Tips for Seminar Presenters

Whether on the job market, at a conference, or at a workshop, the ability to present a seminar well is an important and useful skill.

1. Decide what your message should be.
        The best way to organize a seminar is to work backward.  What message do you want your audience to take away from your talk?  What must you do to give them the background required to make your points?  If you have an empirical paper, then decide what you think are the most important results in your paper and make sure that you can get to them before the seminar is over.  Try to remember that the sections of the paper that took the most time for you to do are not necessarily where you should spend the most time in your presentation.

2.  Leave lots of white space on your overheads
There is no point in simply taking a page from your paper and reproducing it.  The overheads should be in point form and you should be prepared to expound for some time on each point.  If you have difficulty working without more complete notes, then type them up separately but don't show all the detail to your audience.  If you have a detailed table of results in your paper, then take out the columns that you think are most important and put them on the overhead; simply mention that additional detail is available in the paper.

3. Take questions seriously.
    Some presenters find questions annoying and simply want to go through their well rehearsed presentation without interruption.  This is a mistake.  Sometimes a nervous speaker will jump to a conclusion and start answering a question before it has even been completely posed.  Often he answers the wrong question.  Let the speaker finish and think about the question before attempting an answer.  If you don't understand the question, there are several strategies.  Try to clarify the question by seeing if you can re-phrase it to the questioner's satisfaction, e.g. “Do you mean....”.  If you still don't understand the question, you can give the questioner a second attempt to make it clearer to you.  If this doesn't work, you should try to arrange to talk about it after the seminar so that you can move on.  If you don't know the answer, you should admit it.  Your audience may not know much about your topic, but they can usually tell when a presenter is going on about something without knowing what they're talking about. (That said, you should remember that you probably know more about your own research than anyone in the room so you should be able to handle most questions thrown your way).

4.  Keep control of the seminar
Sometimes, the questions and the discussion get out of hand.  Don't stand by for very long while the audience discusses your paper without you.  If you have received far too many questions to finish in a timely fashion, politely point out that you're running out of time and that there are a few important slides that you want to present.

5.  Avoid annoying habits.
      Try not to stand in front of the overhead (although it may be possible to read the projection from your forehead it's usually best read from the screen).  Try to face your audience (rather than staring down at the slides) and try not to turn your back to the audience too often.  It's a good idea to move out of the way of the projector every so often, so that the whole room can see the screen, but don't start roaming back and forth across the room.  Speak clearly.  Don't mumble.  Don't race through your talk, but don't adopt the slow pace and low volume of a late-night DJ who doesn't want to wake up his audience.  Humour can greatly improve a presentation, but if you're not comfortable with your audience this can backfire.  In any event, you're not there to be an entertainer.

6.  Outline of a typical presentation

• The first slide has the title, the date of the paper and/or the talk, and your affiliation.  If you have a co-author, this is the time to make that clear.
• Try to provide a perspective (a puzzle, an empirical regularity, an historical example, a casual observation, a curious gap in the literature, etc.) that you can use as a “hook” to get your audience’s attention.
• An outline of the presentation can be useful, especially if your presentation is going to deviate from your paper or if you want to emphasize a particular part of your talk (e.g.. “I really want to get to the results so I'll skip quickly over the model during my talk.  For those interested, the details are contained in my paper anyhow”).
• Don't spend too much time on the literature review.  The point of the review is to put your paper in perspective.  Avoid getting into a long argument about whether you've cited the right group of papers or whether you have misrepresented a literature.  You want to talk about your own work, not someone else's.
• Present your main contributions right away.  It's extremely important that you emphasize your contribution and distinguish what you've done that adds to the literature.  You may want to repeat your list of contributions at the end of the talk, but don't try to keep the audience in suspense!  Let them know your contribution immediately.  This helps the audience focus on how to assess your paper and means that even those in the audience who leave early will have a good idea of what you want them to take away from your talk.
• If you have a model in your paper that is involved and difficult to follow, try to present a stripped down version in the presentation that you can use to develop the intuition for the main findings.  Then you can say that in the paper you show that the intuition extends to a richer setting.
• If you put up a slide with an equation, make sure that you read through it so that the audience can follow the notation that you are using.  If it's not standard (e.g., “F is a production function with inputs of capital and labour”) try to give an economic interpretation of the equation.
• If you put up a graph, make sure that it's clear what's on the two axes and that you describe what the graph demonstrates.
• If you put up a table, make sure that you take one entry and explain clearly what it means in detail and then briefly indicate how to read the remaining entries.
• You should have some planned ‘slack’ in your talk.  That is material that you don't plan to cover but that you can include if for some reason you receive fewer or briefer questions than usual.  Also, there may be parts of the talk where you anticipate that some audiences will want additional clarification and/or detail.  Have it ready, but don't plan to use it unless it comes up in the talk.
• Always keep your eye on the time remaining.  If you start to fall behind in your planned pace you should try to adjust your talk by eliminating the least important remaining parts of your talk. Always aim to finish a few minutes early.
• End with your conclusion slide.  If you have started or plan to begin related research, mention it.  Then prepare to kick back and think beyond your paper if that's what the audience wants.