Tips for oral presentations

***TIPS FOR ORAL PRESENTATIONS.
This guide is intended to give a few tips for your presentation. It is neither
complete nor precise. You must decide what is appropriate for you and your topic,then
go with it. What is important is that you plan!
Timing
An individual presentation is allocated 30 minutes (this could be an hour if you
are in a large team, in which case scale the timingsup). This includes about 5-10
minutes for questions. You should plan on 20-25 minutes for your presentation, and
you must not take more than the total allotted time. After your preparedpresentation,
you will lead a short period of discussion and entertain questions. You should plan on
interacting with your audience during this period (perhaps during the entire 30
minutes). If, when youfinish, no one has any questions or comments, it is your
responsibility to stimulate some discussion. One way to do this is to leave out
something in your talk that you expect them to question,then turn the question on the
audience if they are silent.
You are expected to rehearse your presentation, so you do not finish extremely
quickly, and you do not run overtime (in which case youwill be cut off). Speak at a
normal pace (not too fast, and not too slow to bore the audience). Usually, it is effective
to use cadence to emphasize a key point: a slowdown brings attention to thepoint,
especially if there is a visual aid on which to focus. This could also work against you if
you inadvertently change cadence over a minor point.
Content
Your objective is tocommunicate with your audience; oral presentation has a
different associative mechanism than a written report (gestures and tones, for example,
are important).
Your basic outline should be the following:1. Introduction - tell them what you are going to say;
2. Background - introduce necessary terms (illustrate complex ones with
examples);
3. Main Results - tell them what you have to...