Presenting Your Proposal BIOS 587 Mary Purugganan maryp@rice.edu

Goals for session Selecting content Designing slides Delivering your presentation Handling questions Critiquing samples

Content Consider your audience State problem / hypothesis clearly & early Include significance Keep background relevant State aims and how experiments will address aims What, why, how Explain methods when appropriate Plan a conclusion

Purpose of visual aids Create a slide show with storyboards, not a script Use the slide show... to select important topics and issues to organize content to create a hierarchy

Designing Your Slides To select a design, ask yourself: What professional image do I want to project? In what type of room will I give my talk? Well-lit room: use light background / dark text and visuals Dimly-lit room: use dark background / light text and visuals

Project a clear font Serif fonts Sans serif fonts Times New Roman, et al. Easy to read in printed documents Sans serif fonts Arial, Helvetica Easy to see projected across the room

Choose color carefully Be aware that colors of similar intensities do not have high enough contrast to be easily distinguished on a slide. For example, many speakers like blue backgrounds, and they choose red to attact attention or highlight a point. Look, however, at how much higher contrast a light blue has compared with red. The red is difficult to see.

Choose color carefully “Gradient fill” allows you to change color Down your slide From left to right On the diagonal From the corner If you like to use a gradient fill for your background, be careful to choose two colors for your gradient that are somewhat similar in brightness. For example, here, I have medium blue and black. You see that the contrast is almost lost in the medium blue section and high in the black. If I had chosen a light blue, I could not have found a text color that would have looked clear across all variations of the gradient.

Use grammatical parallelism Not Parallel: Lyse cells in buffer 5 minutes in centrifuge Supernatant is removed Parallel: Centrifuge for 5 minutes Remove supernatant Readers comprehend more quickly when lists are parallel… LYSE, CENTRIFUGE, and REMOVE are all verbs that make these points easy to scan and understand. The top list is clumsy and requies some synthesis to understand.

Simplify & draw attention If you have a concept to illustrate that is part of a bigger whole, such as an enzyme in a pathway, draw your audience’s eye to the area of interest using a red box. This focuses audience attention and is less distracting than a laser pointer. http://www.indstate.edu/thcme/mwking/tca-cycle.html

Delivery Stance Gestures Eye contact Voice quality Body language Handling notes Gestures Eye contact Voice quality Volume Pace

Handling questions LISTEN Repeat or rephrase Watch body language Don’t bluff

Sample Slides and Videoclips