1. Technical Communications
Reports-
Full Proposal
Professional Self-Assessment
Final project report
Oral Presentations
Proposal
Final presentations

2. Oral Presentation for Engineers
SUCCESSFUL PRESENTATION =
Good Content
+ Visuals
+ Practice
(lot of hard work
& good results)

3. Success Factors Know your audience
You are the expert -- speak from experience
Think about the level of detail and how much will be remembered?
Think about the logical flow of the presentation: organize slides appropriately
Use good visuals, animations,
Don’t memorize - PRACTICE
Don’t read slides - PRACTICE

4. Preparing Content Plan what you must cover to communicate ideas
Avoid using too many slides;
> 1 slide/1-2 minutes.
Use bullet items as prompts
Don’t write full paragraphs
Use LARGE ENOUGH fonts

5. Preparing Content -Visual Tools
Use simple visuals: block diagrams and flowcharts
Proper use of slide template, photos, text, charts, graphs, animations and movies
Clarity – don’t clutter slides with too much information
Label your axes in plots

6. Lamb Waves Define displacement components Shear stresses
Lamb wave equations in terms of the two potentials
Material properties
Define displacement components
Results come from elasticity theory
Shear stresses
Consider harmonic wave propagation in the direction x

7. Preparing Content – Support slides
Anticipate questions
Have some extra material “in reserve”
Handouts may have more detail

8. Delivery Speak up, make eye contact Do you believe what you’re saying?
Ask questions – and wait…
Look at people but beware of the magnet

9. Controlling Nerves Who knows you’re nervous? Holding your papers/notes
Use illustrations with which you are familiar
Practice, practice, practice

10. Remember Your Audience
Look at them
Respect them
Excite them
Listen to them
Thank them

11. Assignment -- Prep for Oral Presentation of Proposal
Prepare the PowerPoint material for the oral presentation of your proposal.
Each team will have 25 minutes.
Practice with teammates -- don’t just “discuss” it -- practice it! Give each other suggestions!
Everyone must talk an equal time (as practical).
Dry run for facilitator. Seek his/her critique.
We have 2 classrooms for parallel sessions - Check the time and place for your presentation
Attendance will be taken

12. Template for Proposal Presentation
Slide 1 - Title – Team# Team Members, Facilitator, Sponsor
Slide 2 - Outline
Introduction – Problem Statement
Objectives
Prior work by others
Your Technical Approach – Block diagram
Implementation Details
Technical and non-technical roles for each member

13. Remember & Make Sure You stay within allocated time – 25 minutes
your presentation should not be too short or long
Font size is large enough to be read by the last row
Plots - axes should be labelled
Practice with your facilitator

14. Template for Final Project Presentation
Title – Team# Team Members, Facilitator, Sponsor
Outline
Introduction – Problem Statement
Objectives
Prior work by others
Your Technical Approach – Block diagram
Implementation Details
Results
Conclusions
Issues, Limitations
Suggestions for future work

15. Pointers on Technical Writing

16. Technical Communications
Reports-
Full Proposal
Professional Self-Assessment
Final project report
Oral Presentations
Proposal
Final presentations

17. Cures for Common Mistakes in ECE 480 Deliverables
In any document, first describe the context – give the big picture
Use style, level of formality, appropriate to audience

18. Cures for More Common Mistakes
Do not use contractions in formal writing (don’t can’t, etc.)
Do not end sentences in prepositions. Instead of “Sockets Are Us makes the best platform to put the chip in.” write “The best platform for chip installation is produced by Sockets Are Us.”
Spell out numbers less than 10 unless they are measurements (i.e., unless they have units attached to them)

19. Cures for More Common Mistakes
Use a consistent format for units. For example, do not randomly use “V,” “Volts,” and “volts” in the document
Never begin a sentence, let alone a paragraph, with a conjunction (and, or, so, etc.)
Avoid the use of first and second person in formal writing. For example, instead of “We then have to read our value from our counter.” Say “The value of the counter must then be read.” (passive voice)

20. Cures for More Common Mistakes
Do not use colloquial language or slang. Instead of
“We’ll just go with the flow and use the 10 kOhm resistor because it won’t break the bank like the fibrillated googlewazer.”
say “The 10 kOhm resistor is much less costly than the fibrillated googlewazer, and a negligible change in the cutoff frequency results from its use in the design.”

21. Cures for More Common Mistakes
Do not include statements with no information or imprecise information. Example: “The XYZ widget is very popular because it’s small and cheap, and we like it a lot.”
Similarly, avoid redundancy. Your boss and the executives who will read your document are busy and do not want to read unnecessarily long documents. Use phrases like “As we discussed in Section 2 above,…” only sparingly.

22. Cures for More Common Mistakes
Avoid stating “beliefs,” “feelings,” and “predictions” which have no substantiation or basis in fact. Examples: “We believe that this new design will work really well and that the project will be a big success.”, or “I feel that the XYZ widget is the best on the market.”
Do not trivialize your own work. Example: “The task is a very simple matter of making a trivial calculation and popping the chip in the slot.”

23. Cures for More Common Mistakes
Do not anthropomorphize inanimate objects. Instead of writing “When the capacitor sees 10 mV, it changes the flag bit to high.”, write “When the potential across the capacitor reaches 10 mV, the flag bit is set high.”
Proofread your work! Nothing looks less professional than a document filled with spelling errors, missing words, sentence fragments, missing figures, etc.

24. Cures for More Common Mistakes
Be Quantitative and Precise – do not use qualitative adjectives
Example – From the graph in Fig. 1 we see that is error is “very small” or “acceptable”
From the graph in Fig. 1 we see that is error is less than 3%

25. Template for Final Project Report
Title – Team# Team Members, Facilitator, Sponsor
Outline
Introduction – Problem Statement
Objectives
Prior work by others
Your Technical Approach – Block diagram
Implementation Details
Results
Conclusions
Issues, Limitations
Suggestions for future work