Tips for Presenting Your Work
Dianne Cook · The R Journal · 2011
With the international R user confer- ence, useR! 2011, approaching, many partici- pants may be contemplating how to put their thoughts together for presentation. This paper provides some suggestions for giving presenta- tions and making posters. Some background Just after completing a practice of the talk I planned to give about my PhD research in several upcoming academic job interviews, my advisor, Andreas Buja, sat me down, and completely re-drafted my talk! I had produced what I had seen many times presented by numerous speakers in weekly seminars at Rutgers University, slide after slide of details. Andreas ex- plained that while this might be appropriate for a pa- per it is not the best approach for a talk. We laid out the key problem that my work addressed, and then put in a slide that simply said Stay tuned. . The next few slides addressed the methodology, and the key answers to the problem came near the end of the talk. The Stay tuned sticks with me. Although, today this phrase might be something of a cliche, overused by the electronic media to keep your attention through another barrage of advertis- ing, the effect is useful to re-create. What did this phrase do for the talk at the time? It allowed it to build interest in the topic early, and let the audi- ence know they would be rewarded later. The mid- dle of the talk also showed a VHS video of high- dimensional data being explored using various tours - computers that could display videos were not so portable in 1993! (That video is now available in Flash format at http://stat-graphics.org/movies/ grand-tour.html.)