This post is part of our blog series The Unwritten Curriculum. Check out our posts in this series (How to apply to grad school, The grad student life, How to submit a paper, Demystifying the qualifying exams, How to do a remote postdoc, How to apply for a tenure track faculty job in ecology, and Paths to ecology I, II, and III). Please see the companion post How to prepare for a faculty job interview.
Giving great talks is an essential, yet undervalued, skill for being a successful scientist. Because talks afford you creative ways to convey your work through words, visuals, and personal connection, they can be much more compelling and memorable than research papers. For job interviews in particular, giving a stellar talk is a prerequisite for getting an offer. (Please see the companion post for more advice on preparing for a faculty job interview.)
The best talk advice* I ever got was: always talk about your best work. Tailor it to the audience and setting and come up with a framing and transitions that make it make sense as part of a bigger picture, but find a way to highlight your most important 2-3 research findings. The best talks tell a story. What are the most important 2-3 research findings you want to convey, and for each: what is the importance of the problem; what was known before; how did your unique approach move the field forward; what was your key result; and what is the implication of your result?
Take the time to come up with a compelling way to frame your best work as part of a cohesive whole. For me, this meant coming up with a way to connect research on the impact of the fungal pathogen Black Fingers of Death on the outcome of competition between native and invasive grasses to the impacts of climate change on malaria. What is the common thread? How are human impacts on the environment affecting the dynamics and impacts of infectious disease? This framing really helped me to envision the scope of my research program and what future directions I might pursue, and I continue to use this framework (which I came up with by following the “always talk about your best work” advice for my dissertation exit seminar).
Once you have decided on the content and framing, attention to detail goes a very long way in making talks clear, polished, and memorable.
Some details to consider:
Make sure to clearly acknowledge your collaborators and funding sources. You do not want to seem to be taking all the credit without acknowledging what others contributed. This can be done at the beginning, at the end, or section by section as you introduced the people involved in each project.
Make sure that every image or figure shown on your slides has a purpose, and that you explain every figure clearly by walking through what is shown on the axes and in each line or data series. This means that figures should be presented only when they are essential to understanding the message. Take the time to make the figures clear and readable, which often requires making axis labels larger, removing extraneous panels and lines, adding annotations that aid in visual interpretation, and changing color schemes and fonts to be consistent across figures from different papers. It is very rare that a table is an effective display item in a talk.
Limit the use of figures from other people’s work (and your own) to only those that are absolutely essential. Every figure you show requires careful work to make it readable and time to clearly explain it, and it requires mental effort on the part of the audience to interpret it. Save their precious brain space and attention span for the figures that are really important. This means resisting the urge to flip through many figures from previously published papers during your introduction just to show that something has been previously studied. Likewise, I am not a big fan of showing snapshots of published papers as a way of demonstrating that there is previous literature on a topic; instead, I would recommend a visually compelling picture, possibly accompanied by brief descriptions of key previous results, with parenthetical citations at the bottom of the slide.
A small amount of supporting text is very important for making sure that the audience grasps your key points, but limit the use of text on your slides to short, easy-to-read, informative statements or bullet points. Large blocks of text are almost never effective because they detract the audience’s attention away from listening to you. If you need to put down a large amount of text to convey an important point, animate it and use bold for emphasis so that each key part appears separately.
Another great piece of advice* I received on talks: don’t constantly be flipping. It is disorienting to move through many slides very quickly, especially if the visual format of those slides change. Instead, choose a consistent visual format and add and remove information as you move through a story, and spend ample time explaining the content of each slide before moving on. Animations can be very helpful for this, for example by first introducing the headline of a slide, then the axes of a plot so you can explain them, then adding the data points or lines, then adding small arrows or text boxes to annotate the key parts of the figure for the audience to absorb, then adding a concluding statement summarizing the key take-home point.
Use color to signify meaning. For example, if your talk has two parts, you can use two distinct color schemes for the titles and text as a way of visually orienting the audience to where you are in the talk. Choose a consistent color to use for a given treatment or condition and keep that consistent across all plots, so that the audience can quickly and intuitively understand the logic of new figures. Make sure your color schemes are color-blind friendly and generally pleasing to the eye.
Use consistent and readable fonts, and make sure all text is large enough to read from far away (e.g., 22-point or larger unless it is text that is not meant to be read, such as an image credit). My current favorites are Century Gothic and Avenir, but you can’t go wrong with Arial.
Make sure that all images you use in the talk are high-quality and visually compelling. More than at any other time in your career, now is the time to spend extra time searching for great pictures (give image credits at the bottom), developing nice line drawings or icons to represent study species, making beautiful diagrams of life cycles or models, and making sure your layouts are readable and visually pleasing. The time you invest now will continue to pay off for years down the road as you keep using and updating these images and slides for future talks.
Showcase your publication record by including small parenthetical citations at the bottom of each slide corresponding to the results you show. This doesn’t need to be showy, but can be helpful for putting your CV in context so the audience sees how your papers fit together into a research program.
It always surprises me how often people give really good talks but then at the end either trail off, end with multiple false summits, or otherwise stop awkwardly or abruptly, leaving the audience uncomfortable and unsure when to clap. I try to always come up with a compelling last line that is written partially or in full on my last slide, say that concluding point, and then say “thank you very much, and I’d be happy to take any questions.” I say it the same way every time because it helps me to end decisively and without wandering or trailing, and it makes it very clear to the audience when the talk is over.
As you work on beautifully preparing the content, practice delivering the talk as well. I recommend practicing the talk in full as early and often as you can. In preparing for my faculty job interviews, I practiced my talk every workday for a month before my first interview. It got better and I got more comfortable each time, and the time I invested continues to pay off as I still feel comfortable and confident giving talks and have to practice much less now. (This amount of effort should obviously be scaled based on the importance and length of the talk and how often you’ve given it in the past.) Make sure to give practice talks to trusted colleagues and advisers who will give candid feedback, ideally at a stage that is polished enough that they can actually give specific feedback but where you still have enough time to significantly revamp the talk if needed. Also practice the talk on your own, and as you would actually give it: standing up, using your slide clicker and body language, projecting your voice, and trying not to read off of your notes. Try to push through any mistakes and awkwardness and keep going, like you would during the real thing, to practice keeping your composure. Make notes of where you keep getting tripped up or stuck and consider rehearsing specific language that helps get you through that section (for example, an opening sentence, a specific way of phrasing a difficult concept, or a transition). When I say ‘rehearse,’ I don’t mean script and memorize: try to keep it natural and conversational, but prepare some phrasing that you can easily recall and repeat so you won’t stumble.
Make sure to conclude your talk by returning to the big picture (including some of the visual images that you used in the introduction), reminding the audience of your 2-3 key results and what their implications are, and giving a preview of the kinds of directions this science could inspire in the future. For a job talk, this preview should be more extensive and include more concrete future research ideas that, if it makes sense, are tailored to the location and university.
*Who gave me all this great advice, you ask? Jonathan Levine, that’s who.