Open Resources in Alcohol Studies

Timing - Practicing Your Presentation:

PowerPoint has many features that will help you give a smooth and professional presentation. This document will help you prepare your presentation by providing useful information and making you feel comfortable with your presentation.

• Rehearsing Presentations
  Rehearsing is just as important as the work you put into creating your presentation. It is especially important if you have applied builds, transitions and/or other elements, and are working in the automatic advance mode because you will need to keep control of the timing of all these elements to prevent mistakes.
• Working with Slide Timing
  PowerPoint offers a number of options in regard to the timing of the slides in your presentation. You can assign timing manually, suppress it during a presentation, or remove it. Talk through your presentation to see how much time you use for each slide. Set the automatic slide transition to the amount of time you want to spend discussing each slide. Decide if you want to remove the automatic slide transition feature before giving the presentation.
• Embedding Fonts
  When you create your presentation, it is best to embed the fonts in case the computer with which you actually present does not have all of the fonts you used. Embedding fonts will also enable you to avoid problems with bullet shape and helps make your presentation more portable. This can be done after your slides are already written.

Content:

• Make a list of key words/concepts for each slide
• Read through the list before you begin.
• Don't attempt to memorize your text or read it to your audience
• Your words will probably be different each time you practice.
• Think about the ideas, and your words will follow naturally.

Title

• Your entire project boiled down to a few words
• Used by many to decide whether to visit your poster
• Should not be too long or contain jargon and abbreviations
• Should state the main focus of your study
• Must be visible from six feet away

Author and Affiliations

• Include first and last name
• Spell out affiliations that may not be universally recognized
• Street addresses are not necessary
• Smaller than the title but still big font
• Logos and pictures can be nice but not if they clutter up the poster

Introduction

• Gets the viewer interested and brings them up to speed in the field
• Puts your work into the context of what is known
• Justifies your model system and approach
• Often ends with a clear statement of your specific goals or hypothesis
• Keep it brief, use figures and diagrams, use bullets points if possible

Goal (optional)  

Methods

• As brief as possible
• Use graphics and flow charts, rather than text if possible
• No need to describe basic methods
• Most viewers don’t want to read details; they will ask for them. Can supply more information via handout

Results

• Include only a few key figures or tables
• Each figure should have a title that summarizes the results
• Figures should be large, labeled clearly, and be easy to understand with a long legend
• All text should be visible from several feet away ( 48-30 pt font)

Conclusions

• Use bullet points to highlight a major finding
• Consider displaying a model
• Possible to use a summary paragraph or summary bullet points instead
• Remember...less is more!

Future direction (optional)

• Use bullet points
• Be brief

References (optional)

Acknowledgements