Oral Presentation Resources

Oral podium presentations

If your abstract has been selected for an oral podium presentation at a local, regional or national meeting, the research chief resident and program director can offer you guidance to create your slides and prepare for your presentation.  **We recommend that you practice giving your presentation to colleagues and chief residents for feedback well before the conference!** For all work done at GW, you should include the GW logo on your presentation.  

Please see our policy on conference reimbursement for information.

The following links discuss tips on presentation skills. Some of them are not from the science world, but they all provide insights on the elements that make a presentation bad, good, or great. You will also find them useful for other presentation situations: Chairman's Rounds, M&M, CPC, etc.

ACP's "Giving the Oral Presentation" webpage (must read!!)

ACP's "Oral Presentation Checklist"

Giving an Academic Talk, by Jonathan Shewchuk, Associate Professor in Computer Science. University of California at Berkeley.

Oral Presentation Advice, by Mark D. Hill, Computer Sciences Department. University of Wisconsin-Madison.

How to give a good research talk, by Simon Peyton Jones, John Hughes, and John Launchbury from the Department of Computing Science, University of Glasgow, Scotland. This is really quite good, although the balance has tipped away from hand-written slides since 1993 (so browse this resource and then watch the updated material below!)

Meta Talk: How to Give a Talk So Good There Will Be Pizza Left for You, by David Evans from University of Virginia, Department of Computer Science.

» Download the PDF of the presentation.

“There is a special circle in hell for those who use laser pointers”, by Cal Newport from the award winning blog "Study Hacks".

Maxims for Malfeasant Speakers

Pointers on Giving a Talk 

The real entertainment gimmick is the excitement, drama and mystery of the subject matter. People love to learn something, they are "entertained" enormously by being allowed to understand a little bit of something they never understood before. One must have faith in the subject and in people's interest in it. Otherwise just use a Western to sell telephones! The faith in the value of the subject matter must be sincere and show through clearly. All gimmicks, etc. should be subservient to this. They should help in explaining and describing the subject, and not in entertaining. Entertaininment will be an automatic byproduct."

-Richard Feynman, Letter to Mr. Ralph Brown, Advisory Board in Connection with Programs on Science (in Perfectly Reasonable Deviations from the Beaten Track)