Tips for giving talks

Introduction

I gave quite a few online talks in 2020 and I’m very happy to have done so. Giving talks is great. It’s an excellent commitment device if you want to learn or better understand something (and great for signalling, if you care about that). They improve (and are a proof of) your communication skills, which are very important both for academia and all sorts of jobs outside of academia. And it’s a lot of fun to give a talk!

The tips here helped me give talks; as always with advice, adapt it to your situation. These don’t guarantee giving good talks, but I think they are a great starting point. Some of my talks were merely okay (even though I followed all the advice here), and some were great!

While all the talks I gave in 2020 were online, I think most of these points should easily generalise for in-person talks. Also, my talks were on applied mathematics or theoretical physics, and the advice here reflects that.

Note: I don’t claim any originality here, most of these tips are taken from David Tong and Neel Nanda (both of who give outstanding talks!).

Tips

0. Choose a topic that you really like. I think enthusiasm in the speaker is very important for the audience and it will help you put effort into giving the talk. So choose something that you’ll enjoy, if you have a choice at all (in high school, I once had to give a talk for my biology class on – content notice: disgusting- elephantiasis…)!
1. Don’t use PowerPoint. The editor for equations will give you nightmares.
   -For very maths heavy talks, I have been recommended Beamer, which is a LaTeX package, but I’ve never used it. So if you’re familiar with LaTeX, this could be a good choice, although in my humble opinion the presentations I’ve seen are not very aesthetic. And be careful not to include too many equations!
   -I use Google Slides, with the add-on Maths Equations (which does exactly what its name suggests). I usually present directly from it by sharing my screen, but you can also download it as a pdf or PowerPoint (but double-check the formatting if you’ve got animations or special symbols like greek letters).
2. Make sure your camera and your audio work well, etc. And really, this http://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/user/tong/rant1.mp4
3. Give a good motivation for the topic of your talk. This is one I struggle with a lot, so I don’t have much specific advice on how to do it. But I think it helps to say why you find that topic interesting, eg ‘complexity’ for my biology talks or ‘the universe when it was a-fraction-of-a-second old for my inflation talks. (And this links back to the idea of choosing a topic that you love!)
4. Give an outline for your talk at the start.
5. Encourage questions from the start. This really helps ‘break the ice’ and have some interaction with the audience from the start, which will make you less nervous. This is super important for online talks, it will feel a bit less like you’re just talking to a screen! You still can (and should) take general or left-over questions at the end.
6. Don’t read the slides or some notes you’ve made. I feel like this is something that need not be said (like not filling up slides with lines of texts or pointless mathematics).
   -I make speaker’s notes in Google slides and I have them open in my iPad -a phone would work well (especially given how horribly big they’re becoming…)- as I give the presentation. It helps as a backup in case you go blank, and if there are a few slides that you know you always get stuck on, you can have a look at them.
   -My body tends to get a bit nervous at the start, so I sometimes memorize what I want to say at the start, say the first two minutes or the first two content slides. I don’t recommend at all memorizing the whole talk!
7. Make a break, if the talk is longer than half an hour. Just add a slide that says ‘break’ and say that it will last for one minute. Encourage people to walk around, grab a glass of water, or go to the loo. It makes everyone (including you) more focused when they join again.
8. Don’t do the striptease, show the full slide at once. Learning is non-linear. And it saves you time from introducing all the animations.
9. DO NOT EVER OVERRUN (the golden rule). Don’t.
   –Time yourself when practising, and ensure that you have a margin to finish on time!
   -If you’re unsure about timings because eg, you don’t know how many questions you’ll get, you can have a bonus section and go through it if you’re doing well on time.
10. Make it clear that you have finished. You deserve a round of applause, even if it’s over Zoom. The end of your presentation should not be awkward. Just say ‘That is all I wanted to say, thank you for your attention.‘
    -Making a conclusion slide, where you summarise your talk and give some takeaways, helps with this, and it’s also a great idea per se.
11. Be prepared for questions. The obvious ones, and tricky ones. Make sure you’re as confident as you could with the material.
    -If there is a good chair and nobody else in the audience asks questions, the chair will ask, to make sure there is some interaction. So be prepared for this. (This can also be converted for advice on chairing talks: ask questions!)
    -If you don’t know the answer to a question,
12. Practice, practice, practice. It is very weird to give online talks, because you barely make visual contact with your audience. So it is really important to practice it speaking out loud, even if it makes your housemates think you’ve gone mad.
13. Give a practice talk. Find a friend that is on your target audience (eg second-year maths student) and that could be interested in the topic of your talk, bonus if he/she often attends talks -he will have even better advice-. Giving a practice talk is also fun and it will make you way less nervous when giving the real talk.
    -Schedule this a couple of days before the actual talk (this also ensures that you won’t leave it preparing the talk to the last minute).
    -Give the talk as if it was the real talk (eg talk to a plural audience, thank the chair for introducing you, etc).
    -Ask him/her lots of questions about how it went. Was Section 2 clear? Should I omit the slide on the derivation of the Euler-Lagrange equation? Did I speak too fast? How could I improve it?
    -Ask him/her to make you all the questions that he/she can think of, both obvious ones and tricky ones.
14. Ask for (anonymous) feedback. Google forms are great for this. Encourage people to fill it up, say thanks and explain why you appreciate the feedback). Next time, use the feedback to make your talk better.
    -I find it useful to send the link to the form before starting the talk, in case you forget at the end! (And in case someone has to leave early).
15. Iterate! Your first talk won’t be perfect, but you’ll get better with time.
16. (Bonus:) Include some memes (advice I was once given on a feedback form!), if appropriate for the audience. (If you’re going to make jokes, run them in your practice talk to make sure they work and are appropriate.)

Conclusion

Giving talks is awesome, but it takes work to give a talk. According to my time-tracking app, I spent about 22 hours on my latest talk, for the Part III Seminar Series, including the time it took me to read the relevant papers. So if you’re going to give a talk, I think it’s worth a bit of extra effort to make it great.

That said, I think the most important advice is to actually give a talk. So don’t fall into the trap of trying to make it perfect. If, like I am, you are really bad with this, I’d suggest to start to preparing your talk close to the day you’ll give it. This sets a bound on how much time you’ll spend with irrelevant details. Remember disminishing returns.

Further, it takes a lot of courage to sign up to give a talk. You might think you’ll make mistakes or that you are not qualified enough for it. But student talks (the maths, physics, and bio societies at Cambridge run series of student talks last summer) are exactly to avoid this. The audience will be mostly students, and they’re not there to judge you: they’ve come to your talk because they’re interested on the topic (and want to learn from you about it!). Most of them will not have had the willpower to sign up to give a talk, so they are nobody to judge you. And those who have given other talks know how nerve-wracking it can be, so they perfectly understand you. So I want to encourage everyone reading this to give a talk. I think it’s a very efficient use of your time. You’ll feel glad after you’ve done it, and it’s a lot of fun. Believe me, it even gets addictive.