Researcher's Toolkit: Preparing for Presentations

Some dissertation courses will have a presentation as part of the assessment, so we thought we’d give you some practical advice that should help you to prepare. For many people, the thought of formally speaking in front of others is quite intimidating, but with a little bit of preparation it might not be quite as scary as it sounds.

In terms of content, there are five key elements of a research presentation:

Context—why is this an interesting thing to do, what have other people said about it, and what were your aims and objectives?
Method—how did you address those aims and objectives, that is, what did you do?
Findings—what did you find in relation to your aims and objectives? (The weight of the content is usually on this component.)
Conclusions—a summary of the findings, and why they are important.
Questions—this isn’t always the case, but there is often some time for the audience to ask questions about your research.

If you are to transpose this into ‘slides’ for a presentation, it might look something like this:

A title slide, including your details
1 slide about context, and perhaps another that clearly sets out the aims and objectives
1 slide about methods (including research strategy, research design, sample and data collection methods, techniques of analysis)
3 or 4 slides on your findings, try to make them reflect your aims and objectives
1 slide concluding the talk, including key points and a summary of why the research is important
1 slide thanking the audience and ‘any question’

There might be a requirement to include a slide of references used in the talk, and you may also have an overview of the talk after the title slide. However, you can verbally introduce what you are going to do over the title slide, so an overview slide is not always necessary.

In terms of presentation, slides should be used to express key points to the audience—that you can talk to and around during your presentation. Remember that you will be looking at your audience, not at the slides. This means that they are not really there to prompt you, but instead to anchor key issues in the mind of the audience. Be clear and concise when presenting material, less is usually better than more, and try not to think of your slides as an expression of your personality. Don’t use wacky fonts or strange colours. Visual images are fine as they can draw people into your talk, but don’t overdo it. This is also true of animations.

In terms of what to say, we tend to advise students to ‘know what you are going to say, not necessarily how you are going to say it’. If you read from a script, it will become formulaic, but if you try to speak ‘off the top of your head’, it is very easy to ramble.

But a really quick tip to help you develop a script so you can familiarize yourself with what you are going to say and how it might sound, is to use the voice typing function in Google Docs. So when practising your presentation, get a microphone (most Android and Apple phones will have an in-built one), and use the voice typing tool as you are talking. Google will automatically transcribe your talk. Of course, we don’t speak like we write, so you’ll have to do some editing, but doing this will reveal where ‘weak spots’ in your talk might be and gives you the opportunity to fill them in before you present your work. The purpose here isn’t to read out the transcript verbatim in your final presentation, but it gives you something concrete to work with in terms of the content of your talk.

To help you develop your understanding of what a bad and a good presentation might look like and differ from one another, we have provided you with:

Author Guidance on Academic Presentations
Example 1: A Bad Presentation (downloadable document)
Video of a Bad Presentation
Example 2: A Better Presentation (downloadable document)
Video of a Better Presentation