represents, and what pattern or signal they’re looking for. If you’re showing a figure common to a specific audience, you may not need to explain as much. But if you show the data before the audience knows how to read it, they’ll stop listening to you, and instead scrutinize the figure, hoping that a knitted brow will help them understand.

If you are worried your audience won’t understand your data, one approach is to show sketches of what the data would should like if your hypothesis were true or false. Then show your real data.

For an audience unfamiliar with cyclic battery testing as a way to measure corrosion, first show a slide explaining how the electrical signal would appear without corrosion ( top ) before showing the slide with the actual data ( bottom ). Use parallel design across the explanation and data slides. This way, the audience is introduced to the logic of the experiments and how to draw conclusions from the data, making them more likely to follow and agree with the point made on the second slide. [Adapted from AAE2]

Be Critical of Visual and Textual Jargon

If there are discipline-accepted symbols, for example in fluid or electrical schematics, using them is an effective tool to simplify your visual for people in your field. However, if these may be unknown to a significant portion of your audience, be sure to add a descriptive keyword, label or legend.

Use simple, consistent visual design

A clean set of slides will minimize visual noise, focus the audience’s attention and improve the continuity between what you’re showing and telling. The graphical design is also important for setting the tone and professionalism of the presentation.

• Are colors related to each other? Do some carry intrinsic meaning (e.g. blue = cold, water, red = hot)?
• Are you using colors that are well-represented when projected?
• Are your color choices appropriate for colorblind members of the audience? Can you textures or line/point styles to differentiate data instead?
• Spread out elements on a slide to use space effectively—don’t be afraid of white space! By limiting the amount of information on a slide, you can control what your audience will focus on at each moment in time.
• Use your software’s alignment and centering features.
• When items are grouped as a list, make sure they actually belong under a helpful unifying theme.
• Make sure all text and figures are legible to the back of the room.

Resources and Annotated Examples

Annotated example 1.

This is a technical presentation given by MechE graduate students for a system design class. 13 MB

Annotated Example 2

This presentation was given by a MechE PhD student during interviews for postdoc positions. 1 MB

Reference management. Clean and simple.

How to make a scientific presentation

Scientific presentation outlines

Questions to ask yourself before you write your talk, 1. how much time do you have, 2. who will you speak to, 3. what do you want the audience to learn from your talk, step 1: outline your presentation, step 2: plan your presentation slides, step 3: make the presentation slides, slide design, text elements, animations and transitions, step 4: practice your presentation, final thoughts, frequently asked questions about preparing scientific presentations, related articles.

A good scientific presentation achieves three things: you communicate the science clearly, your research leaves a lasting impression on your audience, and you enhance your reputation as a scientist.

But, what is the best way to prepare for a scientific presentation? How do you start writing a talk? What details do you include, and what do you leave out?

It’s tempting to launch into making lots of slides. But, starting with the slides can mean you neglect the narrative of your presentation, resulting in an overly detailed, boring talk.

The key to making an engaging scientific presentation is to prepare the narrative of your talk before beginning to construct your presentation slides. Planning your talk will ensure that you tell a clear, compelling scientific story that will engage the audience.

In this guide, you’ll find everything you need to know to make a good oral scientific presentation, including:

• The different types of oral scientific presentations and how they are delivered;
• How to outline a scientific presentation;
• How to make slides for a scientific presentation.

Our advice results from delving into the literature on writing scientific talks and from our own experiences as scientists in giving and listening to presentations. We provide tips and best practices for giving scientific talks in a separate post.

There are two main types of scientific talks:

• Your talk focuses on a single study . Typically, you tell the story of a single scientific paper. This format is common for short talks at contributed sessions in conferences.
• Your talk describes multiple studies. You tell the story of multiple scientific papers. It is crucial to have a theme that unites the studies, for example, an overarching question or problem statement, with each study representing specific but different variations of the same theme. Typically, PhD defenses, invited seminars, lectures, or talks for a prospective employer (i.e., “job talks”) fall into this category.

➡️ Learn how to prepare an excellent thesis defense

The length of time you are allotted for your talk will determine whether you will discuss a single study or multiple studies, and which details to include in your story.

The background and interests of your audience will determine the narrative direction of your talk, and what devices you will use to get their attention. Will you be speaking to people specializing in your field, or will the audience also contain people from disciplines other than your own? To reach non-specialists, you will need to discuss the broader implications of your study outside your field.

The needs of the audience will also determine what technical details you will include, and the language you will use. For example, an undergraduate audience will have different needs than an audience of seasoned academics. Students will require a more comprehensive overview of background information and explanations of jargon but will need less technical methodological details.

Your goal is to speak to the majority. But, make your talk accessible to the least knowledgeable person in the room.

This is called the thesis statement, or simply the “take-home message”. Having listened to your talk, what message do you want the audience to take away from your presentation? Describe the main idea in one or two sentences. You want this theme to be present throughout your presentation. Again, the thesis statement will depend on the audience and the type of talk you are giving.

Your thesis statement will drive the narrative for your talk. By deciding the take-home message you want to convince the audience of as a result of listening to your talk, you decide how the story of your talk will flow and how you will navigate its twists and turns. The thesis statement tells you the results you need to show, which subsequently tells you the methods or studies you need to describe, which decides the angle you take in your introduction.

➡️ Learn how to write a thesis statement

The goal of your talk is that the audience leaves afterward with a clear understanding of the key take-away message of your research. To achieve that goal, you need to tell a coherent, logical story that conveys your thesis statement throughout the presentation. You can tell your story through careful preparation of your talk.

Preparation of a scientific presentation involves three separate stages: outlining the scientific narrative, preparing slides, and practicing your delivery. Making the slides of your talk without first planning what you are going to say is inefficient.

Here, we provide a 4 step guide to writing your scientific presentation:

• Outline your presentation
• Plan your presentation slides
• Make the presentation slides
• Practice your presentation

Writing an outline helps you consider the key pieces of your talk and how they fit together from the beginning, preventing you from forgetting any important details. It also means you avoid changing the order of your slides multiple times, saving you time.

Plan your talk as discrete sections. In the table below, we describe the sections for a single study talk vs. a talk discussing multiple studies:

The following tips apply when writing the outline of a single study talk. You can easily adapt this framework if you are writing a talk discussing multiple studies.

Introduction: Writing the introduction can be the hardest part of writing a talk. And when giving it, it’s the point where you might be at your most nervous. But preparing a good, concise introduction will settle your nerves.

The introduction tells the audience the story of why you studied your topic. A good introduction succinctly achieves four things, in the following order.

• It gives a broad perspective on the problem or topic for people in the audience who may be outside your discipline (i.e., it explains the big-picture problem motivating your study).
• It describes why you did the study, and why the audience should care.
• It gives a brief indication of how your study addressed the problem and provides the necessary background information that the audience needs to understand your work.
• It indicates what the audience will learn from the talk, and prepares them for what will come next.

A good introduction not only gives the big picture and motivations behind your study but also concisely sets the stage for what the audience will learn from the talk (e.g., the questions your work answers, and/or the hypotheses that your work tests). The end of the introduction will lead to a natural transition to the methods.

Give a broad perspective on the problem. The easiest way to start with the big picture is to think of a hook for the first slide of your presentation. A hook is an opening that gets the audience’s attention and gets them interested in your story. In science, this might take the form of a why, or a how question, or it could be a statement about a major problem or open question in your field. Other examples of hooks include quotes, short anecdotes, or interesting statistics.

Why should the audience care? Next, decide on the angle you are going to take on your hook that links to the thesis of your talk. In other words, you need to set the context, i.e., explain why the audience should care. For example, you may introduce an observation from nature, a pattern in experimental data, or a theory that you want to test. The audience must understand your motivations for the study.

Supplementary details. Once you have established the hook and angle, you need to include supplementary details to support them. For example, you might state your hypothesis. Then go into previous work and the current state of knowledge. Include citations of these studies. If you need to introduce some technical methodological details, theory, or jargon, do it here.

Conclude your introduction. The motivation for the work and background information should set the stage for the conclusion of the introduction, where you describe the goals of your study, and any hypotheses or predictions. Let the audience know what they are going to learn.

Methods: The audience will use your description of the methods to assess the approach you took in your study and to decide whether your findings are credible. Tell the story of your methods in chronological order. Use visuals to describe your methods as much as possible. If you have equations, make sure to take the time to explain them. Decide what methods to include and how you will show them. You need enough detail so that your audience will understand what you did and therefore can evaluate your approach, but avoid including superfluous details that do not support your main idea. You want to avoid the common mistake of including too much data, as the audience can read the paper(s) later.

Results: This is the evidence you present for your thesis. The audience will use the results to evaluate the support for your main idea. Choose the most important and interesting results—those that support your thesis. You don’t need to present all the results from your study (indeed, you most likely won’t have time to present them all). Break down complex results into digestible pieces, e.g., comparisons over multiple slides (more tips in the next section).

Summary: Summarize your main findings. Displaying your main findings through visuals can be effective. Emphasize the new contributions to scientific knowledge that your work makes.

Conclusion: Complete the circle by relating your conclusions to the big picture topic in your introduction—and your hook, if possible. It’s important to describe any alternative explanations for your findings. You might also speculate on future directions arising from your research. The slides that comprise your conclusion do not need to state “conclusion”. Rather, the concluding slide title should be a declarative sentence linking back to the big picture problem and your main idea.

It’s important to end well by planning a strong closure to your talk, after which you will thank the audience. Your closing statement should relate to your thesis, perhaps by stating it differently or memorably. Avoid ending awkwardly by memorizing your closing sentence.

By now, you have an outline of the story of your talk, which you can use to plan your slides. Your slides should complement and enhance what you will say. Use the following steps to prepare your slides.

• Write the slide titles to match your talk outline. These should be clear and informative declarative sentences that succinctly give the main idea of the slide (e.g., don’t use “Methods” as a slide title). Have one major idea per slide. In a YouTube talk on designing effective slides , researcher Michael Alley shows examples of instructive slide titles.
• Decide how you will convey the main idea of the slide (e.g., what figures, photographs, equations, statistics, references, or other elements you will need). The body of the slide should support the slide’s main idea.
• Under each slide title, outline what you want to say, in bullet points.

In sum, for each slide, prepare a title that summarizes its major idea, a list of visual elements, and a summary of the points you will make. Ensure each slide connects to your thesis. If it doesn’t, then you don’t need the slide.

Slides for scientific presentations have three major components: text (including labels and legends), graphics, and equations. Here, we give tips on how to present each of these components.

• Have an informative title slide. Include the names of all coauthors and their affiliations. Include an attractive image relating to your study.
• Make the foreground content of your slides “pop” by using an appropriate background. Slides that have white backgrounds with black text work well for small rooms, whereas slides with black backgrounds and white text are suitable for large rooms.
• The layout of your slides should be simple. Pay attention to how and where you lay the visual and text elements on each slide. It’s tempting to cram information, but you need lots of empty space. Retain space at the sides and bottom of your slides.
• Use sans serif fonts with a font size of at least 20 for text, and up to 40 for slide titles. Citations can be in 14 font and should be included at the bottom of the slide.
• Use bold or italics to emphasize words, not underlines or caps. Keep these effects to a minimum.
• Use concise text . You don’t need full sentences. Convey the essence of your message in as few words as possible. Write down what you’d like to say, and then shorten it for the slide. Remove unnecessary filler words.
• Text blocks should be limited to two lines. This will prevent you from crowding too much information on the slide.
• Include names of technical terms in your talk slides, especially if they are not familiar to everyone in the audience.
• Proofread your slides. Typos and grammatical errors are distracting for your audience.
• Include citations for the hypotheses or observations of other scientists.
• Good figures and graphics are essential to sustain audience interest. Use graphics and photographs to show the experiment or study system in action and to explain abstract concepts.
• Don’t use figures straight from your paper as they may be too detailed for your talk, and details like axes may be too small. Make new versions if necessary. Make them large enough to be visible from the back of the room.
• Use graphs to show your results, not tables. Tables are difficult for your audience to digest! If you must present a table, keep it simple.
• Label the axes of graphs and indicate the units. Label important components of graphics and photographs and include captions. Include sources for graphics that are not your own.
• Explain all the elements of a graph. This includes the axes, what the colors and markers mean, and patterns in the data.
• Use colors in figures and text in a meaningful, not random, way. For example, contrasting colors can be effective for pointing out comparisons and/or differences. Don’t use neon colors or pastels.
• Use thick lines in figures, and use color to create contrasts in the figures you present. Don’t use red/green or red/blue combinations, as color-blind audience members can’t distinguish between them.
• Arrows or circles can be effective for drawing attention to key details in graphs and equations. Add some text annotations along with them.
• Write your summary and conclusion slides using graphics, rather than showing a slide with a list of bullet points. Showing some of your results again can be helpful to remind the audience of your message.
• If your talk has equations, take time to explain them. Include text boxes to explain variables and mathematical terms, and put them under each term in the equation.
• Combine equations with a graphic that shows the scientific principle, or include a diagram of the mathematical model.
• Use animations judiciously. They are helpful to reveal complex ideas gradually, for example, if you need to make a comparison or contrast or to build a complicated argument or figure. For lists, reveal one bullet point at a time. New ideas appearing sequentially will help your audience follow your logic.
• Slide transitions should be simple. Silly ones distract from your message.
• Decide how you will make the transition as you move from one section of your talk to the next. For example, if you spend time talking through details, provide a summary afterward, especially in a long talk. Another common tactic is to have a “home slide” that you return to multiple times during the talk that reinforces your main idea or message. In her YouTube talk on designing effective scientific presentations , Stanford biologist Susan McConnell suggests using the approach of home slides to build a cohesive narrative.

To deliver a polished presentation, it is essential to practice it. Here are some tips.

• For your first run-through, practice alone. Pay attention to your narrative. Does your story flow naturally? Do you know how you will start and end? Are there any awkward transitions? Do animations help you tell your story? Do your slides help to convey what you are saying or are they missing components?
• Next, practice in front of your advisor, and/or your peers (e.g., your lab group). Ask someone to time your talk. Take note of their feedback and the questions that they ask you (you might be asked similar questions during your real talk).
• Edit your talk, taking into account the feedback you’ve received. Eliminate superfluous slides that don’t contribute to your takeaway message.
• Practice as many times as needed to memorize the order of your slides and the key transition points of your talk. However, don’t try to learn your talk word for word. Instead, memorize opening and closing statements, and sentences at key junctures in the presentation. Your presentation should resemble a serious but spontaneous conversation with the audience.
• Practicing multiple times also helps you hone the delivery of your talk. While rehearsing, pay attention to your vocal intonations and speed. Make sure to take pauses while you speak, and make eye contact with your imaginary audience.
• Make sure your talk finishes within the allotted time, and remember to leave time for questions. Conferences are particularly strict on run time.
• Anticipate questions and challenges from the audience, and clarify ambiguities within your slides and/or speech in response.
• If you anticipate that you could be asked questions about details but you don’t have time to include them, or they detract from the main message of your talk, you can prepare slides that address these questions and place them after the final slide of your talk.

➡️ More tips for giving scientific presentations

An organized presentation with a clear narrative will help you communicate your ideas effectively, which is essential for engaging your audience and conveying the importance of your work. Taking time to plan and outline your scientific presentation before writing the slides will help you manage your nerves and feel more confident during the presentation, which will improve your overall performance.

A good scientific presentation has an engaging scientific narrative with a memorable take-home message. It has clear, informative slides that enhance what the speaker says. You need to practice your talk many times to ensure you deliver a polished presentation.

First, consider who will attend your presentation, and what you want the audience to learn about your research. Tailor your content to their level of knowledge and interests. Second, create an outline for your presentation, including the key points you want to make and the evidence you will use to support those points. Finally, practice your presentation several times to ensure that it flows smoothly and that you are comfortable with the material.

Prepare an opening that immediately gets the audience’s attention. A common device is a why or a how question, or a statement of a major open problem in your field, but you could also start with a quote, interesting statistic, or case study from your field.

Scientific presentations typically either focus on a single study (e.g., a 15-minute conference presentation) or tell the story of multiple studies (e.g., a PhD defense or 50-minute conference keynote talk). For a single study talk, the structure follows the scientific paper format: Introduction, Methods, Results, Summary, and Conclusion, whereas the format of a talk discussing multiple studies is more complex, but a theme unifies the studies.

Ensure you have one major idea per slide, and convey that idea clearly (through images, equations, statistics, citations, video, etc.). The slide should include a title that summarizes the major point of the slide, should not contain too much text or too many graphics, and color should be used meaningfully.

Scott Hanselman

11 top tips for a successful technical presentation.

Here's my five-years-later Updated Tips for a Successful Technical Presentation.

1. Have a Reset Strategy (One-Click)

If you're going to give a talk, you'll probably have to give it more than once. If you have demonstrations of any kind, have a "one-click" way to reset them. This might be a batch file or Powershell script that drops a modified database and reattaches a fresh one, or copies template files over ones you modify during your demo.

Personally, I'm sold on Virtual Machines. I have seven VMs on a small, fast portable USB drive that will let me do roughly 12 different presentations at the drop of a hat. You never know when you'll be called upon to give a demo. With a Virtual Machine I can turn on "Undo Disks" after I've prepared the talk, and my reset strategy is to just turn off the VM and select "Delete Changes." A little up-front preparation means one less thing for you to panic about the day of the talk.

2. Know Your Affectations (Ssssssseriously)

I have a bit of a lisp, it seems. I also hold my shoulders a little higher than is natural which causes my neck to tighten up. I also pick a different word, without realizing it, and overuse it in every talk. This is similar to how Microsoft Employees overuse the word "so" (which is actually Northwestern Americans, not MSFTies) too much.

It's important to know YOUR affectations so you can change them. They may be weakening your talk. Don't try to remember them all, though. Just pick two or three and focus on replacing them with something less detracting. Don't overanalyze or beat yourself up, though. I've spoken hundreds of times over the last 15 years and I'm always taking two-steps forward and one step back. The point is to try, not to succeed absolutely.

3. Know When To Move and When To Not Move (Red light!)

One of the most powerful tips I ever received was this: "When you move, they look at you. When you stop, they look at the screen." Use this to your advantage. Don't pace randomly, idley or unconsciously. Don't rock back and forth on your heels. Also, empty your pockets if you tend to fiddle with lose change or your keys.

4. For the Love of All That Is Holy, FONT SIZE, People (See that?)

It just tears me up. It physically makes me ill. To give a presentation and utter the words "um, you probably won't be able to see this" does everyone in the room a disservice.  Do NOT use the moment of the presentation as your time to do the font resizing.

Lucida Console, 14 to 18pt, Bold.  Consider this my gift to you.  This is the most readable, mono-spaced font out there.  Courier of any flavor or Arial (or any other proportionally spaced font) is NOT appropriate for code demonstrations, period, full stop.  Prepare your machine AHEAD OF TIME.  Nothing disrespects an audience like making them wait while you ask "Can you see this 8 point font? No? Oh, let me change it while you wait."  Setup every program you could possibly use, including all Command Prompt shortcuts, before you begin your presentation.  That includes VS.NET, Notepad, XMLSpy, and any others, including any small utilities.

I've found that the most readable setup for Command Prompts is a Black Background and with the Foreground Text set to Kermit Green (ala "Green Screen."  Yes, I was suspicious and disbelieving also, but believe it or not, it really works.)  I set Command Prompts to Lucida Console, 14 to 18pt, Bold as well, with much success.

Also, set the font size to LARGEST in Internet Explorer and remember that there are accessibility features in IE that allow you to include your own Large Font CSS file for those web pages that force a small font via CSS.

Learn how to use ZoomIt and practice before-hand. It can be an incredibly powerful tool for calling out sections of the screen and making it so even the folks way in the back can see what's going on.

For simplicities' sake, I like to keep a separate user around call "BigFonty" (choose your own name).  He's an Administrator on the local machine and he exists ONLY for the purposes of demonstrations.  All the fonts are large for all programs, large icons, great colors, etc.  It's the easiest way to set all these settings once and always have them easily available.

5. Speak their Language (Know the Audience)

When I was in Malaysia for TechEd, I spent 3 full days exclusively with locals before the talk, I learned snippets of each of the languages, tried to understand their jokes and get an idea about what was important to people in Malaysia.  American analogies, much humor, and certain "U.S. specific" English colloquialisms just didn't make any sense to them.  When it came time to give the presentations, I better understood the Malaysian sense of timing, of tone and timbre, and I began each of my presentations by speaking in Bahasa Malaysia.  I changed aspects of my slides to remove inappropriate content and add specific details that would be important to them.

I've used this same technique in a half-dozen countries with success. While this is an extreme example, the parallels with any audience are clear.  If you're speaking to a room full of IT guys who work in the Automotive field, or the Banking industry, the fact that we are all programmers only gives you a small degree of shared experience.  Remember no matter the technical topic, try to get into the mind of the audience and ask yourself, why are they here and what can I tell them that will not be a waste of their time.  What would YOU want to hear (and HOW would you like to hear it) if you were sitting there?

6. Be Utterly Prepared (No excuses)

Short of an unexpected BSOD (and even then, be ready) you should be prepared for ANYTHING.  You should know EVERY inch of your demos and EXACTLY what can go wrong.  Nothing kills your credibility more than an error that you DON'T understand.  Errors and screw-ups happen ALL the time in Presentations.  They can even INCREASE your credibility if you recover gracefully and EXPLAIN what happened.  "Ah, this is a common mistake that I've made, and here's what you should watch for."  Be prepared with phrases that will turn the unfortunate incident around and provide them useful information.

7. CONTENT, CONTENT, CONTENT (Have some)

Every move, phrase, mistake, anecdote and slide should actually contain content.  It should be meaningful.  Your mistakes should teach them, your demos should teach them; even your shortcut keys, utilities and menu layout should teach them.  A presentation isn't an opportunity to read your slides.  I'll say that again. Don't READ your slides. I can read faster than you can talk.

Remember that most people can read silently to themselves 5 to 10 times faster that you can read to them out loud.  Your job as a presenter is to read in between the lines, and provide them structure.  Your slides should be treated as your outline – they are structure, scaffolding, nothing more.  If you jam your slides full of details and dozens of bullets, you might as well take your content and write an article.  It's difficult to listen to someone talk and read their slides at the same time – remember that when you design your content. YOU are the content, and your slides are your Table of Contents.

8. System Setup (Be unique, but don't be nuts)

When you a presenting, remember that you are looked upon as an authority.  Basically, you are innocent until proven guilty.  It's great to have a personality and to be unique, but don't let your personal choice of editors or crazy color scheme obscure the good information you're presenting.  I appreciate that you may like to use VI or emacs to view text files, but let's just say that sometimes Notepad has a calming effect on the audience. 

I give Microsoft talks, usually, so I tend towards Visual Studio, but 99% of my talks use a limited number of tools. Basically Visual Studio, Notepad, the Command Prompt and a Browser.

Remember that while you may prefer things a certain way while your face is a foot away from the screen, it's very likely the wrong setup when 500 people are more than 100 feet away.

I really like to get Toolbars and things out of the way. I use F11 (Fullscreen) in the Browser a lot, as well as Visual Studio's Shift-Alt-Enter shortcut to FullScreen. Turn off unneeded flair and toolbars. Also, turn on line-numbering so you can refer to lines if you're presenting code.

9. Speaking (Um…)

"Volume and Diction," my High School Drama teacher said to me.  Speak clearly, authoritatively, project your voice to the back of the room.  The best speakers don't even need microphones.  If you have a speaking affectation (I had a lisp growing up) or you tend to say, um, etc, or find yourself overusing a specific phrase ("a priori", "fantastic", "powerful", etc) take it upon yourself to NOTICE this mannerism and avoid it.

Practice multi-tasking.  It seems silly to say, but although we can all multitask to a certain degree, when we hit a real snag in a presentation, many of us tend to freeze.  Silence is deadly.  Remember, since all eyes are on you, complete silence and apparent introspection says "I don't know know what I'm doing."  When you need to get to a particular file, don't make the audience wait for you while you putter through explorer.  Have shortcuts ready (and explain when you use them).  Move fast and efficiently, but annotate your actions.  You should continue to "color-commentate" your actions like a sports announcer.  Don't allow "dead-air," unless it's silence for effect.

10. Advancing Slides (No lasers!)

I always used to hate slide-advancers, you know, those little remotes with forward and backward buttons. Then I tried one and I'm hooked. I use the Microsoft Presenter Mouse 8000 and totally recommend it. It isn't just a great Bluetooth mouse, but flip it over and it's a great Powerpoint slide advancer. 

Take a look at Al Gore's excellent presentation in "An Inconvenient Truth." It's seamless and flows. Now imagine him running over to his laptop to hit the spacebar each time he wanted to advance a slide. My presentations have gotten better as I've started incorporating this technique.

11. Care (deeply)

I really avoid presenting on topics that I don't care about. I avoid it like the Plague and I encourage you to do so as well. There's nothing more important that truly caring about your topic. If you care, it'll show. If you eschew all the other tips, at the very least care.

What are YOUR tips, Dear Reader? What tips, mantras or preparations have you used to make your presentations that much better?

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

Comments are closed.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed herein are my own personal opinions and do not represent my employer's view in any way.

How to give a technical presentation (how to give a scientific talk)

By michael ernst, january, 2005 last updated: march 21, 2022, introduction, the content, answering questions, in-class presentations, practice talks, other resources.

(Also see my advice on giving a job talk and on making a technical poster .)

A successful career depends on the ability to give effective technical presentations, whether at a conference, to your research group, or as an invited speaker. This page notes some problems that I very frequently see in talks.

Get feedback by giving multiple practice talks ! One of the most effective ways to improve your work is to see the reactions of others and get their ideas and advice.

Think about the presentations you attend (or have attended in the past), especially if they are similar in some way to yours. What was boring about the other presentations? What was interesting about them? What did you take away from the presentation? What could you have told someone about the topic, 30 minutes after the end of the presentation?

Before you start preparing a talk, you need to know your goal and know your audience. You will have to customize your presentation to its purpose. Even if you have previously created a talk for another venue, you often need to make a new one, particularly if the audience differs or you have done more work in the meanwhile.

The goal of a talk you give to your research group is to get feedback to help you improve your research and your understanding of it, so you should plan for a very interactive style, with lots of questions throughout. In a conference talk , questions during the talk are unlikely, and you have much less time; your chief goal is to get people to read the paper or ask questions afterward. In a seminar or invited talk , you want to encourage questions, you have more time, and you should plan to give more of the big picture.

The goal of a talk is similar to the goal of a technical paper : to change the audience's behavior. Therefore, you should also read and follow my advice about writing a technical paper . Decide what the change is, and focus your talk around that. Typically, you have done some research, and to effect the change you need to convince the audience of 3 things: the problem is worthwhile (it is a real problem, and a solution would be useful), the problem is hard (not already solved, and there are not other ways to achieve equally good results), and that you have solved it. If any of these three pieces is missing, your talk is much less likely to be a success. So be sure to provide motivation for your work, provide background about the problem, and supply sufficient technical details and experimental results.

When you give a talk, ask yourself, “What are the key points that my audience should take away from the talk?” Then, elide everything that does not support those points. If you try to say too much (a tempting mistake), then your main points won't strike home and you will have wasted everyone's time. In particular, do not try to include all the details from a technical paper that describes your work; different levels of detail and a different presentation style are appropriate for each. Never paste PDF of a table from a paper to slides. Reformat the table to be more readable and to remove information that is not essential. The talk audience does not have as much time to comprehend the details as a paper reader does.

Before you create slides, a good way to determine what your talk should say is to explain your ideas verbally to someone who does not already understand them. (You may use a blank whiteboard, but that often is not necessary.) You may need to do this a few times before you find the most effective way to present your material. Notice what points you made and in what order, and organize the talk around that. Slides should not be an obstacle that constrains your talk, but they should support the talk you want to give.

Do not try to fit too much material in a talk. About one slide per minute is a good pace (if lots of your slides are animations that take only moments to present, you may have more slides). Remember what your key points are, and focus on those. The key point should be written on the slide, for example as its title or as a callout. Don't present more information than your audience can grasp; for example, often intuitions and an explanation of the approach are more valuable than the gory details of a proof. If you try to fit the entire technical content of a paper into a talk, you will rush and the audience may come away understanding nothing. It's better to think of the talk as an advertisement for the paper that gives the key ideas, intuitions, and results, and that makes the audience eager to read your paper or to talk with you to learn more. That does not mean holding back important details — merely omitting less important ones. You may also find yourself omitting entire portions of the research that do not directly contribute to the main point you are trying to make in your talk.

Just as there should be no extra slides, there should be no missing slides. As a rule, you shouldn't speak for more than a minute or so without having new information appear. If you have an important point to make, then have a slide to support it. (Very few people can mesmerize an audience on a technical topic, and leave the audience with a deep understanding of the key points, without any visual props. Unfortunately, you are probably not one of them.) As a particularly egregious example, do not discuss a user interface without presenting a picture of it — perhaps multiple ones. As another example, you should not dwell on the title slide for very long, but should present a graphic relevant to the problem you are solving, to make the motivation for your work concrete.

Slide titles. Use descriptive slide titles. Do not use the same title on multiple slides (except perhaps when the slides constitute an animation or build). Choose a descriptive title that helps the audience to appreciate what the specific contribution of this slide is. If you can't figure that out, then you do not yet understand your own material.

Introduction. Start your talk with motivation and examples — and have lots of motivation and examples throughout. For the very beginning of your talk, you need to convince the audience that this talk is worth paying attention to: it is solving an important and comprehensible problem. Your first slide after the title slide should be motivation, such as an example of the problem you are solving.

Outline slides. Never start your talk with an outline slide. (That's boring, and it's too early for the audience to understand the talk structure yet.) Outline slides can be useful, especially in a talk that runs longer than 30 minutes, because they help the audience to regain its bearings and to keep in mind your argument structure. Present an outline slide (with the current section indicated via color, font, and/or an arrow) at the beginning of each major section of the talk, except for the introductory, motivational section.

Conclusion. The last slide should be a contributions or conclusions slide, reminding the audience of the take-home message of the talk. Do not end the talk with future work, or with a slide that says “questions” or “thank you” or “the end” or merely gives your email address. And, leave your contributions slide up after you finish the talk (while you are answering questions). One way to think about this rule is: What do you want to be the last thing that the audience sees (or that it sees while you field questions)?

Builds/animations. When a subsequent slide adds material to a previous one (or in some other way just slightly changes the previous slide), all common elements must remain in exactly the same position, pixel-for-pixel. A good way to check this is to quickly transition back and forth between the two slides several times. If you see any jitter, then correct the slide layout to remove it. You may need to leave extra space on an early slide to accommodate text or figures to be inserted later; even though that space may look a little unnatural, it is better than the alternative. If there is any jitter, the audience will know that something is different, but will be uneasy about exactly what has changed (the human eye is good at detecting the change but only good at localizing changes when those changes are small and the changes are smooth). You want the audience to have confidence that most parts of the slide have not changed, and the only effective way to do that is not to change those parts whatsoever. You should also consider emphasizing (say, with color or highlighting) what has been added on each slide.

Keep slides uncluttered. Don't put too much text (or other material) on a slide. When a new slide goes up, the audience will turn its attention to comprehending that slide. If the audience has to read a lot of text, they will tune you out, probably missing something important. This is one reason the diagrams must be simple and clear, and the text must be telegraphic. As a rule of thumb, 3 lines of text for a bullet point is always too much, and 2 full lines is usually too much. Shorten the text, or break it into pieces (say, subbullet points) so that the audience can skim it without having to ignore you for too long.

Do not read your slides word-for-word. Reading your slides verbatim is very boring and will cause the audience to tune out. You are also guaranteed to go too fast for some audience members and too slow for others, compared to their natural reading speed, thus irritating many people. If you find yourself reading your slides, then there is probably too much text on your slides. The slides should be an outline, not a transcript. That is, your slides should give just the main points, and you can supply more detail verbally. It's fine to use the slides as a crutch to help you remember all the main points and the order in which you want to present them. However, if you need prompting to remember the extra details, then you do not have sufficient command of your material and you need to practice more before giving your talk.

Just as you should not read text verbatim, you should not read diagrams verbatim. When discussing the architecture of a system, don't just read the names of the components or give low-level details about the interfaces between them. Rather, explain whatever is important, interesting, or novel about your decomposition; or discuss how the parts work together to achieve some goal that clients of the system care about; or use other techniques to give high-level understanding of the system rather than merely presenting a mass of low-level details.

(It's possible to overdo the practice of limiting what information appears on each slide, and you do want to have enough material to support you if there are questions or to show that the simplified model you presented verbally is an accurate generalization. But the mistake of including too much information is far more common.)

Text. Keep fonts large and easy to read from the back of the room. If something isn't important enough for your audience to be able to read, then it probably does not belong on your slides.

Use a sans-serif font for your slides. (Serifed fonts are best for reading on paper, but sans-serif fonts are easier to read on a screen.) PowerPoint's “Courier New” font is very light (its strokes are very thin). If you use it, always make it bold, then use color or underlining for emphasis where necessary.

Figures. Make effective use of figures. Avoid a presentation that is just text. Such a presentation misses important opportunities to convey information. It is also is wearying to the audience.

Images and visualizations are extremely helpful to your audience. Include diagrams to show how your system works or is put together. Never include generic images, such as clip art, that don't relate directly to your talk. For example, if you have a slide about security, don't use the image of a padlock. As another example, when describing the problem your work solves, don't use an image of a person sitting at a computer looking frustrated. Just as good pictures and text are better than text alone, text alone is better than text plus bad pictures.

When you include a diagram on a slide, ensure that its background is the same color as that of the slide. For example, if your slides have a black background, then do not paste in a diagram with a white background, which is visually distracting, hard to read, and unattractive. You should invert the diagram so it matches the slide (which may require redrawing the diagram), or invert the slide background (e.g., use a white slide background) to match the diagrams. A light-colored background with dark text is usually the best choice (preferably white background with black text; see the next paragraph about eye candy).

Do not use eye candy such as transition effects, design elements that appear on every slide, or multi-color backgrounds. At best, you will distract the audience from the technical material that you are presenting. At worst, you will alienate the audience by giving them the impression that you are more interested in graphical glitz than in content. Your slides can be attractive and compelling without being fancy. Make sure that each element on the slides contributes to your message; if it does not, then remove it.

Emphasis. Slides that are monocolor black on a white background can be boring. This tires the audience, and it may prevent them from appreciating the big picture. Use color, callouts (e.g., arrows or speech bubbles), or other mechanisms to draw attention to the most important parts of your slides or graphs. For example, suppose you have a list of 3-5 bullet points, each one line of text long. You might want to emphasize the 1-3 most important words in each bullet point.

Color. About 5% of American males are color-blind, so augment color with other emphasis where possible. For example, on an outline slide, in addition to color I use boldface and also a right arrow (⇒) in the left margin to indicate the current section of the talk.

The presentation

Make eye contact with the audience. This draws them in. It also helps you determine when they are confused or have lost interest, and whether your pacing is too fast or too slow.

Stand and face the audience.

• Don't give a talk while seated. Standing gives you more energy, the talk is more dynamic, and it is easier to maintain eye contact.
• Do not face the screen, which puts your back to the audience. This is offputting, prevents you from getting feedback from the audience's body language, and can cause difficulty in hearing/understanding you. Do not look down at your computer, either, which shares many of the same problems.
• Don't stand in front of the screen. This prevents the audience from viewing your slides.
• Being animated is good, but do not pace. Pacing is very distracting, and it gives the impression that you are unprofessional or nervous.

When giving a presentation, never point at your laptop screen, which the audience cannot see. Amazingly, I have seen many people do this! Using a laser pointer is fine, but the laser pointer tends to shake, especially if you are nervous, and can be distracting. I prefer to use my hand, because the talk is more dynamic if I stride to the screen and use my whole arm; the pointing is also harder for the audience to miss. You must touch the screen physically, or come within an inch of it. If you do not touch the screen, most people will just look at the shadow of your finger, which will not be the part of the slide that you are trying to indicate.

If you find yourself suffering a nervous tic, such as saying “um” in the middle of every sentence, then practice more, including in front of audiences whom you do not know well.

If you get flustered, don't panic. One approach is to stop and regroup; taking a drink of water is a good way to cover this, so you should have water on hand even if you don't suffer from dry throat. Another approach is to just skip over that material; the audience is unlikely to know that you skipped something.

Think about your goal in giving the talk. When presenting to your own research group, be sure to leave lots of time for discussion and feedback at the end, and to present the material in a way that invites interaction after and perhaps during the talk. (When presenting to your own group, you can perhaps give a bit less introductory material, though it's hard to go wrong with intro material. It should go quickly for that audience; you ensure that everyone is using terms the same way; and it's always good to practice presenting the motivation, context, background, and big ideas.)

For computer science conferences, the typical dress code is “business casual”. (For men, this is a dress shirt with slacks or jeans.) Some people dress more formally, some more casually. The most important thing is that you are comfortable with your clothing; if you are not, your discomfort will lead to a worse presentation.

Answering questions from the audience is very hard! Even after you become very proficient at giving a talk, it will probably take you quite a bit longer to become good at answering questions. So, don't feel bad if that part does not go perfectly, but do work on improving it.

Just as you practice your talk, practice answering questions — both the ones that you can predict, and also unpredictable ones. Give practice talks to people who are willing to ask such questions.

When an audience member asks a question, it is a good idea to repeat the question, asking the questioner whether you have understood it, before answering the question. This has three benefits.

• You ensure that you have understood the question. When thinking under pressure, it can be far too easy to jump to conclusions, and it is bad to answer a question different than the one that was asked. A related benefit is that you get to frame the question in your own words or from your own viewpoint.
• You give yourself a few moments to think about your answer.
• If the audience member does not have a microphone, the rest of the audience may not have been able to hear the question clearly.

Be willing to answer a question with “no” or “I don't know”. You will get into more trouble if you blather on or you make up an answer on the fly.

For an in-class presentation by a student, you will be judged on how well other people understand the material at the end of the class, not on how well you understand the material at the beginning of the class. (You do need to understand the material, but that is not the main point.)

When you present someone else's paper in class, you should cover not only the technical details (people generally do a good job of this), but also what is novel and why others didn't do it before. That is just as important but very often overlooked. Focus on what is important about the paper, not just on what is easy to explain or to give an example for.

Know what your main point is, and don't get bogged down in easier-to-understand but less interesting details. Try not to bring up a topic until you are ready to discuss it in detail — don't bring it up multiple times.

Encourage questions — it's the best way to deepen understanding — and be able to answer them. If other students wrote questions in a reading summary, be responsive to them. When you ask a question, don't assume the answer in the form of your question. For example, don't ask, “Was there anything novel in the paper, or not?” but “What was novel in the paper?” It can be very effective to ask a question that reveals understanding of a subtle or easy-to-misunderstand point (but an important one!) in the paper, because this will lead the audience members to reflect both on the paper and on the way they read and understood it. Don't be too abstruse, and don't get bogged down in unimportant details just to show your mastery of them.

Examples are often very helpful. Augment your talking with visuals on the board or slides. Either is fine. The board may encourage more interaction (and it slows you down in a beneficial way), but does require pre-planning; don't just go up and start drawing. Most people find comfort in having pre-prepared slides, and slides can be a good choice because they can be more legible and detailed, can include animations, etc. Don't waste a huge amount of time on elaborate slide decks, though; that is not the point.

Always give at least one practice talk before you present in front of an audience. Even if you have read over your slides and think you know how the talk will go, when you speak out loud your ideas are likely to come out in a different way. (This is true about writing , too: even if you know what you want to say, it takes several revisions to figure out the best way to say it.) In fact, you should practice the talk to yourself — speaking out loud in front of a mirror, for example — before you give your first practice talk. In your individual practice session, you must say every word you intend to in the actual talk, not skipping over any parts.

It can be a good idea to keep your practice talk audience relatively small — certainly fewer than 10 people. In a large group, many people won't bother to speak up. If the pool of potential attendees is larger than 10, you can give multiple practice talks, since the best feedback is given by someone who has not seen the talk (or even the material) before. Giving multiple practice talks is essential for high-profile talks such as conference talks and interview talks. Avoid a small audience of people you don't trust, who might be unanimous in a wrong opinion; getting a balance of opinions will help you avoid making too many mistakes in any one direction.

Videotape yourself to see how you come across to others. This information can be a bit traumatic, but it is invaluable in helping you to improve.

When giving a practice talk, number your slides (say, in the corner), even if you don't intend to include slide numbers in your final presentation.

When giving a practice talk, it is very helpful to distribute hardcopy slides (remember to include slide numbers) so that others can easily annotate them and return them to you at the end of the talk. (Also, the audience will spend less time trying to describe what slide their comment applies to, and more time writing the comment and paying attention to you.) For non-practice talks, don't give out hardcopy slides, as they would tempt the audience to pay attention to the piece of paper instead of to you.

Go to other people's practice talks. This is good citizenship, and cultivating these obligations is a good way to ensure that you have an audience at your practice talk. Furthermore, attending others' talks can teach you a lot about good and bad talks — both from observing the speaker and thinking about how the talk can be better (or is already excellent), and from comparing the feedback of audience members to your own opinions and observations. This does not just apply to practice talks: you should continually perform such introspective self-assessment.

(Also see Tessa Lau 's advice on giving a practice talk — which focuses on a practice talk for a PhD qualifying exam, but is relevant to talks in general.)

Here are some other good resources for speakers who wish to give a good talk.

See Ian Parberry's speaker's guide .

The LaTeX Beamer documentation has some good advice.

Back to Advice compiled by Michael Ernst .

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Chapter 16: Technical Presentations

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One important, but often overlooked, skill in engineering is presenting. From talking with students, I have noticed that a lot of engineering students are intimidated by public speaking. In fact, I have almost a decade of experience lecturing, but I still am a little scared standing in front of a large classroom! It is OK to be a little nervous. I tell students being a little nervous means that you care, and caring is part of successful presentations. This chapter aims to reduce your presentation anxiety by teaching you the skills you need. The main key is to practice, know the format, and be prepared.

Learning Goals

In this chapter we will learn:

• Why it is important to practice and get comfortable presenting technical information.
• What your presentation should entail for the main type of engineering presentations.
• How to present technical information professionally and engagingly.
• What “audience” means and how to use what you know about your audience to your advantage.
• The art of PowerPoint and how to use the features in a non-distracting way.
• What should (and should not) be included in a technical presentation.

Why Learning How to Present Is Important

It is one thing to have a good idea, invent something cool, or develop new technology, but it is a whole other thing to successfully disseminate that information. A lot of people don’t realize that presenting is a skill and like all skills requires practice and study to perfect. It seems like it is easy to slap together a PowerPoint and talk about your project, but if you do not put the time and effort into the presentation to ensure that it impacts your audience, your work will be wasted.

Key Concept: You have to learn how to present in a compelling manner in order to get people to pay attention to your product/idea/report/etc.

For example, I have been an instructor and advisor for several senior design teams. I have seen team projects range from truly impressive to mediocre. I have also seen the impressive teams be dismissed at competitions and the mediocre teams win awards at competitions because of presentation skills alone. What I am trying to convey to you is that presenting can be the “make or break” for a project. No matter how good your project is if you can’t describe to people how good your idea is, no one will care. That being said, the moral of this story is not to do a mediocre project and coast on your presentation skills. Combining a good project with a good presentation should be your goal.

Finally, it should be noted, that engineers have to present a lot . In fact, engineers have to do presentations a lot more than you might think. You might have to present your design idea to your research and development team. You might have to present to the entire company describing how you optimized a system process for efficiency. You might have to present to shareholders the newest technologies your team is working on. You might have to present to future customers on how your technology can improve their productivity. The point is, that engineers are expected to be good presenters and historically, University education in engineering does not explicitly address this skill. Hopefully, this chapter and your subsequent education reverses this.

Presentation Anxiety

Before we jump into some examples and tips, I wanted to take a quick note on presentation anxiety. As I mentioned before, there is no getting around it, you will probably be a little nervous when you present. That is ok! Almost everyone feels a little nervous. However, there are tactics that you can use to reduce your anxiety when stepping up in front of an audience.

One of the biggest keys to reducing your anxiety is preparation . In fact, there is no such thing as “over preparing”. The more you prepare for your presentation the better you will feel because you will be more confident about what you are speaking on.

Here are three tips that should help when it comes to preparation and alleviating anxiety:

Anxiety Reduction Mechanism 1) Rehearse, Rehearse, Rehearse…

Although it might seem self-explanatory or obvious, rehearsing is the most important step in reducing presentation anxiety. In my experience, this is the step that most students spend the least amount of time on even though it is the most important.

Out of all of the time you budget to create your presentation, the majority of time needs to be spent rehearsing.

The more you rehearse, the smoother your delivery will become and the more confident you will feel. Rehearse in front of your roommates. Rehearse in front of your classmates. Rehearse in front of a mirror. Rehearse to your parents (this is a great idea as it will probably impress them about how far you have come in your education and maybe get a few more bucks thrown on your campus cash card!). Rehearse in front of your grandparents (I am sure grandma would love to hear from you anyway). I think you get the idea. Rehearsing is key and the more that you practice your presentation, the more comfortable you will feel. Rehearsing in front of people that aren’t familiar with the course is even better. It will generate questions and make sure that you are explaining things in an optimal manner.

What I suggest to students is, that they time each of the rehearsals of their presentation. The key is to continue to practice rehearsing and practicing until the group can finish the presentation without making any mistakes and when they can finish within +/- 5 seconds of the same time (if it is a 10-minute limit presentation, the team can finish each practice session in 9:50 seconds to 9:55 seconds every time). As you can imagine, this takes a ton of practice but does reflect the level of polish necessary to feel confident about your presentation.

Anxiety Reduction Mechanism 2) Anticipate questions.

The next key to preparation for your presentation is to anticipate the questions you think the audience will ask, and be prepared with answers to those questions. You can’t anticipate every single question that you may get asked, but you can probably think of a few avenues that your audience members’ minds might wander.

For example, let’s imagine that you are giving a presentation on the efficacy of a vaccine. Depending on your audience, you should be prepared to answer the following questions:

• What is a vaccine?
• Specifically, how do vaccines work?
• Do vaccines cause autism? (Spoiler: NO )
• What types of adverse reactions might there be to the vaccine?
• How long will it take to produce 100 million doses of the vaccine?
• Are there specific storage requirements for this vaccine?

Preparing detailed answers to these questions will strengthen your knowledge of your presentation topic and alleviate your anxiety. Since you anticipated the questions your audience will ask, you don’t have to worry as much about looking like a fool on stage. This is also where rehearsing in front of someone who is not familiar with the course or topic can be very beneficial since it will generate a lot of these types of questions that you may have not considered.

Anxiety Reduction Mechanism 3) No one in the audience cares about you.

Sometimes students interpret this incorrectly. I am not saying that no one cares about you. Lots of people do. Your professor does, you have friends in the class, etc. What I mean by this is that it is important to remember that when you give class presentations, often, your classmates and peers have to give presentations as well.

Think back to the last class you were in where you had to present. Think about sitting in your chair, while another team is presenting, waiting for your turn. Be honest. Were you even listening to them? Or were you anxiously awaiting your turn at the presentation? Well, the reality is, everyone else is only thinking about themselves and their presentation while you are presenting . When you make a tiny mistake, no one notices. The only thing they will notice is if you totally bomb the presentation (which you won’t because you rehearsed so much).

So as part of your preparation, relax . The selfish and narcissistic tendencies of your classmates ensure that they won’t be paying as much attention to you as you think they might. Hopefully, that relieves a little bit of the pressure.

Discussion 16.1: How do you feel about presentation anxiety?

What Your Presentation Should Entail

As an engineer, you will typically be presenting on projects you are proposing or presenting data from projects that you have already completed. All of the advice from this chapter (no such thing as over-preparing, etc) will be helpful in reducing stage anxiety but to make sure that your presentation is well received, you need to make sure that the presentation contains the appropriate material.

You will be expected to have the following sections: title, introduction, materials and methods, results, discussion, and conclusion. The following example presentation will highlight the most important and standard slides that your presentation should (probably) entail.

To describe each of the required sections (keep in mind that I am showing only one slide for each section but it is likely that you will need multiple slides) I included example slides from a presentation I gave at an American Society for Engineering Education conference in 2019 in which I won the “Best Presentation” award. Note, that the slides shown below are only a subset of the slides that I presented at the conference. For the full slide deck, you can click here.

Title Slide

The title slide is just a place to include the names of all the people that worked on the project and their affiliations. And the title. Duh.

• Keep it simple.

Introduction / Background Slide(s)

The purpose of the introduction slide is to outline your current understanding of the subject. You need to include specific examples of previous work/research.

• Clearly explain the importance of the current project and what the significance of the project will be.
• Justify the merit of your project by presenting significant information.
• End with a specific, clear, and explicit purpose for the project. Some of the projects that you complete during your undergraduate career will be chosen for you. It does not mean that the purpose of the project is “because the professor told me to do it”. Spend some time thinking about the project and what learning outcomes you are expected to gain from it.

Materials and Methods

The purpose of the materials and methods slide is to list the necessary steps for your audience to interpret the results.

• You should include: sample sizes, how the data will be processed, everything that was used in the project, and what statistical tests if any will be used.
• It should be clear how the materials and methods relate to the purpose of the project.
• The audience should feel that presenters fully understand the scope and details of the work (especially if it is a proposal).

The results slide is the place where you describe what you found from your project.

• Present the data from the project. What did you do? What did you find?
• Do not interpret your results yet! Just show what you gathered.
• Visual descriptions of your data are important. Be sure to include figures and tables as appropriate.

Although it might seem like your results are the most important slide, I would argue that it is actually your discussion slide. Whereas in your results section you simply tell your audience what you found, in your discussion section, you need to interpret the results for your audience.

• Interpret the data from the results section.
• Answer the “why” of the data.
• Draw conclusions about the project.
• List any limitations of the project.
• Discuss future work.

Conclusion / Significance

Finally, we get to the conclusion slide. This is another very important slide as it can be an opportunity to reinforce the takeaway message that you want to give your audience.

• Should be a “natural” conclusion. Your presentation should not end abruptly. The audience should feel it coming.
• Summarize the major points from your presentation. Be sure to provide your audience with a take-home message.
• Summarize the weaknesses of the project. It shows that you can critically think about your own work and makes your audience more sympathetic to your position. Admitting what you would change actually strengthens your position.

How To Give a Dynamic Engineering Presentation

There are two main things to worry about when presenting engineering information in a dynamic and interesting way; the content and yourself.

In my opinion, one of the best ways to convey what makes for a dynamic and engaging presentation is to have you look at one of the worst. What follows is one of the worst presentations I could find on the internet. To set the stage for you, it is from a British show in which people pitch their ideas to a group of investors (it is similar to the American show Shark Tank). I chose this particular clip for a few reasons:

It is supposed to be entrepreneurs getting the opportunity of a lifetime to get their dream invested. They should be excited and passionate by default! The following pitch is atrocious but the product is actually kind of an interesting idea. It seems to me that if she had given a more dynamic and engaging pitch, the investors may have been more interested. In fact, one of the investors says as much. With that out of the way, watch the following pitch from Gayle Blanchflower (I couldn’t find out if this spelling was correct). Note: the video should automatically start at 30:12 for you. If it doesn’t you can skip there. Also, be prepared to answer some questions on what you think went wrong with her pitch.

Discussion 16.2: An atrocious presentation

I am truly sorry for putting you through that. However, I hope you agree that it gives you some ideas of what NOT to do when trying to give a dynamic and interesting presentation. Here are some more tips about both the content of your presentations and tips for you.

Know your audience Your audience will dictate what you are presenting. If you are presenting on the efficacy of vaccines to a group of doctors, you can assume that they know what vaccines are and how they work, therefore, you can leave that information out of the presentation. However, if you are giving the same presentation to a group of middle schoolers, it might be a good idea to include that background information. The key is to know your audience and tailor the presentation to their knowledge.

Convey your excitement If you aren’t excited about your project, your audience surely will not be. Get excited and make your presentation exciting the best that you can.

Tell a story This chapter gives you the basic framework (you can think about it like the beginning, middle, climax, end, or a story) but you need to tell it. The more you can make your presentation flow like a story, the better.

Keep it simple (communicate, don’t obfuscate) Every field has jargon and acronyms that make people feel smart for knowing. Don’t lose your audience in the lingo! This is where knowing your audience is critical but in reality, even scientists and engineers appreciate brief definitions of scientific terminologies and processes.

• Set the stage. Clear the podium of distractions. Have whatever tools you need for your presentation ready to go ahead of time.
• Get ready to perform Presentations are performances. Know your subject and know your main talking points. Do not memorize a script! Your rehearsing should have been so extensive you don’t need one anyway.
• Stride up to podium / stage / front of room. Be proud! Don’t sulk.
• Stand tall, keep your chest lifted, and smile. If you aren’t confident by nature, learn to fake it. It goes a long way.
• Pay attention to your teammates when it is their turn to talk. Remember, if you look bored, your audience will interpret that as if they should be bored.
• Speak loudly and project your voice clearly. For some, this is not natural and will take practice. Good thing you rehearsed so much!
• Take your time. A moment or two of silence is a powerful tool.
• Talk to the audience, not the screen.
• Stay on time.
• Rehearse a lot. Remember, there is no such thing as being over-prepared.

PowerPoint Tips

As I stated before for dynamic presentations , I think it is a good idea to look at bad PowerPoint decks to understand what makes the good ones, good. Before moving on, take a look at the slides here: https://www.slideshare.net/Kshivets/...cancer-surgery –4936542. When you have finished looking at those slides, participate in the following discussion prompt before moving on.

Discussion 16.3: A really terrible slide deck

Well after reviewing that horrible slide deck, you should actually probably have a good idea of what makes for a good slide deck. Here are my tips:

• Less is more. Less slides, less text. Trim off the fat and concentrate on the coolest most relevant things.
• Create sections. Title slides to start new sections can help break the presentation into a logical flow. Specifically, you should use the sections that we discussed earlier in the chapter.
• Avoid clutter. 3–5 bullet points per slide at most! Bullets should be keywords, not sentences.
• Make it readable for old people. Sans serif fonts. 28–40 point for headline text, 18–28 point for normal text, and 12–14 point font for references is a good place to start.
• Ensure that there is a clear contrast between the background and all text.
• Use visuals. Steer clear of videos unless completely necessary or exceptionally cool. In my experience, they NEVER work and they take lots of time away from your presentation. Figures are your best bet.
• Triple-check your spelling. A sure-fire way to lose credibility is to have typos in your presentation

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Hints and Tips on Presenting Technical Papers

Andrew lambert offers hints and tips on presenting technical papers..

In the first edition of The Way Ahead , Dusterhoft and Giddens wrote about one of the fundamentals of being a technical professional: how to write a technical paper. In this edition, John Thorogood details the technical journals that such papers appear in and why papers are so fundamental to the industry and to technical personnel in the industry. This article covers the next step—how to present a paper. This article covers hints and tips for presenting papers at SPE conferences and workshops, but the material also applies to other situations, be they internal to your organization or a public forum.

Presentation Skills

Presentation skills are taken extremely seriously by organizations and considered a major skill in every sector of the industry, not just for technical staff. Before discussing some of the hints and tips, let us first examine why presenting is seen as so important for all staff and, in particular, technical personnel.

When I first started to think about this article, I immediately felt that technical presentations are more difficult than other presentations. However, after some reflection, I realized that giving a technical presentation is no more difficult than giving any other presentation. However, what is different is the necessary preparation time and effort, and this really comes down to the complexity of the message in technical presentations and the diversity of the audience. If we trace the elements of both complexity and audience, we come to the conclusion that the root cause is variety. In terms of complexity, the variety includes the technical discipline of the work, the degree of specialism in the subject matter, the advancement of work, and the aim of the work. In terms of audience, the variety is education, language, familiarity with the work, familiarity with the speaker, and the audiences’ job function. This then leads to the conclusion that a technical presentation needs to be tailor-made for each situation. We can take this thought of tailoring a presentation one step further. What we are really trying to do is to break down the work into easily understood blocks that build into the message we are trying to convey and achieve a desired result. The difficulty and, therefore, skill is knowing how much you need to break down the material to convey the message and what the desired result is from that particular audience.

In Fig. 1, I have tried to show for different audiences (within the industry) how much a message needs to be broken down. The different levels are grouped from Group 1, consisting of subject experts, where the amount of breakdown is low, to Group 4 for nontechnical personnel. The difference between internal and external personnel in Groups 1 and 2 is there to illustrate that while the subject knowledge may be the same in both parties, external personnel may not be familiar with internal methodology, systems, software, or previous internal research, and so some extra information is needed.

We can use this chart to estimate how much we need to break down our work. If we look at the Groups in regard to presenting a paper at an SPE conference, we face a challenge because Groups 1 through 3 can all be present. I would say, though, that you should aim to break down the work to be somewhere around Group 2. The reason for this is that you do not want to oversimplify for a Group that may be attending out of general interest (i.e., Group 3), as opposed to those who attended with specific focus. Workshops are much more focused than the large conferences, and so here you should aim at between Groups 1 and 2.

In terms of desired result, you must think about why you are presenting to a particular group, why they should be interested in the work, and what they need to gain for them to see the work as a success. For example, the desired result for a peer assist presentation is probably far different from the desired result for a management presentation.

The Presentation

Once you have worked out how much the message needs to be bro- ken down, you need to start preparing the slides. This is a challenge. First, at SPE workshops and conferences, you are allocated 20 minutes to present, with some time after for questions. Therefore, you need to work out how to break down the message sufficiently, yet produce uncluttered, easy to understand slides. The number of slides varies, and the guides point toward having ideally between 1 slide every 3 minutes and a maximum of 1 slide every minute. This then means you will have only around 15–20 slides, not including the title and questions slide. So how do we maximize the slides we have? In the following section, I will describe both the rules SPE has governing presentations and also some hints and tips to hopefully help you prepare a great presentation. To accompany this article, a presentation has been prepared to demonstrate these points, and I shall refer to it in this section. The presentation has been placed on the Young E&P Professionals professional network website, which can be found by logging on to communities.spe.org.

The venue has a large impact on your presentation. Room sizes can vary from 30 seats to 1,000 seats, and the rooms could be either dark or light. For this reason, it is worth evaluating your slides before you travel to the conference or workshop for different situations. You may find that for some slides you need to prepare two versions—one for one condition (say, a light room) and one for the alternate situation. When you actually arrive at the facility holding the meeting, you can evaluate the actual room and adjust your presentation as necessary. You will have time to do this and access to computing facilities at the conference/workshop in the author room. You should, though, be prepared to drop slides that do not work, if needed.

Paper vs. Presentation

One of the most fundamental points about a presentation is that it is a verbal presentation of your paper. You should never use the opportunity to insert additional information in the presentation; you should, however, use the opportunity to clarify the message and answer questions that your peers may have in regard to your work. The general rules of presenting concerning structure, language, and preparation are as valid for a technical presentation as for any other presentation, if not more so. If we first look at the structure, the old adage of “tell them what you are going to tell them, tell them, and tell them what you have told them” is extremely useful. If you look at the presentation on the website, you will find the outline (tell them what you are going to tell them), the presentation (tell them), and the summary that repeats the outline (tell them what you’ve told them). This structure is designed to address the listening and learning associated with repetition and reinforcement of information.

SPE does have rules regarding the structure. Company logos may be used only on the title slide of the presentation, and trade names should not be used. The same rule applies to suppliers, service companies, and operators.

One of the important parts of the general rules is spelling and slang. We have all sat in a presentation and seen poor spelling, and it reflects badly on the presenter. You should thoroughly check the spelling, and not just using the spellchecker in the computer because, while this may find misspelled words, it will not find words that are grammatically incorrect (e.g., if you have mistakenly inserted whole instead of hole ). You should also try to avoid slang. As someone who grew up in London, like any other person who grew up in a big city, I can lapse into using a lot of slang when I speak. This can also carry through to writing if you are not careful. Slang simply puts up an additional language barrier and prevents the audience from understanding your work.

Text Slides

Slides that contain general text should be kept as plain and simple as possible. You should not cram too much data onto a slide. Remember, time is against you, and the audience must be able to read through and understand the text in the time available. Animation and sounds should be avoided. These may work when you prepare the slides; however, when you are using a different machine at a conference, they may cause the machine to jam.

Data Slides

The main point of both technical papers and presentations is to present quantitative data that support your conclusions. It is normally the presentation of these data that actually causes the most problems, and the majority of the online presentation is dedicated to how and how not to present data. The central learning here is again the relevance of the data to the presentation (remember the paper contains the fine detail) and displaying the data in a way that allows the audience to interpret and understand them, all in the extremely short amount of time the data will be on the screen. There are problems in presenting data as text, tabulated values, and graphics. The problems center on the conjoined problems of presenting enough data to support your argument while not presenting so much data that the message is lost in too much clutter.

Volume of Data

Volume clutters slides, and the problem of clutter is most easily demonstrated when using tables. On Slide 7 of the online presentation, you will find a typical example of showing too much data, and I am sure you can think of examples of presentations in which so much data is put up that you simply cannot see it, and you certainly would not have time to digest it. The presentation of a slide such as the example serves no purpose. Remember: clear and simple and relevant.

Graphics are perhaps the best way to present data (if appropriate) during presentations, because they present the data in a very easily understandable form. However, there are many pitfalls here also. In Sides 9 through 16 of the online presentation, you will find several graphics and notes about them. You must think carefully about the amount of information a slide shows and whether you need to add further details in terms of improved legends or background details that will aid the audience. It is important to note that the level of information needed on a graph also increases when presenting to an outside audience, because their familiarity with software packages or the way you display certain forms of data may be low. For those of you in the logging industry, the attention to the graphics becomes especially difficult when trying to present logs. Logs, by their very nature, attempt to present changes in multiple parameters that are time or depth indexed. This presents problems for scale, detail, and, not least, for the header to explain the curves displayed. My personal experience from both presenting logs and watching presentations is that logs rarely display well.

Video can work very well, and the use of video clips in presentations increases year after year. SPE guidelines recommend having video in AVI format if possible. You will also have opportunity to ensure that the video works at the meeting. Again, though, you need to be ready to drop the clip if you find it does not display sufficiently well in the facility you are in.

The speed at which data are presented is an important factor in the success or failure of a presentation. Remember that the audience needs time to understand data and understand its relevance to the paper and what you are saying.

Complexity is a difficult point to discuss. As I have stated previously, you need to take a complex message and break it down so the audience understands. However, at the same time, you must not be afraid of presenting complex themes and/or data.

Unless it is vital to the presentation, and clearly there are many examples in which this is the case, you should try to avoid listing extremely complex equations. The reason for this is that if you show a fully developed complex equation, the audience will not have time to interpret the terms involved and the equation construction. However, if you do need to show an equation, you should list what the different terms represent.

It is worth remembering that at workshops and conferences, the audience is made up of people from across the globe. This means that some will be familiar with American Petroleum Inst. (API) units and some with the Intl. System of Units (SI). Therefore, if displaying a single value, you should list the value in both API and SI units. However, when displaying relationships between numbers (i.e., to show an increase or on graphs), it is not necessary to show both unit sets. The use of units is important, especially for equations in which dimensionless terms may change if the equation inputs are in another unit set.

Remember, accuracy is vital. Ensure that the numbers in the presentation match the numbers in the paper, because often someone in the audience will have read your paper before the conference. If you are in doubt over material and cannot double-check, remove the item.

So it is that easy! Seriously, though, what is described above and is shown in the online presentation is very subjective. The most important lesson is that preparing a presentation can be as difficult as writing the paper, but as long as you think carefully about each of the slides, and do not try to cram too much in, your presentations will be a success. Good luck.

A lot more advice can be found on the Web by entering “advice to presenters” in any search engine.

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7 Steps to Delivering a Technical Presentation

June 21, 2021 - Dom Barnard

So you want to share the fruits of your technical labor with a presentation? Perhaps, you’re an engineer, a maker, a coder, or a designer, and you’re looking to discuss a research study, explain a process, or demonstrate a product.

Regardless of the agenda,  speaking to a group  can be intimidating. However, there are steps you can take to deliver an effective technical presentation that gets your point across and appeals to the audience.

Whether you’re presenting in person or via  web conferencing software , the following tips and best practices will help you be prepared, feel more confident, and set up the tools you need to conduct your presentation without any issues.

Know your subject matter

A great presentation isn’t about reading a bunch of slides – your attendees are capable of reading much faster on their own.

If you are going to pack your slides with dozens of details and bullet points, you might as well ditch the slides and write an article instead. It’s difficult for the audience to listen to a presenter and read a lot of information at the same time.

Your job as a presenter is to be the expert that your attendees expect you to be. Keep your slides simple and minimal. In fact, 91% of people say that  well-designed slides  help  boost their confidence  when giving a presentation.

Remember that your slides are not the star of the show, you are. Help your audience understand and make sense of what they are reading in your slides. To do this, make sure you are using a  suitable structure  for your presentation.

You can do these things only when you’re well-versed in what you’re presenting. The slides are supposed to be your outline, or simply a table of contents to remind you what to cover during the presentation.

Know your audience

Knowing your audience  is crucial for any presentation, but it’s even more important for a technical one. If your audience is as experienced and comfortable with the topic of your presentation as you are, then you don’t want to dumb it down to the extent that it bores them.

On the other hand, you don’t want to give a complex presentation to an audience with no clue of what you’re talking about.

There may also be times when your attendees are people with different levels of technical skill, experience, and interests. Then your job is to make sure that the content of your presentation is relevant and doesn’t alienate any of those segments.

Image Source:  Digital Clarity Group

To understand how technical you need to be, consider what your audience might already know and how much is required for them to understand to meet your goal.

If your objective is to acquire funding, for instance, your audience will be more interested in financial benefits than the technical details of your product. The idea is to meet the needs of your audience, not to fuel your passion for engineering.

Configure your IDE

Since you’re delivering a technical presentation, there may be instances where you’ll want to walk your audience through your development environment, code scripts, software demos, or other technical components.

However, you may have adjusted how things look on the screen according to what’s the most convenient for your usual workflow. And what’s good for working in your day-to-day routine may not render well as you go full screen in presentation mode.

If the attendees can’t decipher what’s on the screen, they’ll get confused and will find it hard to focus on your talk. So it’s important that you customize whatever you’re going to show in your presentation such that it’s easily readable and viewable.

There are several steps you can take to make this happen. First of all, don’t use dark backgrounds. Light-colored backgrounds are easy on the eyes. Second, adjust your font styles and sizes to make sure they’re big enough.

And finally, learn to zoom in on specific areas as required, depending on whether you’re using a  Windows PC  or a  Mac system .

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Minimize distractions

Nothing is more annoying than to keep getting disruptive notifications or popups from in the middle of your presentation. These can be from your operating system (Windows or Mac), or apps such as Slack, Email, Twitter, and more.

At times, these notifications can be personal, embarrassing, or contain confidential information that you don’t want your audience to see.

Therefore, it’s best to make sure in advance that there are no unpleasant surprises. Before you get up to give your presentation, turning off your notifications can go a long way.

This will also reduce the number of processes running on your machine and free up available resources. As a result, the resource-intensive programs that are part of your presentation will run a lot smoother. Here’s how to turn off  notifications for Windows ,  Google Chrome , and  Mac .

Get the right equipment

If you want to be a master presenter, you should have the proper tools for the job. The basics include a desktop or laptop machine with good configuration, a big display screen, presentation software (usually MS Powerpoint or Keynote), and a clicker/pointer device.

A clicking device, like the  Logitech Wireless Presenter , can help you switch slides from wherever you are in the room, point to a specific part of a slide, and add an overall professional touch to your presentation.

In addition, you should have any cables (HDMI, VGA, USD, etc) and adapters required to connect the devices you are going to use for the presentation.

Conrad Delock USB 3.0 Network adapter

If you have no idea about what will be available at your presentation venue, then carry one piece of each of the commonly used cables and adapters. You’ll thank us later.

Rehearse in advance

Practice your slides and your demo multiple times before the presentation, even if you have presented the exact same thing in the past. Do not make any assumptions about your actual presentation environment based on your practice environment.

Technologies and situations change, and you may find things that catch you off guard. Run through everything at least once the night before just to be sure.

Practice your presentations with  interactive exercises .

Even better if you can record yourself during these rehearsal presentations and watch the recordings later to find areas of improvement.

Also, if you’re relying on downloading or doing something in front of the audience that may require a high-speed internet connection, don’t assume you’ll have access to such a network during your presentation. Download and install whatever you need ahead of time.

Finally, enjoy the experience

You’re giving a technical presentation, but that doesn’t mean it has to be boring, or that you have to be serious all the time as you talk.

It’s okay to have fun, crack some jokes,  tell a story ,  ask a rhetorical question  or invite participation from the audience when presenting. In fact, a study showed that presentations that don’t let the audience participate see a  drop of 14%  in engagement.

Don’t worry too much about things going wrong. See every presentation as a dialogue with your attendees and an opportunity to learn and be a better presenter. If you are enjoying yourself, so will your audience.

The Art of the Technical Presentation: How to Present Technical Topics to Non-Technical People

So, you need to make a technical presentation to people outside of your field. It should be easy, right? All you have to do is let the bounty of your knowledge flow forth. But what if your message gets lost in the gap between your expertise and your audience’s point of view? Find out how to conquer the divide with an artfully designed presentation.

Although great presentations are a mix of education, communication, and collaboration, in the end, they all boil down to persuasion. Luckily, you don’t need a degree in psychology to get through to your listeners. These five tips will help you build a simple presentation that gets your message across, imparts key technical details, and leaves you and your audience feeling like you got what you needed.

Focus on your purpose

What’s the nitty gritty reason why you’re doing this presentation? Whether you’re seeking funding, partnership, a job, or a sale, you’re essentially trying to persuade your audience to take action. 

What do you want them to do when they’ve heard your spiel? Remember this as you plan each step of your presentation, and make sure that every element you add contributes to your purpose. If you notice your content going off on a tangent, cut that part out. Keep it tight, and you’ll keep their attention.

Find the Gap

Once you’ve got a clear purpose in mind, think about why you need to do this presentation. There must be something that your audience doesn’t know or fully appreciate yet, because otherwise they’d already be with you.

But be careful here. A lot of us fall into the trap of thinking they need to hear everything we know. If you take the time now to tease out the information that’s critical to your message, you’ll save yourself from overwhelming your listeners and losing their support. 

What’s the simplest way you can explain the difference between what they’re doing now, and what will happen if they adopt your idea? An infographic can be a powerful and succinct way to make your message hit home, and Beautiful.ai’s templates can make it easy.

One trick that will help you explain technical things in simpler terms is to empathize with your audience. What do they want to get from working with you? Let’s say you’re speaking to investors. They want a return on their investment, right? So you’ll need to highlight facts, figures, and examples that show why your proposal is going to profit them in the end. Think about who you’re speaking to, and how cooperating with you will make their lives better.

Some other common needs that your project might meet are helping your audience to save time, have less stress, or enjoy better relationships. Make sure you frame your request in terms of how it will benefit your viewers.

Images can be a powerful way to help listeners picture the results that you’re promising in vivid detail. With Beautiful.ai’s image gallery, you’ll have thousands of photos, icons, and visual elements at your fingertips that you can add to your presentation for free. You can also upload your own custom images with an effortless drag and drop.

Keep it short

Another way to make a technical topic easy to digest is to keep your presentation brief. One trick is to create an outline to distill your message into 3-5 key points. Another is to use Guy Kowasaki’s 10/20/20 rule (10 slides, 20 minutes, and a minimum of 30 font) to force yourself to be concise.

Some technical presenters check their urge to splurge by only addressing “ what ” their idea will accomplish, rather than the “how”.

And of course, you can save words and pack a stronger punch by incorporating visual elements into your presentation. Beautiful.ai has templates to help you easily build a pictograph or specialized slide with a Venn diagram, flowchart, bar graph, and more to make your point in fewer words with a greater lasting impression. 

Did you know that people remember things they learned with an accompanying visual over 6x longer than information they only heard verbally?

Use good design

Although you can insert good information into any presentation maker, even the most brilliant thoughts will be lost on your audience if the styling doesn’t flow. Awkward spacing, inconsistent colors and fonts, and illegible sizing are hugely distracting to your audience and can steal your thunder in a heartbeat.

Beautiful.ai uses smart slides technology to automatically adjust these elements on every slide. Whether you work with our templates for slides and presentations or customize a look that’s all your own, no matter what images or elements you add, the rules of good design will be applied. Your slides will come out balanced and beautiful and your message will be crystal clear. It’s like having a pro designer fixing each slide as you work.

No more all-night formatting battles or embarrassing, cluttered messes. Just powerful presentations that persuade your audience and make you proud.

When all is said and done, your technical presentation can get through to non-technical people if you stay focused on your purpose, bridge the gap between what they already know and what they need to learn to get on-board with your plan, empathize with their needs, and boil your message down into its most persuasive elements.

You can make an outstanding impact with even the most technical presentations if you start with an intelligent plan and use specialized design tools like Beautiful.ai. Try it today.

Beautiful.AI Team

Beautiful is an AI-powered presentation tool that makes it fast and easy for anyone to build clean, modern and professionally designed slides that they can be proud of.

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Research for All

Technical presentation and Google Slides examples

Presenting your research work or weekly progress to a large audience or your supervisor is an important skill to learn. Google slides (googleslides) have been a go-to nowadays for technical presentations. Studying real-world examples of technical presentations is a great practical way to learn!

Whether you create in Powerpoint or Google Slides (googleslides), practical tips and good technical presentation practices will help you make an awesome presentation and communicate your ideas and updates more clearly.

My technical presentations are all given in an academic setting like research teams or ML conferences.

During my stint at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kharagpur for my MS Research degree and currently Ph.D. degree in Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing, I had to give several presentations.

To date, all my presentations in PDF format can be found on my Github repository .

If you need to use the PDF slides in Google Slides, you must first convert them to PPT format (Powerpoint) using online converters or other open-source software.

Then you can upload it to Google Slides.

My previous blog article discusses practical tips while preparing for a technical or research (PowerPoint or google slides) presentation . Especially when you have very less amount of time to spare.

In this article, I will provide a list of presentation slides I have delivered to date at different venues, which you can use as a technical presentation template.

After a great deal of advice and feedback from my seniors and my supervisors, I was able to identify the points of a technical presentation I was blatantly overlooking previously.

My technical presentation examples using Google Slides (googleslides)

1. an article from the reputed science magazine.

The spread of true and false news online , published in Science (March 2018 issue). We presented the above article in this presentation prepared by me and Amrith Krishna Da(a Ph.D. scholar, CSE, IIT Kharagpur). [ PPT ]

2. My 1st conference paper presentation

My first conference paper was “Understanding Email Interactivity and Predicting User Response to email, ” and went to present it at Second International Conference on Computational Intelligence, Communications, and Business Analytics (CICBA) 2018, organized at Kalyani Government Engineering College, West Bengal, India.

Here, they already provided a presentation template from beforehand which also included the organization of the slides.

3. Reading Group (internal) talk at IIT Kharagpur 

Here, I introduce the topic of semi-supervised deep learning techniques and present a NIPS 2017 paper in this domain titled “Mean teachers are better role models: Weight-averaged consistency targets improve semi-supervised deep learning results.”

4. My compilation for a Research panel discussion

Semi-supervised Learning techniques and Active Learning I have only provided my segment, which was a part of a panel discussion covering a broader topic titled Leveraging Unlabeled Data and Environment Access for ML .

The discussion panel also covered recent literature on Transfer learning, Zero-shot learning, Reinforcement Learning(with different variants), and Imitation Learning.

5. Reading Group (internal) talk at IIT Kharagpur

Bidisha Di and I presented the AAAI 2018 paper titled “ Weakly Supervised Induction of Affective Events by Optimizing Semantic Consistency ” in the Reading Group of our research group on 17th October 2019. 

6. ACM WebSci 2019 paper titled “Understanding Brand Consistency from Web Content” at the “Out-of-India” track of India HCI 2019   [ Slides ]

7. CNeRG Reading Group talk on 17th October 2019, where I presented the AAAI 2018 paper titled “Weakly Supervised Induction of Affective Events by Optimizing Semantic Consistency” [ Slides ]

Final thoughts on technical presentation examples using googleslides

We hope the above slides gave a more practical perspective on preparing academic and technical presentations. However, these learnings, in principle, should also help you to deliver technical talks in the industry or your workplace.

If you liked this article, please do not forget to comment or follow me on Medium

If you found this article to be useful, this article may also be of interest to you.

Ten ways to sharpen your Soft Skills as a Grad student How to deliver technical talks and the importance of local reading groups Internal and external collaboration, common email mistakes How to prepare for a meeting with your research supervisor/guide Work productivity and managing your mental health as a grad student

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Presentations

Communication, facilitation, targeted learning, ​powerspeaking blog: tips and strategies for crafting presentations, deliver more powerful technical presentations: 8 techniques.

by Ralf Wolter     Aug 4, 2022 1:36:00 PM

Before moving into training and coaching, I was an IT Consulting Engineer for 25-plus years.  To this day, I have a left-brain bent.  But I remember the experience that changed my perspective on what makes a powerful technical communicator (hint: it involves both hemispheres).

I was watching a very senior engineer at Cisco give a technical presentation.  This engineer was so senior and well-regarded, he held a prestigious Fellow position at the high-tech company.  

What struck me was that he was so good at illustrating his points and keeping the audience rapt.  I approached him after his talk and asked him, ‘What’s your secret sauce?’  He said, ‘Whenever I give a technical talk, I start by explaining in a way that my mum would understand it.’

I really liked the way he dove into deep technical detail only after he introduced the concepts with brief, compelling stories and vivid analogies.  To me, that was a perfect way to make sure everyone understands what you’re talking about, without dumbing down the content.

What I’ve learned since then is that this kind of approach to technical presenting doesn’t take away from the content expert’s credibility; as a matter of fact, it adds to it, especially if they’re addressing a mixed audience.

Delivering clear, complex data in a meaningful way to the people and businesses impacted is more important than ever—at work and in our communities.  

To do it well, you might need to rethink some of the hallmark left-brain preconceptions about how to craft and deliver your talk.  But trust me, it’s well worth the journey.

Here are our top pointers . . .

1. Start With Your Audience in Mind

Who are you presenting to, and how is your main message or proposal relevant to them?  How much detail do they really want or need? Your technical peers might be happy to dive into lots of detailed data.  But how about a mixed audience of engineers, salespeople, and potential customers?  Or maybe senior executives , who just want the bottom line?

For example, let’s say you’re presenting to a mixed audience. The best strategy would be to organize your presentation so you begin with a big-picture overview and main message/proposal for the non-technical people; then a strategic level of detail for technical managers and technical specialists outside your area; and last, a deep dive for content experts who are familiar with your work.  

Senior-level executives prefer content focused on the overall impact of your data or proposal: the cost, ROI, and benefits. They want the high-level view, with executive summaries, solutions, and future business implications. (Check out our downloadable PDF, “ How to Present to Executives: 23 Proven Tips ”)

Non-technical audiences and technical people in different disciplines also appreciate higher-level content.  In addition, they typically want to know how what you’re presenting will affect them directly.  Will it impact their workload or priorities?  Will it delay other projects they’re working on?  Will it shift roles or responsibilities?

Technical audiences want content rich in detailed data analysis, design specifications, theory, and statistics. They expect you to know the jargon and to use technical terms. They want to know about the research behind your data, and they appreciate information such as algorithms, process-flow diagrams, feature lists, and coding examples.

One presenter we worked with noted that with mixed audiences, he starts by announcing, "Today, I'll be doing a split-level presentation. The first 10 minutes will be a big-picture, market-focused summary. In the next 10 minutes, I will provide an overview of the technology involved. In the last 10 minutes I will go into the detail and present the results of our code review. Feel free to leave before the next level of detail if that is not what you want."

So remember, consider your audience before you get too far in crafting your presentation.  By doing so, you will be more . . .

Engaging By directing your presentation to the audience’s needs, you’ll increase attention and retention.

Efficient By creating an audience-centric presentation from the start, you’ll find it easier to plan and deliver a relevant and memorable talk.

Effective By communicating an action the audience can take as a result of the presentation, you’ll have a greater impact (we go into this in “Identify an Action Step,” below).

Here’s a helpful Audience Analysis checklist we developed for workshop participants.

Next, what do you want the audience to do with the data you’re presenting? 

2. Identify an Action Step

Once you’ve analyzed your audience, the next best step is to ask yourself, "What do I want the audience to do, think, or feel as a result of hearing this presentation?" 

One common mistake many presenters make is to assume the audience understands what they’re being asked to do.  Unless your request is clear and concrete, you risk creating confusion and losing their support.

Here are some quick examples of effective vs. ineffective action steps . . .

Now it’s time to dive into the core content of your presentation . . .

3. Develop a Clear Main Message

Even if you have complex ideas or data to discuss, your presentation should have a clearly stated central purpose or key message.  Why are you presenting the data?  What do you want your audience to remember?  

A short, clear, and compelling main message accomplishes several important things . . .

Here are some best practices for developing your main message so it’s clear and memorable . . .

As PowerSpeaking, Inc. Master Facilitator Rita Williams emphasized in the video, repetition of your main message—word for word—is key.  Research has shown that people are much more likely to retain your clear, concise main message if you repeat it at least three times throughout your presentation, at the beginning, middle, and end.

Once you’ve analyzed your audience, identified an action step, and crafted your main message, it’s time to turn to the substance of your presentation . . .

4. Make Your Content Relatable and Memorable

Maybe you want to get a group of teams fired up about the next phase of product development.  Perhaps you need to enlist support from other departments to make a system change. Or maybe your team needs budget approval from senior management to launch a new project.

No matter your purpose, you’re far more likely to succeed if you help your audience relate to your content and remember (and maybe act on) it after the presentation is over.

We’ve found that the best way to do that is to craft a technical presentation that balances analytical and anecdotal evidence— and connects with people on a human level.

Analytical Evidence: Facts and Figures

Analytical evidence is typically evidence drawn from statistical information—especially data collected by systematic methods. for example, the number of component failures reported in a quarter, the percentage of people who had adverse reactions to a new drug, or the roi on a new service offering over a specified period of time would all be considered analytical data. , anecdotal evidence: stories, analogies, case studies, examples.

Anecdotal evidence tells a story rather than drawing solely on numbers or percentages. Examples:  A story about how a seriously ill patient responded to a new drug, reading a letter from a satisfied customer, or talking about an experience you had when calling your own company for customer service. 

Some technical people in our workshops bristle at the idea of storytelling or, as they’ll say, “trying to be entertaining.”  But being an entertainer isn’t the point here.  The point is that we’re all human, and images, metaphors, and stories spark our interest and lodge in our memories more easily than facts and figures alone.

  “In fact, the thickness of the Earth's atmosphere, compared with the size of the Earth, is in about the same ratio as the thickness of a coat of shellac on a schoolroom globe is to the diameter of the globe. That's the air that nurtures us and almost all other life on Earth, that protects us from deadly ultraviolet light from the sun, that through the greenhouse effect brings the surface temperature above the freezing point.”   

In his book “Actual Minds, Possible Worlds,” psychologist Jerome Bruner estimated that facts are about 22 times more memorable when they are delivered via a story.  

When the brain sees or hears a story, it mimics the pattern of the writer’s or speaker's brain. This is known as neural coupling, where in effect,  the storyteller literally shares their sensory experience with another person.  (A much more memorable experience than looking at a spreadsheet in a slide presentation.)

“ You cannot reach a person's head without first touching their heart, and the path to the heart runs through the brain, starting with the amygdala . . . We now know which brain chemicals make us pay attention to a speaker (cortisol) and which make us feel empathy toward another person (oxytocin)." — Carmine Gallo, "Storyteller's Secret.”

  “ You can’t play tennis with a bowling ball.”  

So, remember that research proves you will increase the impact of your data and your message by reaching people through their hearts and minds .

Next, use the power of imagery to help people understand and remember key points . . .

5. Be Creative With Visual Aids

Whether you’re presenting in person or virtually, there are several ways you can hold people’s interest and drive home your message by getting creative with visuals.

Add Imagery to Explain Data

You already know not to clobber your audience with endless data-dense slides, right?  Good.  The more you can convey data/key messages via imagery, the more engaging and memorable your content will be.

Here are a few more examples of combining simple, powerful images with (few) words to deliver a message . . .

Don’t Limit Yourself to Slides

Think about introducing a variety of visual aids to make your presentation more interesting . . .

Whiteboards : A virtual whiteboard or an in-person flip-chart are still great ways to emphasize key points, capture audience feedback or questions, or explain a concept. 

Props: Use props to illustrate a key metaphor or idea from your presentation. A world globe could help illustrate the global marketplace, or an apple could evoke preventive health care (“An apple a day keeps the doctor away.”) 

Handouts: A handout allows the audience to take something back to work that can be used as a reference or summary of your content.

Video Clips: These are a great way to break the monotony of still slides, and often introduce a more human factor to the topic. 

6. Use Pattern Disruption to Hold Attention

There’s nothing like breaking a pattern to snap people back to attention.  Think of a presenter who suddenly turns off the screen or introduces music.  Or how about a presenter who’s been talking for five minutes then suddenly . . . stops.  Silence, for like 30 seconds.  You’d look up, right?

Consider places in your presentation where people might need something fresh to keep them engaged.  Some examples . . .

• Stories and analogies
• Video clips or sound recordings
• Style changes (vocal, movement, gestures, pausing)
• Blanking the screen
• Visuals (graphics, illustrations, images)
• Audience participation (small group discussion, brainstorming)

Next, let’s look at one aspect of successful presenting that causes many techies to roll their eyes:  an engaging delivery style.  

Stay with me.  It’s relatively painless . . .

7. Don't Underestimate the Power of Style

A speaker who stands statue-still, stares at their slides or notes, and speaks in a monotone is enough to put anyone to sleep—no matter how interesting the content.  

Remember, even scientists, engineers, and system programmers are human.  And research has shown that we humans are moved by nonverbal communication.  We “read” a lot into its presence or absence, which means it can either obscure or make clear what we’re saying out loud.

“What you do speaks so loudly that I cannot hear what you say." — Ralph Waldo Emerson

If you’re preparing to make a presentation or give a talk, it’s likely you do what most people do: focus solely on your content. While what you have to say is definitely key, how you say it—through nonverbal “language”—is a lot more important than you might think.

Research has shown repeatedly that your posture, gestures, facial expressions, and the tone and cadence of your voice play a huge role not only in getting your message across to an audience, but also, in engaging them, building trust, and increasing your credibility.

Your tone of voice, for example, has a big impact on how your content is received. 

Not being able to hear a speaker, either because of poor audio or a too-soft voice, isn’t just an annoyance. In a USC study that looked at the effects of poor audio in scientific presentations, they found that, “When the video was difficult to hear, viewers thought the talk was worse, the speaker less intelligent and less likable, and the research less important.”

Speaking in a dreary monotone is another way to lose your audience.  Watch how to avoid it and instead, create energy and interest . . .

source: Great Speech Writing, "How to Avoid Speaking in a Monotone," via YouTube

If you’d like more tips on making nonverbal communication work for you, check out our blog, “ Use the Power of Nonverbal Communication to Connect with Your Audience: 7 Tips .”

8. Bring Your Authentic Self to the Table

Speaking of the human factor when it comes to presentations, know that authenticity, openness, and passion go a long way in engaging your audience, building trust—and yes, even establishing your credibility. 

NASA mathematician Katherine Johnson once revealed her childhood passion for numbers in a very simple, relatable way . . .

“I counted everything. I counted the steps to the road, the steps up to church, the number of dishes and silverware I washed ... anything that could be counted, I did.” 

Now, if you had been in the audience when she led with that, she’d have your attention, right?  

No matter how complex the data or the message, an audience-centric, authentic, human approach is a good place to start.

Join Us in Conversation . . .

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Topics: Effective Technical Presentations

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The practical strategies to deliver an effective technical presentation

Techniques on delivering technical presentation effectively.

Chiawei Lim

Towards Data Science

Technical presentations are inevitable, especially when conveying knowledge around the fast-evolving technology stack, algorithms, and workflows.

Technical presentation spans into different contexts such as

• technical sales speech
• demonstration
• technical support
• knowledge transfer session.

Each of these requires a different granularity towards delivering ideas around technical concepts or demonstrating technical live walkthroughs towards a specific group of audience.

The quest for an effective way of delivery was motivated by my first dreadful technical sharing. The need to explain LSTM and the architectural structure simply seems like a mission impossible to me. Needless to say, the audience did not take away anything from the 2 hours session.

Since then, I took an effort in crafting different approaches towards delivering content effectively. I apply the methodologies and observe how it turns out on various occasions, tinkering with the techniques along the way.

Here are the 3 most important bags of tricks on the list which will turn a dreadful session into a meaningful one. The sole intention is to maximize the understanding of the topics and make the session worthwhile.

The Gist of Content:

• Big picture to granular details. Not the opposite.
• Understand the audience.
• Visualization is everything.

1. Big picture to granular details. Not the opposite.

Background:.

One common practice that the presenter opts for in the order of presentation is by using chronological order to explain a certain flow of a topic.

In the technical world, it often means it starts with explaining the basic blocks or fundamental modules which build up to something bigger. It can also mean the walkthrough of a workflow from step 1 to step N to achieve a goal.

While this is perfectly normal, a technical module takes twists and turns to accomplish a certain milestone. Possibly only by the time the audience reaches the end of the journey, they might come to the epiphany moment in understanding what are all the grunting moments leading up to.

Here’s the catch, it might be lucky that the audience is still following, most did not make it till then. For those who come to understand the ultimate goal and intend to understand the process more thoroughly, the session might have already been near an end.

Instead, do it this way:

Paint the big picture at the beginning of the session, elaborate on how’s the goal would look like at the finishing line, and break it down to what it takes to achieve that. This indirectly also boosts the tenacity of the audience to follow you through the potentially challenging steps like the explanation through lines of code, or breakdown of algorithms.

Building the foundations is just the start of the journey. During the presentation, do a regular milestone checking with the audience. Make it explicitly clear which steps we are in, where we are heading, and how this step maps to the big picture.

2. Understand the audience.

Almost whenever I am preparing a presentation, I’ll start by asking the following questions surrounding the context of the audience.

• Who is the audience?
• What background do they have?
• How large is the crowd?

This helps in shaping the tone of the whole speech with the audience in mind. Essentially, the success of a presentation depends on how much can each recipient take away. Hence, having a clear idea of who the recipient is makes it straightforward in shaping the presentation's content. This includes

• gauge the complexity of topics to covers
• determine the background context to include
• shaping the jargon around technical concepts

Depends on the background of the audience, often the presenter has to narrow down the scope, simplify the content, and present it in a manner that the audience can comprehend.

Simplifying doesn’t mean you are occluding or not explaining key concepts the way it supposes to be, but rather highlight and focus on some of the most important key points as pointers. Humans have limited attention spans, it’s pointless to focus on 1000 items where they will forget most. Rather, focus on the 3 most important key points, and the audience will be resourceful to fill in the missing puzzle by themselves.

3. Visualization is everything.

While technical content is complex in nature, the delivery method doesn’t have to be. No matter what are the topics in discussion, it is always possible to rethink the way of presentation.

There are multiple visualization methods, starting with charts, graphs, infographics, tables, and many more.

Here are a few visualization methods that are well applicable to most scenarios:

• Flowchart Diagram

Most engineering solutions are constituted from a series of steps and processes, with specific input and output on each step. Laying it out graphically aids in picturing the whole workflow in one glance and helps to explain details steps by steps referring to the flowchart.

Decision-making in the engineering world is a series of tradeoffs, weighing the pros and cons and choose the one that best suits the situation.

XY Graph is a 2-dimensional graph that shows the relationship between the x element (horizontal axis) and the y element (vertical axis). It’s a straightforward method to illustrate how does the changes in the input element impacts the output element.

Always start by explaining what does the axis of X and Y means as well. For example, when X <increase/decrease>, Y <increase/decrease>, and this can be translated as <elaboration here>. This will maximize the interpretation of the recipient towards the table.

Technical ideas, algorithms, programming might be painful at times, the presentation does not have to be. With the audience at heart and the intention to convey effectively what’s on your mind, your presentation will be awesome.

Till next time!

Written by Chiawei Lim

Data science lead, battle-tested for 9 years in both startup and MNC | LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/codenamewei/

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Amber Robertson is the founder of Quill and Fox. A creative writing studio that helps people find their voice and share their stories. Amber is also a published author, with her first book slated for release in 2020. She loves spending time with her family and friends, reading, writing, and traveling. When Amber was younger, she loved to write short stories and plays. But somewhere along the way, she lost touch with her creativity. It wasn’t until she became a mom that she realized how important it was to share her stories—both the good and the bad—with the people she loves most. That’s when Quill and Fox was born. Amber is passionate about helping others find their voice and share their stories. She believes that every person has a story worth telling, and it’s her mission to help them tell it in a way that is authentic and true to themselves

Technical Paper Presentation

Table of Contents

Presentation on theme: “TECHNICAL PAPER PRESENTATION” — Presentation transcript:

The technical paper presentation is an essential part of conferences and events, where researchers and professionals showcase their findings and share their knowledge with others in the field. It provides an opportunity to present research papers, posters, and other technical content, allowing presenters to delve into their work and engage with the audience.

Time-Limits

When it comes to technical paper presentations, adhering to time limits is crucial. Oral presentations are typically limited to 8 minutes, followed by a 2-minute question and answer session with judges. A maximum of 12 slides is allowed, and the Times New Roman font is recommended for readability. It is important to strictly follow the time limit, as exceeding it may lead to the deduction of marks. Any animations or videos included should be played within the allotted time frame.

Guidelines for Presentation

Presentations should be conducted on-stage, using Microsoft PowerPoint 2003 (.ppt) format. All necessary audio-visual equipment, including computers, microphones, speaker systems, and digital projection systems, will be provided. It is encouraged for all authors to speak during the presentation but without exceeding the time limit. Prior to the event, a soft copy of the presentation must be submitted by the designated deadline, ensuring that it meets the specified format requirements.

Tips for Text and Slide Design

To make the content visually appealing and easy to comprehend, it is advisable to keep the text as brief as possible. Data and information are better organized when presented in bullet points. Each slide should contain no more than 10 lines of text or points. Additionally, it is essential to ensure that all text is large enough to be legible from the back of the auditorium.

Slide Background and Readability

Selecting an attractive and relevant picture for the title slide can captivate the audience’s attention. For subsequent slides, it is crucial to use contrasting colors for the background and text, making it easier to read. Using a light background with dark print or a dark background with light print is recommended. However, using a dark background with dark print or a light background with light print should be avoided, as it hampers readability.

Utilizing Graphs, Figures, and Photographs

Instead of lengthy text, employing well-designed graphs, figures, and photographs is highly recommended. Graphs and figures provide a visual representation of data, making it easier to understand. Whenever possible, data should be presented graphically rather than in tables. Remember, a photograph can often convey more information than a thousand words.

A Sample Technical Paper Presentation (8 minutes duration) (12 slides)

A sample technical paper presentation typically follows a structure consisting of various sections. Here is an outline of a possible structure to consider:

• Title Slide: Introduce yourself and the paper’s title. Use an attractive and relevant picture as the background.
• Introduction: Briefly introduce your topic and paper title, while providing relevant and meaningful points. 3-4. Problem and Theories: State the problem you are addressing and the associated scientific theories briefly. Use examples and consider using visuals.
• Methods (Optional): Summarize your method of literature or content analysis on one slide, if applicable. 6-12. Results and Discussion: The majority of slides are dedicated to presenting results, discussing hypotheses, and drawing conclusions. Recap descriptive statistics, if available, and provide scientific proof to support your hypotheses. Discuss the practicality of each hypothesis and emphasize the significance of your research. Lastly, mention what further steps should be taken in relation to your findings.
• References: Include the top five or six references for your paper, mentioning them in bullet points. Avoid common websites and focus on books and research papers.
• “Thank You” Slide: Conclude your presentation with a slide expressing gratitude and, if desired, allow for questions from the audience.

By following these guidelines, presenters can effectively deliver their technical paper presentations, engaging the audience and showcasing their expertise in the field.

For more information on technical paper presentations and related topics, visit Quill And Fox . Thank you!

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How to Make a PowerPoint Presentation of Your Research Paper

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A research paper presentation is often used at conferences and in other settings where you have an opportunity to share your research, and get feedback from your colleagues. Although it may seem as simple as summarizing your research and sharing your knowledge, successful research paper PowerPoint presentation examples show us that there’s a little bit more than that involved.

In this article, we’ll highlight how to make a PowerPoint presentation from a research paper, and what to include (as well as what NOT to include). We’ll also touch on how to present a research paper at a conference.

Purpose of a Research Paper Presentation

The purpose of presenting your paper at a conference or forum is different from the purpose of conducting your research and writing up your paper. In this setting, you want to highlight your work instead of including every detail of your research. Likewise, a presentation is an excellent opportunity to get direct feedback from your colleagues in the field. But, perhaps the main reason for presenting your research is to spark interest in your work, and entice the audience to read your research paper.

So, yes, your presentation should summarize your work, but it needs to do so in a way that encourages your audience to seek out your work, and share their interest in your work with others. It’s not enough just to present your research dryly, to get information out there. More important is to encourage engagement with you, your research, and your work.

Tips for Creating Your Research Paper Presentation

In addition to basic PowerPoint presentation recommendations, which we’ll cover later in this article, think about the following when you’re putting together your research paper presentation:

• Know your audience : First and foremost, who are you presenting to? Students? Experts in your field? Potential funders? Non-experts? The truth is that your audience will probably have a bit of a mix of all of the above. So, make sure you keep that in mind as you prepare your presentation.

Know more about: Discover the Target Audience .

• Your audience is human : In other words, they may be tired, they might be wondering why they’re there, and they will, at some point, be tuning out. So, take steps to help them stay interested in your presentation. You can do that by utilizing effective visuals, summarize your conclusions early, and keep your research easy to understand.
• Running outline : It’s not IF your audience will drift off, or get lost…it’s WHEN. Keep a running outline, either within the presentation or via a handout. Use visual and verbal clues to highlight where you are in the presentation.
• Where does your research fit in? You should know of work related to your research, but you don’t have to cite every example. In addition, keep references in your presentation to the end, or in the handout. Your audience is there to hear about your work.
• Plan B : Anticipate possible questions for your presentation, and prepare slides that answer those specific questions in more detail, but have them at the END of your presentation. You can then jump to them, IF needed.

What Makes a PowerPoint Presentation Effective?

You’ve probably attended a presentation where the presenter reads off of their PowerPoint outline, word for word. Or where the presentation is busy, disorganized, or includes too much information. Here are some simple tips for creating an effective PowerPoint Presentation.

• Less is more: You want to give enough information to make your audience want to read your paper. So include details, but not too many, and avoid too many formulas and technical jargon.
• Clean and professional : Avoid excessive colors, distracting backgrounds, font changes, animations, and too many words. Instead of whole paragraphs, bullet points with just a few words to summarize and highlight are best.
• Know your real-estate : Each slide has a limited amount of space. Use it wisely. Typically one, no more than two points per slide. Balance each slide visually. Utilize illustrations when needed; not extraneously.
• Keep things visual : Remember, a PowerPoint presentation is a powerful tool to present things visually. Use visual graphs over tables and scientific illustrations over long text. Keep your visuals clean and professional, just like any text you include in your presentation.

Know more about our Scientific Illustrations Services .

Another key to an effective presentation is to practice, practice, and then practice some more. When you’re done with your PowerPoint, go through it with friends and colleagues to see if you need to add (or delete excessive) information. Double and triple check for typos and errors. Know the presentation inside and out, so when you’re in front of your audience, you’ll feel confident and comfortable.

How to Present a Research Paper

If your PowerPoint presentation is solid, and you’ve practiced your presentation, that’s half the battle. Follow the basic advice to keep your audience engaged and interested by making eye contact, encouraging questions, and presenting your information with enthusiasm.

We encourage you to read our articles on how to present a scientific journal article and tips on giving good scientific presentations .

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4.6 Presentations

Presentations are an interesting genre, since they can cover a variety of genres and purposes. Presentations provide the opportunity to present information in a multimodal format, and often require you to condense information for a broad audience. Within the very broad genre of “presentation” many genres fall with more specific conventions and constraints. Some examples include:

• Conference presentations
• Less formal meeting or business presentations (internal)

As technology continues to develop, you might consider other genres under the umbrella of “presentations,” including:

• Youtube videos

In this section, we talk about the specific genre of presentations, but we also focus on taking complex information (such as gathered in a formal report) and reworking, condensing, and remixing that information into a presentation, a website, a poster or infographic, or a podcast.

Diversity, equity, and inclusion

Just like with the other common genres that we’ve discussed so far, presentations are developed for a specific audience. So, you need to consider how your audience might best receive the information that you are working to communicate. Presentations are a great way to reach an audience, and as a communicator you get to explore various communication modes and approaches. As with anything else, what might work for one audience would not work for another audience; think back to the different ways to communicate the process of conducting a Covid-19 nasal test. Each example was effective, but only in the context of their intended audience.

Technical presentations are a specific genre that often take the complex, lengthy information included in a formal report and condenses and translates that information in a way that includes visual and audio communication modes. Consider why it is useful to present information in various ways (as a formal report and as a 5-10 minute presentation). How might presenting information in various ways or formats increase accessibility? How might developing a presentation work towards equity of information access?

When creating a presentation, the principles of universal design are important things to keep in mind. One example might be adding captions if you create a presentation that has any audio component. The captions are essential for any audience members who are hearing impaired, AND they make it easier to absorb content and understand the audio for your entire audience. Remember that universal design means that accessibility of information is an essential part of your presentation: do not think about accessibility after you’ve created your content, but work it in from the beginning and throughout your process.

Technical presentations

Technical presentations can vary quite a bit in length and content, depending on your purpose, audience, and context (remember that the rhetorical situation is always relevant!). Generally speaking, a technical presentation will:

• Condense a longer text, such as a formal report
• Summarize the most important, useful, or meaningful information from that text
• Use visuals, text, and audio together in order to tell a story

Most often, presentations work to inform, to persuade, or both. All the things that we’ve discussed so far are important to consider when you create a presentation, including plain language, document design, and considering diversity, equity, and inclusion. Just as with any other genre, to create an effective presentation, you must understand your audience.

Google Slides

These are only 3 of many free tutorials available online.

When creating effective presentation slides, be sure that you balance the amount of information on each slide. Consider how your audience is interacting with these slides: they are not likely sitting down with so much time to carefully read through each one. Rather, they may only have a minute to take in all the content. So, less is often better than putting too much text on any one slide. It’s also important to use a variety of visual modes–such as graphics and images–along with text.

The text that you choose should summarize key points, and the images should reinforce or illustrate those points. Do not make your audience take in large blocks of text. Instead, summarize key questions, data points, findings, and conclusions. Show them examples that help to illustrate these important points, but do not overwhelm them. You cannot include everything in a presentation that you would include in a lengthy report. Rather, you must choose the most important pieces so that your audience has a clear idea of what you want them to take away from your project.

When planning and creating audio, be sure that you do not simply read the text from our slides. Instead, you can use the audio portion of your presentation to further explain key concepts. Give your reader a bit more detail, but do not overwhelm them. A presentation works to create a narrative or tell a story. The audio and text should complement each other, but not be exactly the same (if you’ve ever attended a presentation where the presenter read each slide out loud, you know how uninteresting that can be!).

Finally, consider accessibility when you design your presentation. Create closed captions or subtitles when recording audio, and be sure to incorporate the principles of universal design. Try to imagine how to make information accessible to your audience in regards to your text, your use of language and terminology, your use of visuals and graphics, and your use of audio.

Message titles

On way to create stronger, more memorable presentations is through the use of  message titles  rather than  subject titles  for each slide. It’s important to use strong titles, and a message title delivers a full message to your reader. A subject title is briefer and less specific. An example of the difference between a message title and subject title might be:

Subject title: 

Covid-19 prevention

Message title: 

How can I protect myself from Covid-19?

A message title is generally more effective for audiences because it provides more information. Further, delivering a full message helps audiences to retain the information presented in that slide and it frames what you cover in that section of your presentation. Remember that audiences must  listen  to your presentation and  read  your slides at the same time. Subject titles provide information, but message titles helps audiences place that information into a more specific framework. A message title delivers your message in a more complete way.

Condensing and remixing

While most formal reports use some sort of presentation software and rely on a combination of slides (which contain visuals and text) and audio (which may be spoken live as you present to an audience or may be recorded ahead of time), there are other ways to remix and present information in a condensed and useful way. As technology develops, so does the presentation genre. For example, podcasts, videos, or websites might be useful in place of a technical presentation, again depending on the audience, purpose, and context.

If you are enrolled in WRIT 3562W, you are not asked to create a podcast or website; however, you may come across such genres and want to use them as sources in your own report. And, you will likely want to (or be asked to!) create a website or podcast someday. So how can you begin to take information presented in something like a formal report and revise, translate, and remix it for a completely different medium?

First, consider the rhetorical situation and reflect on your own experiences as a website user or a podcast listener. Which websites do you like best? Which podcasts do you enjoy? Then, do some reflection and analysis and consider the following questions:

• When interacting with a website, what features are most important to you? How are you typically interacting with content (do you want to be able to search for something specific, do you want something easy to skim, do you want to deeply read all the text, etc.)?
• Think of the easiest to navigate website you’ve visited recently; what specific features made it easy to navigate? How did it use text, images, alignment, repetition, contrast, colors, language to help you know how to find and understand information?
• Think of the most difficult to navigate website that you’ve ever visited; what made it difficult? What specific features can you identify or isolate that made it hard to find information?
• Consider your favorite podcast; how does the creator(s) organize the content and present information clearly? How long does it take to listen to? What environment do you usually listen to podcasts in (your car, at home, using headphones, on a speaker while you cook dinner…). What specific features can you identify or isolate that make it enjoyable?

These types of reflection questions help you to make decisions about the texts that you create. They are useful when considering conventions or strengths of specific genres, AND they are useful when you have to create a genre that is completely new to you. Remember that analyzing the rhetorical situation and genre conventions together make it manageable as you approach any new communication task.

Throughout this text, we’ve discussed technical communication as rhetorical, as always concerned with diversity, equity, and inclusion, how we define or set the boundaries for technical communication, and the conventions of common genres. As you continue your education and practice as a technical communicator, or as you approach any new communication situation, keep doing the work of analysis and reflection. Consider how each act of communication engages a specific audience for a specific purpose. Even the most seemingly objective genres require you to make choices: what information do you include, whose voices and experiences do you elevate, how do you take in feedback and revise your texts, how do you approach research in a way that reduces bias and incorporates marginalized experiences–these are all important pieces of the communication process. As technical communication continues to develop and evolve, and as technology and genres also change, keep these considerations in mind.

Activity and Reflection: Presenting information 

Together or with a partner, find a presentation (you can search YouTube for technical presentations or Ted Talks). Reflect on the following questions to perform a  rhetorical analysis  on the presentation:

• Who is the target audience for this presentation? How can you tell?
• What is the main purpose or goal of the presentation? How can you tell?
• What did you like about the presentation (be specific)? What features make it effective?
• What would you change, and why?
• How does the presentation use  text  and audio  together to deliver a message? How do these elements complement each other?

Introduction to Technical and Professional Communication Copyright © 2021 by Brigitte Mussack is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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8 Tips for presenting a paper at an academic conference

• Promoting your Research

Oct 12, 2016

Presenting at an academic conference is an important part of a researcher’s life, and is an opportunity that most young researchers look forward to. However, while it is no doubt an exciting experience, it presents a scary prospect for most researchers. It is natural for even senior and experienced researchers to feel a tad nervous while addressing a large audience, but for young researchers who are presenting for the first time, the whole process can be overwhelming.

The key to an effective conference presentation lies in being well-prepared. Here are a few tips that will make the process smoother for you:

1.  Write your paper with the audience in mind: A conference paper should be different from a journal article. Remember that your paper is meant to be heard , not read .  Audiences typically have lower attention spans than readers; therefore, keep the content simple and straightforward. Structure the paper well, with a clear introduction, body, and conclusion. Use language that is simple and clear. Explain any technical terms that you have used and provide a quick recap of the main points wherever needed.

2. Adhere to time limits: Generally, paper presentation sessions at conferences are 20-30 minutes long, so prepare your material accordingly. Also, be prepared for any last-minute changes in session timings. If you have been allotted 20 minutes, be ready with a short skeleton outline, just in case the speaker before you has overshot his/her time limit and you only get 10 minutes to present. Conversely, keep some extra material handy because you may get 30 minutes instead of 20.

3. Rehearse in front of a friend: Reading in your mind will not help you keep time simply because reading aloud in front of an audience takes longer. Rehearsing a few times in front of a friend or in front of the mirror, so that you are familiar with the content, will boost your confidence. Recording a video of your practice sessions is also a good idea as you can view them later and understand where you need to improve. However, don’t rehearse too much just before the actual session, or your voice might sound dull and tired.

4. Start confidently:  How you begin your presentation matters a great deal. You will have to gain the audience’s confidence and attention within the first 10-20 seconds of your session. Begin with a quick introduction about yourself as this will help establish your credibility. Make sure you prepare for this in advance. Carefully select a few highlights and be ready with a brief self-introduction. Here’s an example:  “Good morning everybody! My name is Tom Smith. I am a post graduate in medicine from the University of Michigan, New York and I have spent the past five years working at the Department of Internal Medicine, JJ Hospital. Today, I am going to present a paper titled …..”

5. Maintain eye contact with the audience: As you begin your presentation, smile. Be calm, and breathe deep. This will help you relax and dissolve any awkwardness between you and the audience.  Be mindful of your posture: stand straight and hold your head up. This will help you make eye contact with the audience and will also make your voice more audible. Do not read to the desk. Talk clearly, loudly, and energetically. But don’t be too fast: remember that there could be people in the audience whose native language is not English. Take advantage of pauses to look up at your audience, give your audience time to react to what you say, or to let what you said sink in, or to just let yourself breathe and be more composed.

6. Use transitions: Remember to use transitions when moving from one idea to another: transitions ensure a smooth flowing presentation. Some useful transitions are “furthermore,” “in addition,” “consequently,” “meanwhile,” “finally,” etc. When using the same idea twice, you can begin with “A similar idea is” or “Another example is,” etc. When giving a point-by-point explanation, it is best to mention the total number of points at the outset; for example: “There are reasons for this. The first reason is….; the second reason is; etc.” This approach will help readers keep track of the points you are discussing. Additionally, sometimes a simple pause or a direct statement such as “Let’s move to the next part of the presentation” or “To move on to another idea” is also an effective way to introduce a new section, idea, or perspective.

7. Encourage questions and discussions:  

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Senior Editor, Editage Insights. Researcher coach since 2015

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Top 6 Trending Technical Topics for Presentation (2023)

Dominik Sumer

Oct 23, 2023 · 7 min read

Do you need help selecting the perfect technical topic for your next presentation?

Don't worry. We've got you covered!

Three key elements you should know:

• Identify the purpose of your presentation
• Understand your target audience
• Select the topic that aligns with your expertise

Crafting an effective technical presentation can help you engage the audience correctly.

Before giving your next talk, let's dive in and discuss the trending topics you should consider.

6 Technical Topics for Your Next Presentation

Smartly select a topic with this guide on AI advancements and developments.

Here is a comprehensive list of the trending technical topics to impress your audience.

AI for Developers

AI technologies have revolutionized the way developers approach software development.

Developers can now create intelligent applications using machine learning, Natural Language Processing (NLP), and computer vision to learn and adapt to user behavior.

Some popular AI technologies for developers include:

• Generative AI
• Open AI Models or ChatGPT
• TensorFlow, OpenCV & PyTorch

Developers can use these tools to create intelligent applications that process large amounts of data, recognize patterns, and make predictions.

You can use this topic idea to explain complex code snippets by using Snappify.

Snappify can help you with technical code presentations smoothly:

• With the support of AI, you can generate what code does
• Proper animations from slide to slide can help engage the audience
• Pretty code pieces explain the complexity clearly.
• The export capability lets you move your slides into images, videos, gifs, or PDFs.

Code Snippet Example:

Slides Example:

Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality

Virtual Reality ( VR ) and Augmented Reality ( AR ) are rapidly advancing technologies transforming how we interact with digital content.

VR allows users to engage in a new computer-generated environment, while AR overlays digital elements in the real world. In Simple words, virtual reality is interactive, while augmented reality is merely observational.

These technologies have numerous applications across various industries, including development, gaming, education, healthcare, e-commerce, and marketing.

By creating a more engaging and interactive user experience, VR and AR can help businesses stand out from their competitors and reach new audiences.

As these technologies continue to evolve, it will be exciting to see how they shape the future of our digital experiences.

Examples of AR and VR:

• Motion Gaming chairs in Malls that use VR headsets
• Mobile apps like AR Emoji Stickers, AR Emoji Studio, etc
• Snapchat has a dedicated AR Bar.

Create your next presentation

snappify will help you to create stunning presentations and videos.

This video was created using snappify 🤩

Internet of Things (IoT) and Smart Home Technology

IoT refers to the interconnectivity of physical devices that can exchange data.

This technological progress has revolutionized how we interact with our devices and the world.

IoT has created more intelligent and efficient systems in various fields like healthcare, agriculture, transportation, home systems, etc.

With IoT, devices can communicate with each other, gather data, and make decisions with little or no human intervention, leading to increased productivity, reduced costs, and improved safety.

IoT devices examples:

• Home Security
• Weight Management (Like RealMe Weight Scale)
• Smart Locks, Camera, Ovens and more

Cybersecurity and Data Privacy

Cybersecurity and data privacy are two crucial aspects of technology that organizations and individuals must prioritize.

Cybersecurity protects computer systems, networks, and sensitive information from unauthorized access or attacks by hackers, malware, or other cyber threats.

Data privacy protects personal information from being collected, shared, or used without consent.

With the surge of technology in our daily lives, it is essential to safeguard our online presence.

You can talk about:

• Role of AI in Cybersecurity
• Challenges and solutions for securing the Internet of Things
• Importance of updating software
• Malware (viruses, worms, trojans, ransomware), Phishing, Man-in-the-middle attacks, DDoS attacks, etc.
• Tools and Resources that can protect the online world

Robotics and Automation

Robotics and automation are fields that focus on the development of robots and automation systems.

Robotics aims to design, build, and program robots to perform tasks that are too dangerous, time-consuming, or complex for humans.

Automation, on the other hand, involves using machines to automate repetitive tasks. It can include software management, data scraping, automated code review , etc.

Robotics and automation are rapidly growing with an interest in cobots, robots that learn from their environment, and AI integration for better decision-making.

• Chatbots like (ChatGPT AI-Powered robotic technology)
• Automation tools like (Zapier, Pabbly Connect, and more)

Blockchain Technology and Cryptocurrency

Blockchain Technology and Cryptocurrency are two different but related technologies.

Blockchain is a technology that enables secure and transparent record-keeping of various data types, including financial transactions, medical records, and intellectual property.

Cryptocurrency is a form of digital money secured by cryptography and used to pay for goods and services.

• Money Transfer (Blockchain facilitates efficient money transfer by reducing third-party fees and bureaucratic hurdles)
• NFTs(Non-Fungible Tokens)
• Logistics (Blockchain can improve transparency and efficiency in supply chains)

Recommended tools for Technical Presentations:

Well, there are many options available to create presentations.

Here are some of the best tools:

• Snappify (Beautifully present code snippets with animations)
• Canva (Lots of graphic elements, icons, illustrations, and more)
• Keynote (Specific for Mac users but very powerful)
• Video Scribe, Create Studio, and PowToon (Explain complexity in a more fun and animated way)

Conclusion:

Choosing the right technical topic for your presentation is crucial in capturing your audience's interest and delivering a compelling presentation.

You can also use these topic ideas for other platforms like YouTube, TED Talks, B2D Marketing , social media campaigns, and more.

Each presentation topic offers unique insights into the advancements and innovations shaping our future.

When presenting complex topics, making your content engaging, understandable, and interactive is important. Utilize graphics, animations, and interactive elements to improve audience awareness.

How can I come up with a good topic for my presentation?

When developing a presentation topic, consider your audience's interests, brainstorm ideas, research current trends, and choose based on your expertise or passion.

What are some tips to make my presentation engaging?

Use visuals, storytelling, and Q&A sessions to engage your audience during presentations. Provide relevant takeaways or actionable tips.

How should I structure my presentation?

Organizing your presentation into clear sections with headings and subheadings is recommended to guide your audience through a logical flow.

How can I make my speech impactful?

Start strong, make eye contact, use body language, vary tone, and show passion to make an impactful speech.

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Preparing a Technical Session Presentation

The PowerPoint presentation template can be found in the author kit. Please create the following slides as a part of your presentation:

Slide 1 | Introductory slide

• Include your paper number and title.
• Include your author and company name and/or logo information. Note: This should be the only slide to contain your company name/logo.

Slide 2 | Information slide

• Main content of your presentation in a One-Column or Two-Column Format.
• Enter Paper #, Paper Title, and Presenter Name at the bottom of the slide.
• Copy and insert this slide as many times as needed for your content.

Slide 3 | Acknowledgement, thank you, questions in a One-Column Format Slide 4 | Acknowledgement, thank you, questions slide in a Two-Column Format

• This slide should be displayed during your Q&A time.

Bad Slide Example

GoodSlide Example

• To test the font, stand back six feet from the monitor and see if you can read the slide.
• Select sans-serif fonts such as Arial or Helvetica. Avoid serif fonts such as Times New Roman or Palatino as they are sometimes more difficult to read.
• Titles 40-48 pt
• Subtitles 28-36 pt
• Body Type 24-36 pt
• Clearly label each screen and use a different color for the slide title.
• Use a single font for most of the presentation. Use different colors, sizes, and styles (bold, underlined) for impact.
• Avoid italicized fonts as they are difficult to read quickly.
• No more than 6 bullet points per slide
• No more than 6 words per bullet point
• Every 6th slide should have a graphic
• Use dark text on light background or light text on dark background.
• Do not use all caps except for titles.
• Limit the number of colors on a single screen.
• Bright colors make small objects and thin lines stand out. However, some vibrant colors are difficult to read when projected.
• Use no more than four colors on one chart.
• Ensure strong color contrast between the background and text to make the presentation easy to read.
• Check all colors on a projection screen before the actual presentation. They may project differently than what appears on the monitor.

Graphics and Design

• Keep the background consistent and subtle.
• Use only enough text when using charts or graphs to clearly explain and label the graphic.
• Keep the design clean and uncluttered. Leave empty space around the text and graphics.
• Bar charts compare data
• Line graphs visualize trends
• Box charts illustrate makeup of an organization
• Pie charts emphasize the relationship of parts of the whole
• Photographs and animation clips best depict realism
• Try to use the same style graphics throughout the presentation (e.g. cartoon, photographs).
• Limit the number of graphics or animations on each slide.
• Check all graphics on a projection screen before the actual presentation.
• Avoid flashy graphics and noisy animation effects unless they relate directly to the slide.
• Limit the number of transitions used. It is often better to use only one so the audience knows what to expect.

General Presentation

• Orientation should be landscape.
• Keep in mind the time limit for your presentation. A good rule of thumb is 1-2 slides per minute.
• Use action words to reinforce ideas rather than complete sentences.
• Check the spelling and grammar.
• It is often more effective to have bulleted points appear one at a time so the audience listens to the presenter rather than reading the screen.
• No commercialism. Company/Organization-branded templates should not be used.

Speaking Tips

• Do not read the presentation. Practice the presentation so you can speak from bullet points. The text should be a cue for the presenter rather than a message for the viewer.
• Give a brief overview at the start, present the information and wrap up by reviewing important points.
• Use a wireless mouse/remote or pick up the wired mouse so you can move around as you speak.
• If sound effects are used, wait until the sound has finished before speaking.
• Do not turn your back to the audience.
• Do not include judgmental remarks or opinions about the technical competence, personal character, or motivations of any individual, company, or group. Any material that does not meet these standards will be returned with a request for revision before the conference.

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Technical Paper Presentation Topics for Electrical Engineering

• by Ravi Bandakkanavar
• April 19, 2023

This post lists Technical paper presentation topics for Electrical Engineering. You can click on the links to get more details. Write to us if you need further details on any topic. 

• Adaptive Piezoelectric energy harvesting circuit
• Advancements in Inverter Technology for Industrial Applications
• Wireless power theft monitoring
• Artificial intelligence in power station
• Application of micro-controller in vehicle monitoring and security system
• Artificial Neural Networks Based Power System Restoration
• Automated Advanced Distribution System
• Advanced Signal Processing Schemes for Power Line Communication
• Axial-Field Electrical Machines
• Microbial fuel cell
• Power generation through Thermoelectric generators
• Bidirectional generators
• Boosting Motoring Efficiency using Small Chips
• Brushless Motors
• Brushless Servo Motors
• Biomass Gasifier for thermal and electrical applications
• Piezo Ceramic Servo Motors
• Composite Insulators
• Bomb Detection Robotics using Embedded Controller
• Traffic Light Control System
• Contactless Energy Transfer Systems
• A Direct Torque-Controlled Interior Permanent Magnet Synchronous Motor (IPMSM)
• Design of IC Amplifiers for touch Sensors
• Superconducting Rotating Machines
• 12 Phase Capacitor
• Distribution System Relaying
• DSP (Digital Signal process) based Motor Control System
• Electric cars
• Electric field optimization of high voltage electrode based on neural network
• Electrical and chemical diagnostics of transformer insulation

Suggested Read: Technical paper presentation topics for CSE Technical paper presentation topics for ECE

• Electricity generation from Ocean Waves
• Electrorheological fluid
• Electromagnetic Brakes
• System on chip
• Electrostatic Discharge ( ESD ) Energy chains
• Electrostatic precipitator
• Emergency Power Systems
• Energy Saving Motors
• Generation of Electricity from Wind Power
• High Bandwidth low Noise Amplifier with improved stability over Radio Frequency range
• Simulation of low-power converter for electromagnetic vibration driven generator
• Energy transmission system for an artificial heart leakage inductance compensation
• Explosive Flux Compression Generator
• Fast quasi-static capacitance extraction using CSurf
• Fault location in Grounded and High resistance Grounded systems
• Fiber-optic devices for local area network application
• Floating Power plant
• Fly ash Utilization
• Arcjet rocket
• Electrostatic generator
• Fuel Cells on Aerospace
• Gas Insulated Powerhouse Stations
• High voltage circuit breakers
• High-Temperature Nuclear Reactors for Space Applications
• HVDC Technology and Short Circuit Contribution of HVDC Light
• HVDC/FACTS (Flexible AC Transmission Systems)
• Hybrid Distributed Generation Systems
• Hybrid electric vehicles
• Icing of Power Transmission lines
• IMode: inception, presence, and impact
• Improving Electrical System Reliability with Infrared Thermography
• Integrated Gate Commutated Thyristor ( IGCT )
• Lightning Protection Using LFA-M (Long Flashover Arresters)
• Line Reactors and VFDs
• Smart Antenna
• Wireless MIMO-Antenna based Communication System
• Sixth Sense Technology
• Bubble Power
• Live Line Maintainance of transmission lines
• Low smoke zero halogen cable
• Low voltage differential signaling (LVDS)
• Magnetless Motors
• Magnetic Launching
• Magnetic Levitation
• MEMS a pollution free option for power generation
• Metamorphic Robots
• Single phase neutral point clamped AC/DC converter with power factor corrector and active filter
• Servomotor Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI)
• Seasonal Influence on Safety of Substation Grounding
• Resistojet Rocket
• Residual Bus Auto Transfer System
• Remote Monitoring and Thought inference
• SPWM modulation technique for multilevel inverter
• Pumped Hydroelectric Energy Storage
• Protection of Transmission Systems using Global Positioning System
• Prepaid Energy meter
• Prediction of the closest margin to restore Power System Solvability
• PPTC Devices for Protection of Battery Packs
• Power System Harmonics
• Power System Contingencies
• Polymeric Positive Temperature Coefficient (PPTC)
• Piezoelectric Actuators
• Piezo Electric Motors
• Opto-Electric Battery
• Optimum VAR Control
• Numerical and Computational Methods
• Nuclear Power Potential as Major Energy Source
• Nomad Expert Technician System
• Neutral networks in process control
• Neural Networks and Fuzzy Logic
• Nanotechnology
• Motors Without Mechanical Transmissions
• Modern Surge Arresters
• Modeling of Transformers with Internal Incipient Faults
• Magneto-Optical Current Transformer Technology (MOCT)
• Applications of Microwaves
• Microprocessor based power theft identification
• Microprocessor based Alternator Synchronisation
• Micro-power Generator
• Micro Turbine Generator System
• Micro Power Electrostatic Generator (MEG)
• Micro Electro Mechanical Systems (MEMS)
• MEMS (Micro Electro Mechanical) technology
• Micro Batteries
• Software Packages
• Photovoltaic thermal hybrid solar collector
• Solar Power Generation Process
• Solid Oxide Fuel Cell
• Solid state drives
• Solid State Motor Controller
• Special electrical machines
• Spintronics (spinelectronics or fluxtronics)
• Standby Power Systems
• Power-System Frequency and Stability Control using Decentralized Intelligent Loads
• Energy storage ultracapacitors
• Z-source inverter for adjustable speed drives
• Wireless Power Theft Monitoring
• Static VAR (Voltage Ampere Reactive) compensator
• Sterling Radioisotope Generator (SRG)
• Substation Earthing System (Grounding system)
• Shielding and Grounding Practices for Control Cables
• Super Conducting Generator
• Super Conducting Magnetic Energy Storage Systems
• Superconductivity
• Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) Systems in Power Stations
• Surge current protection using superconductors
• Swing Power generators
• Synchronous Voltage Source
• Development of a technique for on-line detection of shorts in fields of Turbine Generator Rotor
• Telluric Current
• Terrestrial Photovoltaics (PVs)
• The Global Voltage Regulation
• Thermal Imaging
• Thermal imaging for roofing inspections
• Transient over voltages in electrical distribution system and suppression techniques
• Trends in appliance Motors
• Troubleshooting and Repair Procedures
• Ultra Low-Power Microphone Pre-Amplifier
• Ultra Low-Power Radio Receiver for Biomedical Applications
• Ultrasonic Motor
• Voltage Sag Analysis
• Wavelet-based Multi-function relay for E.H.V Transmission lines
• Wideband Spectrum Sensing for Cognitive Radio Systems
• Wavelet Transforms
• White LED: The Future Lamp
• Written-Pole Technology
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34 thoughts on “Technical Paper Presentation Topics for Electrical Engineering”

Hi .i am electrical and electronic engineering student undergraduate first year. I have to do oral presentation related to my main course but i even don’t have any idea of topic to present. Please help.

I need interesting & new technology topics in electrical engineering for seminar

You may want to go for “e-Nose”

Brother, i am from S1 EEE. which is the simple and good topic among this list to make a ppt??? Please replay fast as you can.

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