Presentation Recommendations

If you are creating a presentation, here are some recommendations:

Use the Assertion-Evidence format

The first step is to make sure you tell a good story. Often the trick, when faced with tight time bounds, is to *highlight* the best results while pointing to the paper for details. Your goal isn't to retell the whole paper but to convince the viewer that they need to go read the paper.

My go-to source for slides is Michael Ally’s work in the area:

• Start with the Tutorial on Creating and Delivering an Assertion-Evidence Presentation

If you are presenting a paper or original research, check out:

• Model Research Presentations by Graduate Students

If you have an hour:

• Check out Michael Alley's 2011 NSF talk

Stylistic and Typographic Recommendations

• Be sure there is a page number on each slide.
• Be careful about pasting in screen shots — frequently you are better off pasting in text and letting PowerPoint or Keynote or Acrobat render the fonts with the computer's anti-aliased fonts.
• If you have a headline that breaks into two lines, see if you can make it be just one line by slightly shrinking the text.
• Be sure that every image is referenced with its source---for example, by having the URL where you found it clearly indicated in small type.
• Only use images that you are legally allowed to use. Typically this is imagery that is distributed under an appropriate Creative Commons license or that are distributed for publicity purposes.

Notes for weekly briefings and other reoccurring meetings

• Make sure the first slide has the date and time of the meeting
• Include a link to the archive of all previous slides
• All file names should be in the form Briefing Name-YYYY-MM-DD.docx so that they sort properly when put in a directory.