A young [person] doesn’t realize how much time it takes to prepare good lectures, for the first time, especially. 1

–Richard Feynman

After his work at Los Alamos during the war, Richard Feynman began teaching at Cornell. During that first semester, he became depressed at how little research he was doing. He claimed to feel “tired” 2 and was unsure what was making him feel that way. It was not until his second semester that he realized how much time and energy preparing his class ­presentations required. Years later, because of the time that preparing a new lecture demands, Feynman hesitated to do the set of freshman physics lectures that ended up bringing him so much acclaim. As he predicted, the freshman lectures did consume his time, causing him to put aside his research. Although he spoke only twice a week, he “worked from eight to sixteen hours per day on these lectures, thinking through his own outline and planning how each lecture fit with the other parts.” 3

Preparing a strong presentation does take time. Time is needed to understand the content well enough to organize it in a fashion that is readily comprehended by the audience. Time is also needed to gather the important images, to graph the important results, and to incorporate those images and graphs into a set of well-designed slides. Moreover, time is needed to rehearse the material so that you can find the right words to explain the difficult concepts and to smooth the transitions between ideas.

Before opening the computer, you should decide upon the story of the talk

Many people begin their presentations on the computer by opening up PowerPoint or similar software and listing phrases that they intend to say. Unfortunately, beginning in this way leads to talks that contain much unneeded information. Before opening up the computer, you want to think hard about the “story” of your talk: what your main message is and what assertions you will have to persuade the audience of before they will accept that message.

As Garr Reynolds and Nancy Duarte recommend, 4 , 5 an excellent way to develop this story is to write out the main message and supporting assertions on separate sticky notes and place those on a wall. For instance, in a research talk, one supporting assertion would be your main hypothesis. Another would be the reason for testing that hypothesis. Still another would be what distinguishes your methods for testing that hypothesis. Yet others would be the individual results from that test. Once you have those takeaways, you can arrange the sticky notes into an order that tells the best “story.”

Put another way, this “story” is your argument to the audience. In this argument, the supporting assertions are the steps of the story that will lead the audience up the mountain to the main message (or vista). Moreover, this act of defining your main message and the assertions is an excellent way to focus your talk. If a detail does not support one of these takeaways, you exclude it. The main reason that so many scientific talks are awash with extraneous details is that the presenters have not expended the time and energy to perform this step.

Once you have your story, you are in position to create your visual aids

Once you have established your story or your argument, you are in position to create the visual aids. Creating the visual aids at this point is important because preparing effective visual aids consumes much time. For instance, to craft a set of assertion-evidence slides, you need time to revise your assertion headlines. Granted, in the story stage, you determined the main message and drafted the supporting assertions that will lead the audience to that message. Now in the visual aid stage, you need to tighten those headlines to a length that the audience can comfortably read during a presentation.

Preparing effective visual aids also requires time to create graphics that will support those assertion headlines. Many presenters mistakenly use the same graphics in their presentation that they have used in their documents. However, a graph or table that works well in a paper often contains too much detail or has lettering too small to be effective in a presentation. Not only do you need to prepare the visual evidence, but you need to incorporate that evidence on the slide, inserting blank space so that the slide breathes and using animations when necessary. Yet more time is required for you to rehearse with those slides so that you can make the appropriate transitions between slides. Finally, if you are providing a handout, time is needed to create that. For instance, the handout might involve you placing secondary details, transitions, and reference citations onto the notes page of each slide.

When the presentation is collaborative, even more time is needed to prepare a set of presentation slides, because each speaker should have the chance to comment on a draft of those slides. Ideally, in a collaborative presentation, one person should have the task of creating the slides. That scheme makes it easier to obtain both a consistent slide format and a set of slides that reveals the presentation’s organization. Even though one person is tapped to design the slides, everyone should meet early on to contribute to the story of the talk, and everyone can help create the supporting visual evidence.

In addition to preparing visual aids, you should prepare yourself to speak

One day my wife lamented about how one of her graduate students had spent far too much time—the better part of six months—preparing a proposal of his doctoral work for his committee. “If he had put that time into his research,” she complained, “he would be a good portion of the way finished with his project.” 6 The communication requirements for this proposal were not so high: a five-page document and a 20-minute presentation. This student, though, had written more than 60 pages and had prepared more than 35 slides. The day before the presentation, my wife tried to persuade this student to stop working on the slides and to spend time rehearsing the presentation. Unfortunately, the student continued tinkering with the slides up to the hour of the presentation. By the student’s own admission, the presentation was a failure. He had problems, as he said, “finding a rhythm.” Things never clicked for him, and he struggled to find transitions between the different scenes.

As mentioned in the previous section, a speaker needs time to practice, even if he or she has an excellent set of presentation slides. Practice helps the speaker with transitions from one assertion to the next. Practice also helps the speaker work through the explanations of difficult concepts so that all the words are, in fact, inside the speaker and ready to come out. Most important, perhaps, practice reassures the speaker that he or she can, in fact, make the presentation. Perhaps the greatest source of nervousness for speakers is the fear that they will stand before an audience and not know what to say. By having walked through the presentation, even if in a mumble, the speaker knows that the words are there.

To prepare themselves to speak, many presenters require time alone before the presentation. For example, Jane Goodall said, “Even when I am giving a talk for the tenth time, I still sit down for at least thirty minutes and go through the talk…It is rude not to do that and disrespectful to the audience.” 7

Likewise, when Heinrich Hertz began teaching, he claimed that he could think of nothing else but each lecture for at least one hour before he gave it. 8 Also, according to one of her daughters, Marie Curie required the entire afternoon to prepare herself for her five o’clock lecture to her graduate students. 9 Finally, as mentioned earlier, in preparing his freshman lecture series on physics, Richard Feynman spent 8–16 hours a day preparing for the series. 10 That time might seem excessive, but if the content is strong and the audience is important, the time is well spent.

Speaking in a second language requires additional preparation

Anyone who attempts to make a scientific presentation in a language different from his or her own deserves much respect. Elisabeth Pain, a writer for Science, has much practical advice for this topic. 11 Much of her advice is common sense. For instance, one tip is to enrich the vocabulary in your field. Another is to practice the pronunciation of common words in your field. A third is to use assertion-evidence slides that give the audience the main takeaway for each scene and provide visual support for your speech. Yet a fourth is to prepare podium notes for each talk that you can refer to, should you become stuck—forgetting a key word or forgetting how to phrase an important idea.

To be successful at giving talks in your non-native language, one important skill for the presenter is listening in that language. Listening is especially important for understanding questions. In other words, just memorizing and practicing a speech in the other language is not enough, as Niels Bohr found out in his first (and last) meeting with Winston Churchill. 12 You have to be able to understand the questions and respond on the spot. If your listening comprehension is not strong, one suggestion is to have a colleague in the audience who knows the language well enough to help you understand difficult questions. That person can also help you during the presentation by feeding you a word or two that you cannot remember.

A second important trait for being successful at giving talks in your non-native language is a willingness to accept that mistakes will occur. All too often, a person learning a new language will make mistakes (as is natural), but then will feel embarrassed and will avoid speaking. Becoming better at that language then becomes impossible, because to learn a new language you have to speak that language. Although you will make mistakes in speaking in a different language, there is no reason to be embarrassed by those mistakes. Although the great physicist Chien-Shiung Wu never felt at ease with English, she did not back down from speaking it. After earning her Ph.D., she went on a lecture tour across the United States. In her presentations, Wu often confused the pronouns he and she, and left out articles from her sentences. Because of her struggles, she wrote out her entire presentations and practiced them repeatedly beforehand. 13 Still, Wu did not shy away from speaking, and her tenacity at continuing to speak before crowds served her well in her career.

Notes

1 H. Hertz, letter to his parents (21 Apr 1885), Heinrich Hertz: Erinnerungen, Briefe, Tagebücher, arranged by J. Hertz, translation by L. Brimmer, M. Hertz, C. Susskind (Physik Verlag, Weinheim, 1977), p. 205

2 R.P. Feynman, Surely, You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! (W. W. Norton & Company, New York, 1985), p. 171

3 J. Metra, The Beat of a Different Drum (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1994), p. 484

4 G. Reynolds, Presentation Zen (New Riders, Berkeley, 2008)

5 N. Duarte, Slide:ology (O’Reilly Media, Sebastopol, 2008)

6 K.A. Thole, professor and department head of Mechanical and Nuclear Engineering, Pennsylvania State University (Apr 2001), private communication to author

7 J. Goodall, primatologist, interview with author (26 Mar 2011)

8 H. Hertz, letter to his parents (27 May 1883), Heinrich Hertz: Erinnerungen, Briefe, Tagebücher, arranged by J. Hertz (Physik Verlag, Weinheim, 1977), p. 183

9 E. Curie, Madame Curie: A Biography (Literary Guild of America, New York, 1937), p. 370

10 J. Metra, The Beat of a Different Drum (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1994), p. 484

11 E. Pain, Presentation tips for non-native speakers, Science Careers (17 June 2011)

12 R.V. Jones, Bohr and politics, in Niels Bohr: A Centenary Volume, ed. by A.P. French, P.J. Kennedy (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1985), p. 285

13 S.B. McGrayne, Nobel Prize Women in Science (Citadel Press Book, Secaucus, 1998), p. 255