Tips for Giving Talks

I. Understanding the topic:

• Read an ASTR 201 or 212 textbook on the topic. (This is a 300-level course. Remind yourself what a 200-level treatment of the material looks like.)

• Read the assigned reading.

• Expand your circle of reading. Follow links on the web-page you are reading, as they often lead to details or background information. Follow bibliography references, search on the web (e.g. http://www.google.com/), and look for articles in print (e.g. Scientific American, Mercury, Nature, Physics Today). (Scientific American has an on-line index for the past ten years at http://www.sciamdigital.com/browse.cfm.)

• Formulate a list of the important issues or questions, which will eventually become an outline for your talk.

• DIG DEEP into your subject. Ask yourself as you go what the evidence is, what the reasoning is, what the significance is. Focus on the science.
• Find and understand the evidence (data, graphs, physical formulae) and present it to your audience.

• Keep a list of questions and topics you want to find out more about. These might include definitions, specific numbers you want to track down, or related background information. More importantly, your list should include questions about important physical processes work (e.g. tides or nuclear fusion) and questions about how something is known.

• Get your questions answered, by additional reading or by talking to the faculty.

• Talk to the faculty. We can give you feedback on your outline or content, and can help answer questions.

II. Preparing the talk:

• Organize the material into a final outline. Prepare the outline you will show your audience.

• Include an introduction to the topic, keeping in mind how much your audience probably does or doesn't know already.

• Decide which topics deserve the most time, and which ones you must keep briefer. If you feel your assigned topic is too broad, you may need to leave out some parts altogether. You might want to mention in your talk that the material exists, but that you are skipping it to concentrate on something else.

• Stay focussed on the important questions.

• Work out numbers when appropriate. Be quantitative rather than qualitative whenever you can.

• Use pictures and graphs. You may find visuals on the web or in print, or you can make your own. A plot or a pie chart or a picture communicates more information more quickly than words, and they keep the talk more interesting.

• Prepare the media. You can get transparencies and pens in the Department office. Di or Janet can help you photocopy onto transparencies. We can provide a laptop and projector, with an internet connection. A 24-point font for text is a minimum to be read from the back of the room.

• Format of slides. Your main goal should be conveying information correctly and clearly, and the composition of overhead or PowerPoint slides may affect this. You may consider these "do's and don'ts" suggested by Lana Johnson of the Univ. of Nebraska.

• Decide what, if anything, you want to hand out to the class. If you do, make sure you have a copy as an overhead or slide for you to point to, especially for figures or pictures.

• Estimate the time. A good rule of thumb is to budget roughly 2 min (+/- 1 min, depending on the density of information) per overhead or slide. Faster than that and the audience can't keep up, slower and it becomes visually less interesting.

• Practice, with or without an audience. And time yourself. If you are too long or to short, change your pacing and add or remove content. Generally when you give a talk, it will go a little faster than when you practiced it.

III. Giving the talk:

• Address the audience and speak clearly. Speak loudly enough that people in the back can hear.

• Refer to notes, but don't read them. If possible, use your prepared overheads or slides as your key to what to say next. Practicing your talk this way will make you less reliant on your notes. But still bring your notes in case you forget a point or get a question that asks for detail.

• Don't block the screen.

• Watch the time.

• Make it clear when you've finished.

IV. Answering questions:

• Make sure you understand the question.

• Try to answer it directly.

• Say you don't know if you don't. Throw the question out to the audience to see if someone else does.