[Paper Review] How to Give a Good Research Talk?

This paper aims to help people to give a good talk for their researches, especially in the computer science domain. I found many points in this paper valuable and they should be thought of every time when preparing presentation. In the following I will talk about those points for summarization.

One thing so important that I have to repeat it here is the two questions in the beginning:

• Who is my primary audience?
• If someone remembers only one thing from my talk, what would I like it to be?

We shall ask ourselves both questions each time before going into slides, especially the second one. In my experience, quite often we regard the presentation as an artwork or a performance, but forget that all the most vital thing is to build a intended comprehension for the audience to your ideas. To this end, we should evaluate every thing in our slides: if it help to make clear?

The other three points proposed in the section 2, in the order: using examples, pruning and to be honest, are all important things for presentation too. I usually intend to conceal problems in the presentation in the past. This is certainly one thing I should avoid in the future.

The section 3 is somehow out-of-date as the popularization of PowerPoint recently. Nevertheless, we can still find many shared pitfalls. For example, people often incline to put too many things on one single slide, or just type exactly the words they are going to speak. The most important thing here, I think, is not to start writing slides too early. This effectively prevent you from putting too much content...

Finally, I have found two points important in the last section: being careful about visual tricks and timing. Beginner presenters usually use many animations on their slides, as it is simple to add in PowerPoint. Most of the "visual aids" are in fact annoying and distracting. Over-running is also something we commit quite often. Just like described in the paper, it is selfish and rude, and we should all try to work things out in time.