Brows­ing the MIT OpenCourseWare’s Lab­o­ra­tory in Cog­ni­tive Sci­ence entry, I came across a paper on giv­ing effec­tive sci­en­tific talks.

  1. Pre­pare your mate­r­ial care­fully and logically
  2. Prac­tice your talk
  3. Don’t put in too much material
  4. Avoid equa­tions
  5. Have only a few con­clu­sion points
  6. Talk to the audi­ence not to the screen
  7. Avoid mak­ing dis­tract­ing sounds
  8. Pol­ish your graph­ics
    1. Use large let­ters (no fonts smaller than 16 pts)
    2. Keep the graphic simple
    3. Use color
    4. Use car­toons
  9. Use humor if possible
  10. Be per­son­able in tak­ing ques­tions
    1. First, repeat the question
    2. If you don’t know the answer then say “I don’t know, I will have to look into that”
    3. If the ques­tioner dis­agrees with you and it looks like there will be an argu­ment then defuse the situation
    4. Never insult the questioner