Guidelines for presentations

The following is a set of guidelines for preparing slides for presentations. A good presentation has several important components apart from the content itself. If these are missed, then even if the technical content is good, the audience will not appreciate your work. So it is important to spend time just in preparing the presentation. Specifically, pay attention to the following points. These are based on the common mistakes/shortcomings I have noticed in student presentations at IITK (and sometimes at other venues too).

• Use a font-size of at least size 16; each slide's title should typically be of size 40, and the first level bullets should start at least at 28
  
  
• Do not use too much text per slide, use pictures instead where possible. The thumb rule is that there should not be more than 8-9 lines max per slide.
• If a slide does need to have as much text as 8-9 lines, it is typically a good idea to also put a picture, even if only peripherally related to that particular slide. This helps in holding the attention of the audience, who would otherwise be put off on seeing a lot of text.
• Another idea to hold the attention of the audience when showing a slide with a lot of text, is to highlight important words in the text (as is done in this set of bullets!).
• Yet another approach is to have a single highlighted take-away bullet at the end of the slide. If the audience has lost you during the slide, they know exactly what to remember for the future slides.
  
  
• Do not use full sentences, or worse, paragraphs. Such uses should be rare, perhaps for important quotations. Use bullets to convey ideas.
• Never read text from the slide as you are presenting. The text in the slide is for the audience to read, as you explain the content. Again, an exception to this can be when you are showing a significant quotation from some source.
  
  
• If an idea can be conveyed using a picture/figure instead of a slide, use it. This may mean that you would have to spend 15 minutes drawing the figure, instead of just 2 minutes typing some text. But this extra time is well worth it!
• For graphs, be sure to make it clear and visible for the audience sitting in the rearmost rows. If you do a screenshot of your paper PDF, it typically does not show well at all on screen. If the audience cannot see the graph, you might as well not show the slide! For a graph, the various plots as well as the title/labels/legend have to be clearly visible. Again, if you spend a few extra minutes in generating a graph in a different format specifically for your presentation, it is well worth it.
  
  
• Practice, practice, practice. In my experience, there is no magic to a good presentation. Even the best and most experienced of orators do have to practice. Practicing means you should speak aloud, preferably in front of someone else. For my presentations, I typically practice multiple times.
• Revise, revise, revise. You usually never get a presentation right the first time. After you practice once, you will notice that several things are unclear, or can be presented better. Incorporate these changes in the next revision. For my presentations, I typically have to revise 3-4 times before it hits a point of diminishing returns.