ABSTRACT

Presenting work at a meeting is an almost obligatory preliminary to submitting a journal article or a thesis. This chapter therefore discusses how to prepare short talks, slides for those talks, and posters for meetings. (For more detailed information on making slides and posters, see Reynolds & Simmonds 1981, on which much of this chapter is based. See also Briscoe 1990, Turk & Kirkman 1989, Turk 1985, and Woolsey 1989.)

MAKING EFFECTIVE ORAL PRESENTATIONS

The first presentation you make as a graduate research worker will probably be to your own department or the institution’s journal club, but you may be giving it before a wider audience, for example during a meeting of the national society of your discipline. Even if you know everyone in the audience only too well, prepare your talk carefully: your career could be at stake. Prepare the paper in good time, rehearse it, rehearse it again-and yet again, and prepare for the questions the audience is likely to throw at you.