Tips on Preparing for the Workshop
Tim Kehoe, October 2005
The organizing committee hopes that you receive valuable feedback on your research, that you learn a lot from the presentations of the other participants, and that you enjoy yourself during the workshop. Some of the participants from previous workshops suggested that I come up with a list of suggestions on preparing to present your research.
Communication of results is an essential component of economic research. Many economists prefer attending conferences, workshops, and seminars to reading working papers and journal articles as a way of picking up ideas. Good presenters are invited more often to present their results at conferences, workshops, and seminars than are bad presenters. In what follows, I provide advice on preparing for presentations. You should realize that these suggestions are based on my personal tastes about what I regard as a good presentation of economic research. Even if you disagree with some of these suggestions and choose to disregard them, however, I think that it would be worthwhile to read them through and to think about them:
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The fundamental ingredient in a good presentation is preparation. Try to get a friend or two to listen to you practice the presentation and to give you suggestions. Try to practice the presentation more than once. (I know that you are asking a lot of a friend to listen to your presentation, but that is the sort of thing that friends are for, and, besides, you can offer to return the favor in the future in one way or another.) Your friend does not have to be studying the same field of economics as you are. In fact, learning how to explain things to someone not in your field is an important skill. Practicing with someone not in your field will help you focus on being clear. (Of course, if you are going to be presenting to economics researchers, you want to practice with a friend who has training in economics.) Do not just use the sessions only to practice what words you will say: Be willing to change the organization and style of your presentation if your practice audience seems confused.
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In preparing for a presentation of your research,
one of the first things that you will need to decide is whether to use a
computer projector or an overhead projector. Sometimes the venue where you are invited
to speak does not have a computer projector. In that case, the choice has been made
for you. If you do have a choice, I
suggest using the computer projector. Some researchers have become proficient at using transparencies,
but, with a little work they can become as good or better at using the
computer projector. Slides projected
by the computer are cleaner than transparencies and, if you set things up
ahead of time, are always well centered. Furthermore, using the computer projector
prevents presenters who have developed bad habits using transparencies from
engaging in these habits, especially the habit of talking down to the
overhead projector while pointing to lines on a transparency, slowly moving
a piece of paper that covers the transparency down to reveal more and more
"secrets", or writing on the transparency. Every once in a while, I have seen a good presenter use a trick like
this, but, in general, anything that makes the presenter look down at the
overhead projector rather than up at the audience is a bad habit. At the end of these suggestions, I provide
some specific suggestions on preparing and using both computer slides and
transparencies.
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When you are preparing slides, use landscape layout and make sure that the font is large enough to be readable - The normal text should
be at least 22 font. Put a typical slide of each sort that you
will need (slides with equations, graphs, tables,
whatever) on a projector in a room of the size in which you will present,
and then go to the back of the room and make sure that you can read
it. If you use a word processor like
Scientific Workplace and are not yet proficient enough at it to produce
transparencies in large font, you need to find someone to help you or you
need to change to another word processor.
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An important byproduct
of making sure that font is large enough to read is that it will prevent
you from putting too much on each slide. In fact, when you are preparing your slides, you should think about
what is the point that each is supposed to make. You can be sure that, if you do not think
about this sort of question ahead of time, you will have to do so during
your presentation. One of the most
common questions during a presentation in is, What
do you want us to learn from this slide? or, more
bluntly, Why did you put this slide up? (This happens during presentations in which the audience is
engaged. In presentations where the
audience is too "polite" to ask such questions, they just start dozing off
or thinking of something else.) The
practice presentations that you give to your friends and colleagues are
good times to think about what your slides should look like. I usually find myself changing my slides
and even the whole organization of the presentation a time or two as a
result of the practice presentations.
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Keeping one idea to a slide also reduces the need
for the "slide with lots of secrets". Some presenters who use
transparencies cover a slide with a sheet of paper and slowly move it down
to reveal more and more of the slide. There are some presenters who do this well - probably because they
are good natural presenters, not because of this trick - but presenters who
do not do it well can irritate the audience. To be on the safe side, it is
best to keep one idea to a slide. Using landscape layout and a computer projector tends to reduce the
possibility for using this trick, but I have seen presenters use MS
PowerPoint in much the same way: New
ideas, sometimes in bright colors, come flying into the slide from all over the place. While I can imagine that this sort of
device can be effective if used sparingly, it can quickly become
distracting and irritating.
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If your presentation has graphs in it, make sure
they are readable. Although many software packages can make graphs, some
require a bit of human capital to make graphs that look good in
presentations. The best software package for making graphs is probably MS
Excel, but you need to learn how to use it. Start every graph by getting rid of the grey background or set up a
default graph without it. In
general, use text boxes to label lines rather than the "1980s style" legend
feature. Make sure that all the axis
labels are large enough to read. Try to avoid putting too many graphs on
one slide. If you are not going to say anything about a graph, then do not
include it. If you are using black
and white slides, then make sure your graphs use dashed lines or other
devices (besides color) to differentiate between
the different variables that are plotted.
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When you are practicing your presentation, think
about the mechanics. My preferred
way of doing things is to stand back from the projector and to point to
things on the screen, just as I would point to things on a chalkboard. Standing near the projector while talking
tends to make the speaker look down at the projector and talk to the
projector, rather than look at audience and talk to the audience. It also tends to block the view of the
screen of part of the audience. The
good thing about computer projectors is that they provide less of a
temptation for the nervous presenter to hover over than does an overhead
projector. (That said, all of us have probably encountered the humorous image
of a presenter who has developed the bad habit of pointing to lines on a
transparency on an overhead projector but who is now using a computer projector. The presenter is so intent on looking
down at the computer rather than up at the audience that he or she is
obviously pointing to lines on the computer screen totally oblivious to an
audience that can only guess what is going on.)
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Pay attention to the time during your practices
and during the presentation itself. Remember that some of the most important elements of each
presentation are the questions and suggestions from the audience and the
speaker's responses to them. Suppose
that you have 60 minutes for a presentation. You should probably prepare a talk that
would run 40-45 minutes without interruption. 50 or 75 minute presentations can be
structured proportionately. During
the presentation itself, you should be ready to add or subtract slides as
you get closer to the end. I usually
have a few extra slides that I think might be useful in answering questions
and that I can also include in the presentation if I end up having more
time that I had expected. Remember,
however, that there is nothing wrong in finishing a presentation a few
minutes early, but it is a crime to run over time!
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The toughest presentations to give are those
scheduled for 20 or 30 minutes. You
cannot just condense a 60 minute or 75 minute presentation into such a
short period by flashing up slides rapidly. (Of course, you can do so if you really want to, but your audiences
will not appreciate it.) If you have
to cut a full length presentation down to a short one, change the
philosophy of the presentation: In
20 or 30 minutes, the best you can do is try to get one idea across and to
try to convince the audience that it would be worth their time to read your
paper. What about 90 minute
presentations? Many researchers are
overjoyed at the prospect of expanding a 60 minute or 75 minute
presentation to 90 minutes. It gives
them a chance to ramble on and on. When invited to give such a long presentation, however, I tell the
organizer that I will cut it short. It is not that I do not enjoy rambling on and on about my work - I
do - it is just that I know how annoying it is to be in the audience while
a presenter is doing this. If an
audience wants to fill up the last 15 minutes of a 90 minute seminar period
by enthusiastically asking questions and discussing the research, that is
fantastic, but I try to stop the presentation itself by the 75 minute mark
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Since time
is precious to you in your presentation, you should think carefully about
how you want spend it. Long
introductions are almost always a bad idea, unless, of course, you really
have very little of substance to talk about. What the audience usually wants to learn
during the introduction is what is the question that you
intend to answer, why the question and the answer are important,
and, probably, what your answer is going to be. In general, audiences do not like
research presentations to be mysterious. Surprise endings are fine for novels and films, but usually not for
economic research.
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Remember in
preparing your introduction that the audience is probably not very
interested in your own personal history of economic thought. If your research is closely related to
other papers, it is worth briefly explaining the relationship. Long discussions of the literature and,
in particular, slides with long lists of papers, are usually a waste of
precious time during a presentation.
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It is worth
stressing that you need to try to pose a clear and interesting question in
the introduction and then to answer it during the rest of the
presentation. This is far more
difficult than it may sound. Put
another way: To make a good
presentation, you need to present a good paper.
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Even
economic researchers who have not done well in presentations in the past and
who think of themselves as bad public speakers can do a very good job
presenting their work. The trick is
to prepare and to practice!
You will learn a lot in
preparing for your presentation. You
can also learn a lot from the presentations of others. When invited to a conference or workshop,
or when attending a seminar at your own institution, try to take at least a
quick look at the paper or papers ahead of time. A useful list of questions that I ask of myself when I am going through a paper before a
presentation is: What question is
this paper trying to answer? What
sorts of tools does the author use to answer the question? What is the answer that the author comes
up with and does it make sense to me?
After attending a good
presentation, try to think of what the presenter did to make it so
good. Just as importantly, after
attending a bad presentation, try to think of what the presenter did to
make it so bad. You can get as many
ideas for improving your own presentations in bad presentations as in good
ones.
Using Computer Projectors
If you are planning to use a
computer projector for your presentation, you need to decide what format to
use. A very common format is Adobe's
Portable Document Format (PDF). In
my experience, MS PowerPoint is more useful for business presentations and
in teaching undergraduates and MBA students. I am sure that a good presenter could come
up with a good presentation of economic research that makes use of all of
the colors and things popping up and flying
around in PowerPoint, but I have not seen one yet. Below are some tips on giving a
presentation in PDF.
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PDF slides
are portable by their very construction; most computers you will encounter
will have a version of Adobe Reader. Not all computers will have the same
font sets, though, so it is very important, when creating PDFs, to embed
all the fonts. If you do not embed the fonts used in your slides, and the
machine you are using for your presentation does not have those fonts,
Reader will try to make font substitutions. These font
substitution can have unexpected effects: ¥ can be substituted for ε, for example. This is not only embarrassing, but
it can make your presentation impossible to follow. PDFs can be created from almost any
program: Microsoft Word, Scientific Workplace, and Latex distributions, to
name a few. If you are using Adobe
Acrobat/Distiller to make your PDFs you can embed all fonts by changing
your settings. For example, in a Microsoft Office application with Acrobat
installed, you can choose Change
Conversion Settings from the Adobe
PDF menu to get
to the settings dialog. Choose Advanced
Settings, click on the Fonts
tab and make
sure the checkbox next to Embed all fonts is checked. If you are using Scientific Workplace or Latex, you will have to
open Acrobat Distiller, choose Settings,
select Edit Adobe PDF Settings, click on
the
Fonts tab, and again make sure the
checkbox next to Embed all
fonts is checked.
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Once you
have created your PDF version of your slides, check it to be sure that your
fonts will display correctly. To do this, open your slides in Adobe Reader
and pull down the Advanced menu (or
the
Documents menu on
older versions of Adobe Reader). Make sure that Use
Local Fonts is unchecked. Next look at
your slides in full screen view by pressing Ctrl+L. Look through each slide and be sure that
all of the fonts, equations and graphs are correctly displayed. (After you are done, you can go back and
check
Use Local Fonts.)
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A common complaint from researchers beginning to
use digital slides is that it is difficult to progress nonlinearly through
the slides. Suppose I am on slide 2,
and someone asks a question for which I have prepared a backup slide. If I were using transparencies, I would
go to my stack of backup slides, pick out the one I needed, and display
it. If I were using a PDF version of
my slides, my backups would be the last few pages of my slides. I could quickly flip through all my
slides to get to the end, show the slide I wanted and flip back, but that
is annoys some people. An
alternative is to use links in your PDFs. Links in PDFs are similar to links on a webpage. You may link to other
slides in your presentation, to pages on the world wide
web, or to external files.
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The only good way to make computer slides is to
use landscape layout. If, for some
reason, you have to show a slide in portrait layout, you can zoom in on
parts of the slide using Ctrl++. (After showing this slide, you will need
to use Ctrl+- to go back to flipping through
landscape slides.)
Using Transparencies
Soon
the technology of using overhead projectors and transparencies will be
obsolete. Until it is, you may be
called on to give presentations where it is the only option.
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Dirty transparencies are ugly. I usually make a new set of transparencies for every presentation
that I am going to give. (Doing this
may imply that you need to limit the number of color
slides for reasons of cost.) You may
also want to clean the top of the overhead projector with eye glass
cleaning fluid before you start. The
worst transparencies of all are the ones that the presenters put in those
plastic covers to protect them and then project up on the screen with the
covers - which are invariably dirty and scuffed up - still on.
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Just like good computer slides, good transparencies are made in landscape layout.
If you are a timid speaker, fight the temptation to stand over the overhead projector, speaking to it rather than to the audience, blocking their vision, and engaging in annoying habits like writing on the transparencies or slowing moving a paper down to reveal more and more of your "secrets".
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