Free Power Point Templates

When you display your presentation electronically as a slide show, the slides take up the full screen. All the tools, menus, and other screen elements are hidden so as not to detract from your show. Your computer becomes the equivalent of a slide projector.

PowerPoint offers a number of features you can use when you run your slide show:

• You can use special effects, such as transitions and builds, to add variety.
• You can practice giving your presentation and set automated timings for your slides to match your rehearsal times.

In this part of the tutorial we will discuss transitions and builds.

Build Slide

A build slide is a slide that starts with the first major bullet point and shows more major bullet points as the presentation proceeds. You decide whether you want to dim previous points on the slide as new points appear and what effect you want to use when the bullet points appear (for instance, bullet points can fly in from the right, left, top, or bottom).

Transitions

Transititions moves one slide off the screen and brings the next one on. Fading from black and dissolving from one slide to another are two examples of transitions. You have a choice of transitions for each slide, plus you can vary the speed of each transition.

The rhetorical goal for any interview talk is very different than a conference talk.

The goal of a conference talk is to get people interested in your paper and your work.

The goal of an interview talk is to get a job, for which interest in your work is one part.  

There are two key audiences for an academic interview talk, and you have to reach both.

One is the people in your sub-area, who you must impress with the depth of your contribution.

The other is the rest of the department, who you must get to understand your problem, why it is important, and a hand-wave at what you did. Both audiences will evaluate how well you speak as an approximation of how well you can teach. An algorithm:

• Take a 20-minute conference talk.
• Expand the 5 minute introduction to 20 minutes to drive home the problem, why it’s important, and the gist of what you’ve done.
• Does the rest of the conference talk, minus the summary and future work?
• Add 10 minutes of deeper stuff from your thesis (to show your depth).
• It is okay losing people outside of your sub-area (as long as you get them back in the next bullet).
• Does the summary and future work from the conference talk in a manner accessible to all?
• Add 10 ten minutes to survey all the other stuff you have done (to show your breadth).
• Save 5 minutes for questions (to show that you are organized).

Other Talks

Other talks should be prepared using the same principles of considering audience and rhetorical purpose. A presentation on a project in a graduate class, for example, seeks to reach the professor first and fellow students second.

Its purpose is to get a good grade by impressing people that a quality project was done.

Thus, methods should be described in must more detail than for a conference talk.

Oral Communication is different from written communication  

Listeners have one chance to hear your talk and can’t “re-read” when they get confused. In many situations, they have or will hear several talks on the same day. Being clear is particularly important if the audience can’t ask questions during the talk.

There are two well-know ways to communicate your points effectively.

The first is to K.I.S.S. (keep it simple stupid). Focus on getting one to three key points across. Think about how much you remember from a talk last week. Second, repeat key insights:

tell them what you’re going to tell them (Forecast), tell them, and tell them what you told them (Summary).

1. Think about your audience

Most audiences should be addressed in layers: some are experts in your sub-area, some are experts in the general area, and others know little or nothing. Who is most important to you?

Can you still leave others with something? For example, pitch the body to experts, but make the forecast and summary accessible to all.

1. Think about your rhetorical goals

For conference talks, for example, I recommend two rhetorical goals: leave your audience with a clear picture of the gist of your contribution, and make them want to read your paper.

Your presentation should not replace your paper, but rather whet the audience appetite for it. Thus, it is commonly useful to allude to information in the paper that can’t be covered adequately in the presentation Practice in public .