General Approach
There are several steps involved in preparing a paper for presentation. It
Is highly recommended that you follow the suggested sequence of steps, and
Do not skip any of them. First, you need to read and understand the paper.
Second, you need to adapt it for presentation. Third, you need to get a set
Of slides ready. Fourth, you need to do a dry run of your presentation. This
Will almost certainly cause you to re-iterate over steps two to four. Once
you are comfortable with your presentation, you get to go on the stage.
Afterwards, there will also be an evaluation process.
Understanding the Paper
The essential ingredient for a good paper presentation is that you
thoroughly understand the paper and the points it is trying to make. Nice
slides and a polished presentation are important, but cannot make up for a
lack of understanding. Therefore, I suggest that you spend a significant
amount of time trying to grasp the contents of the paper you are presenting.
This may require reading additional papers as well, to get a better
understanding of the context. In particular, I expect you to read at least
all the other class papers on the same topic.
While it is important to understand the technical details in the paper, the
primary goal in this first phase of the preparation is to understand what
the key points are that the paper is trying to make. What the key points
are, is a question you should evaluate in the context of the audience for
which you are presenting the paper. In this particular case, you are giving
A presentation in a course. Try to answer the following question: what would
you, as a student in this course, like to know about this subject? Then, try
To evaluate what are the key points of the paper in light of your answer to
This question. Also, remember that this is a course about software for
Distributed systems. A particular paper that we read may contain an
Interesting hardware discussion, but, unless that discussion is essential in
understanding the software concepts presented in the paper, it is probably
not a key point as far as this course is concerned. Also, do not forget that
it is a course, and that therefore for many people your presentation is
their first exposure to the material. This implies that relatively
high-level points are probably of more interest, while low-level details are
most likely going to be lost on your audience. Your choice of what topics to
cover might be different if you were to present the paper at a conference or
as a job interview talk.
Adapting the Paper for Presentation
Experience indicates that the amount of information that people carry away
from a lecture or a presentation is relatively small. Therefore, it is
essential that you very specifically highlight the key points of the paper.
People are most likely to forget the rest. It is also well known that the
audience is most attentive in the beginning of a lecture. Attention then
drops until the point where the speaker signals that the end of the talk is
near, at which point attention levels rise again.
Rule 1: You should have a slide very early on that states the key points of
the paper, and nothing else. You should have a similar slide at the end. You
should decide on these slides first before you proceed.
The most common problem with student presentations has been that the student
goes over the paper from A to Z, in the same order as the written paper,
without adding or deleting anything. This is a very bad idea. A written
paper is an archival document, and therefore it tries to be complete. With
an oral presentation, one tries to relate the key points of a paper to the
audience. That requires highlighting those key points, and only briefly
summarizing or deleting lesser points.
Often people are not quite sure what the key points are, or they cannot make
up their mind. They then try to bury the slide with the key points into an
“overview” slide that outlines the paper or the talk. This is not
acceptable. Having an overview slide may be a good idea, but it is never a
substitute for a slide with the key points of the presentation.
Once you have gotten past this part, it is now time to develop the rest of
your presentation.
Rule 2: The rest of the talk should be structured such that it elaborates
and clarifies the key points.
If, for instance, the paper claims to provide some functionality not
provided by earlier systems, you should specifically state what this
functionality is, what it is good for, how it is accomplished, perhaps what
the costs are, etc. If the paper does something better or faster than other
systems, you should explain what the new concepts are that allow it to do
so, and quantify the improvement. Throughout your discussion, you should
occasionally return to the key points to make sure that the audience does
not lose sight of the overall context.
People are often tempted to budget time to various parts of the talk in a
way proportional to the amount of time they spent getting to understand the
corresponding part of the paper. This is often a bad idea, because it may
lead to a disproportionate amount of time being spent on tricky details that
do not contribute to the overall goal of getting your audience to appreciate
the paper. Tricky details are far better understood by reading the paper.
Your talk should be sufficiently motivating such that people actually want
to go read the paper to figure out the details. If you do decide to go into
some complicated aspect of the paper, and again, you should only do so if
you consider it essential, you have to explain it in real detail and budget
enough time to give the audience a chance to absorb the level of detail.
There is a big danger here of starting to explain some complicated aspect of
the paper and try to hurry through it because it is not very important. Of
course, nobody understands what you are trying to do. Attempts like this
usually end with the comment “Well, I know it’s complicated, I don’t have
the time to explain it all in detail, but I hope you got the idea”. You have
just confused everybody.
Many of the papers that we will read in this course have experiments,
measurements, and performance results in them, “numbers” as the
theoreticians say.
Rule 3: You should fully explain the purpose of the experiments, the
experimental setup, the results, and the conclusions to be drawn from these
results.
In other words, you should make sure that it does not come across as “a
bunch of numbers” but as the account of a scientific experiment. There is
nothing worse than throwing up a slide with some numbers on, and leave it at
that. Even if the numbers are digested into a table or a graph, that does
not relieve you of the responsibility to explain how these results were
obtained, what they mean, etc. In particular, if you put up a graph or a bar
chart, you must explicitly state what is on the x and the y axis. Without
this information, your audience is clueless and has to start searching on
the slide for the labels on the axes. Even if you put on several slides with
Identical looking graphs, it does not hurt to re-iterate for each one what
Is on the axes. More will be said about the slides used for presenting
experimental results later on. You should make sure that you budget enough
time for this part of your talk, as it is a frequent source of questions
from the audience.
A paper presentation in this course is different from a presentation at a
conference, in that you are presenting somebody else’s work and you may not
agree with all of it. Avoid confusion between the paper itself and your
opinion of it.
Rule 4: Your talk should consist of two clearly delineated parts, one in
which you present the paper as if you were the author, and a second one in
which you offer an evaluation of the paper.
The emphasis in the evaluation should be on the contents of the paper and
also, but to a lesser extent, on the paper’s overall structure and
presentation. This is also a good place to make connections with other
papers we have read and cast the paper at hand into a wider context.
Slides
You should allow for approximately 45 minutes of presentation. This is just
a guideline, not a strict upper or lower limit. In any case, you should
allow for questions both during and after the talk, and also for some
discussion after the talk. A good rule of thumb is to have about one slide
per two minutes of talk, although this is certainly not an universal rule.
You can use either transparencies, or use a PC to directly project on the
screen. There are advantages and disadvantages to both. The advantage of
projecting directly from a PC is that it allows for some animation effects,
which are difficult or impossible to do with transparencies. It also
facilitates incremental improvement or adjustment of the presentation. The
disadvantage is that you put yourself at the mercy of the equipment
functioning correctly, not always a given. You should learn to be
comfortable with both styles of presentation, but the way of the future is
definitely to directly project from a PC, and I suggest you try doing so. In
terms of what software to use, Powerpoint slides are pretty nice. Latex and
Slitex can also be used with success.
If you put something on a slide, it must be that you think it is worthwhile
for the audience to read it. From this follows the cardinal rule for making
slides, unfortunately also the rule that is most often sinned against.
Rule 5: Use a big letter size.
I cannot stress this rule enough, so just to make sure, I will repeat it.
Rule 5: Use a big letter size or else …
There is an important corollary to this rule. Occasionally, you want to use
a figure (or a table) from the paper. You should not do this by copying the
figure on to a slide, but by redrawing it on a size that will be readable by
your audience. In particular, units on graphs or in tables should be clearly
legible. If there is too much in a particular graph in the paper, split it
up in two graphs or present only part of it.
The second rule is almost equally obvious, but also often ignored.
Rule 6: Do not clutter you slides.
First, you should leave large margins, both vertical and horizontal. Be
especially careful not to go too close to the bottom of the slide, as the
audience may not be able to see the bottom of the screen. Second, your
slides should just contain the bare essentials: no full sentences, just a
few keywords. Never try to cram a lot of material on to a single side, use
two or more slides instead. There is nothing wrong with a slide that is
three quarters empty.
Rule 7: Your slides should be visually appealing.
A picture is almost always better than text. Long bulleted lists are boring.
Try to distinguish major and minor points by using indentation, by using
boldface, etc. It is a big plus if you do so consistently throughout your
slides. Colors can be very appealing but must be used with care. You must be
consistent. If you have two slides with horizontal lines depicting the
execution of processes and arrows representing messages between them, use
the same color on both slides for the processes and the same color for the
messages. Over-use of color can, however, be distracting. You must also be
careful with certain colors. Red and pink are indistinguishable with many
projectors. As said above, if you project directly from a PC, you can use
some animation. In general, sparse use of animation is a plus, but be
conservative: over-use quickly becomes annoying.
Rule 8: A single slide should never try to convey more than a single
concept.
All slides should have a title that describes this concept. If the
explanation of a concept goes on for more than one slide, then repeat the
title with some qualifier, or with just “(Continued)” added to a title.
Never start a new idea in the middle of a slide, or try to convey more than
one concept in a single side. Use a new slide instead. As said before, there
is nothing wrong with a slide that is three quarters empty. It is almost
always a bad idea to cover up part of a slide, because it almost always
means that you put too much on the slide. Besides, half of the time, the
piece of paper that you are using to cover up part of the slide falls off.
In the same vein, while overlays can be used to advantage, it is often
better to put up a completely new slide, which may include most of what was
on the previous slide. Overlays are difficult to line up correctly, and
slides taped together tend to fall of the projector. Overlays of more than
two or three slides do not project clearly. If you know ahead of time that
you are going to use a slide more than once, you should make as many copies
of the slide as you will need and insert them at the appropriate place in
your stack of slides. This avoids searching through the slides during the
talk.
The Dry-Run
So now you have all your slides ready.
Rule 9: You should do (at least) a couple of dry runs.
Go through the entire talk, as if you were giving it in class. Ask somebody
to time it, and ask people to make notes. Some people also find it useful to
give the talk in an empty room with just the video camera running. The first
time you give a talk, you will be surprised to find out that a lot of people
will look at you with completely empty faces. Some people will fall asleep.
An empty room with a video camera running will prepare you for this
situation.
You will find that, after a first dry run, you will want to change a lot. In
fact, it is not uncommon for people to change all of their slides after a
first dry run.
Rule 10: Avoid premature optimization. Get the contents right first, and
then make your slides look pretty.
For a first dry run, you might just have some of the slides hand-written or
hand-drawn, as long as they accurately reflect what you are going to have on
them for the real talk. If you use direct projection from a PC, you can use
that to great advantage here.
After you have your talk ready, you should spend some time trying to
anticipate what questions you might get during and after the talk. If the
answer to a particular question you expect is difficult, prepare a slide
with the answer. In general, take a few extra blank slides and a suitable
pen with you to the talk, so that you can write something down if you need
to.
One final rule.
Rule 11: Get some sleep the night before your talk.
The night before your talk is not the right time to do all of the above.
Sleepwalkers do not make for exciting speakers.
To Memorize or not to Memorize?
There is often debate on how much of the talk you should memorize. Your
presentation should be smooth, but at the same time it should not appear
completely scripted. How much of the talk you have to memorize to accomplish
this effect differs from person to person. You should definitely not have to
consult your notes on a regular basis. Ideally, you should not have to do so
at all. It is very useful to completely memorize the first minute of your
talk. Many people are quite nervous in the beginning, and memorizing the
first minute helps them get off to a smooth start. Along the same lines, you
should outline in detail what you are going to say in the technically
complicated parts of the talk, if any. Only the most accomplished speakers
are capable of improvizing successfully at such times.
You Are on the Stage
Rule 12: Make it look like you are having a good time.
Audiences are far more forgiving if they think you are enjoying yourself. If
you look scared or uncertain, it is like letting the wolves smell blood.
Show some enthusiasm for the subject. Speak loud and forcefully. Do not end
your sentences in a mutter. Do not be afraid to raise and lower your voice,
to delineate more or less important points. A moment of silence at the right
time can do wonders. If you just said something important or something very
complicated, let it sink in for a while before you continue. This technique
will work particularly well if your slides are such that each slide
introduces a new concept. Do not talk while you are changing slides, and
give the audience time to absorb what was on the previous slide.
Rule 13: Make sure that the audience can always see the screen.
Do not stand in front of it, and do not block the projection of the slide on
to the screen. Especially after changing slides, people tend to continue to
stand right next to the projector. In a level classroom, you should go stand
next to the screen after changing slides. Some speakers also move around
while they are talking, a good idea when done in moderation. Also, never
remove a slide before people have had a reasonable amount of time to read
what is on the slide. Never flip back and forth between two or more slides.
Make sure you have a pointer with you to point things out on the slide.
Pointing things out with a pen or with your hands obscures the projection of
the slide. Do not play with the pointer; put it down when you do not need
it. If you use transparencies, you can point to things on the projector or
on the screen. Either way can be done right, but pointing to the screen is
often better (not always possible, though). If you point on the projector,
make sure that you are not obstructing the projection or the view of a large
part of the audience, especially the part of the audience sitting on the
same side of the projector as where you are standing. If you point on the
screen, make sure that you turn back to the audience. Do not stand or talk
for an extended period with your back towards the audience. Avoid having to
write on a slide during the talk, but have an appropriate pen with you just
in case. You will certainly obstruct the projection while you are writing.
Make sure to step back and take a short pause afterwards so that the
audience can see what you have written before you continue.
Rule 14: Do not try too hard to be funny.
Most people are not very funny, anyways, especially when they are nervous.
There is nothing more awkward than somebody who is not funny and who is
trying to be. There is nothing more likely to throw you off than to have the
audience react stonecold after you tried to make a joke. In general, if
something goes wrong during the talk --- most likely something will in fact
go wrong --- do not let it throw you off. Also, people might not take you
seriously if your talk turns into a stand-up comic act. This does not mean
that you should not be able to see the humor of the situation if something
funny happens. But just let it happen, do not try to make it happen. When it
does happen and people start laughing, wait until the laughter dies out or
nobody will have heard what you said. Also, in some situations you will be
introduced before the talk, for instance for an interview talk. Some people
have the extremely annoying habit of introducing the speaker by telling some
supposedly funny story (In some departments this is a tradition). This is
really great, because it guarantees that nobody is listening right from the
beginning. If this happens to you, make absolutely sure to wait until the
laughter dies out, and be very serious during the first few minutes of your
talk to get things back on track.
Interacting with the Audience and Dealing with Questions
Rule 15: Look at the audience and seek eye contact with them.
Do not look at the screen, at your notes, at the slide projector, or away
from the audience in any other way. Look at the whole audience, not just
your friends, the instructor, the first row. You are much more likely to
keep the attention of the audience going this way.
If you are really confident, you should try to engage your audience in
actively participating through questions and answers. If you ask a question,
you have to be willing to wait until somebody volunteers an answer. If you
don’t, your question will come across as perfunctory, and you will certainly
not get any answers the second time you try. As said before, you have to be
pretty confident to pull this off.
An important aspect of giving a talk is dealing with questions. It is also
one of the most difficult to learn. The first thing you should realize here
is that questions are a good thing. It means that people are listening. It
does not (necessarily) mean that you did a poor job of explaining something.
So maintain a positive attitude to questions and the people who are asking
them. Allow the person who is asking a question to finish his sentence.
Quite often, speakers jump in halfway with their response. It is rude to do
so. And you are probably answering the wrong question. If the question is
not quite clear to you, do not try too hard to guess what the person is
asking. It is often better to ask for a clarification, or to try to re-state
the question in your own words to see if you got it. This has the added
advantage that it gives you some time to think, and, more importantly, it
guarantees that all other members of the audience have clearly heard the
question. It makes people feel good if you ask them if they understood your
answer, or if your answer addressed their question. It is also perfectly
acceptable to say that you do not know the answer. Do not try to hide this
by not answering the question, and certainly not by making fun of the
question or the questioner.
The above not withstanding, it is true that many audiences have a
self-appointed designated jerk. Every audience also has people who do not
understand a word of what you are talking about. The combination of the two,
a person who repeatedly asks stupid questions on a tone of “what the hell
are you talking about” can be quite deadly. This is one of the most
difficult situations to deal with, and there is no universal approach to
combat the problem. You are lucky if the audience contains a jerk
exterminator. This is the person from the audience who casts an annoyed look
over his shoulder, and gives a one-word answer to the question. If that
happens, you are safe. Do not rub it in. If not, you must be very firm in
not letting this person derail your talk, while remaining polite (if at all
possible). One approach is to ask the jerk to defer his questions until
after the talk. If he keeps on asking questions, start giving one line
answers, and continue immediately without checking if he understood the
answer. This situation is unlikely to occur in a course, but in general you
should be prepared for it.
The Role of the Instructor and the Communications Specialist
Speakers and the person who helps them prepare their talk can come and see
me at any time prior to the talk. Speaking from experience, there seem to be
three times at which a meeting is extremely helpful. First, after you have
digested the paper, a brief discussion is often useful to check if you
figured out what the main points are and to clear up technical details about
the paper. Second, I can go over your slides with you before you do a
dry-run. Third, after you have done a dry-run and fixed up your slides
according to the comments of the people who attended, I can go over your
slides with you and point out possible improvements. I strongly suggest that
you come see me at least once and perhaps a second time before the talk.
The communications specialist will help you with the dry run. You need to,
well ahead of time, agree with them on a date and time at which you will do
the dry run. It is strongly suggested that both people involved in the
preparation of the talk attend the dry run. The communications specialist
will make the room available to you, and videotape your dry run. Afterwards,
they will provide you with feedback and with a copy of the videotape.
At lecture time, I will introduce you, and I will lead the discussion after
your talk, but you should not count on me helping you out during the talk.
Although I may say or ask something, you are in charge and you should be
able to handle whatever situation comes up.
Evaluation
After each talk I will hand out evaluation sheets, on which everyone will be
asked to evaluate the presentation. I will then summarize the student
evaluations, add the evaluation made by the communications specialist, and
my own comments, and provide a summary to the speaker. Your evaluations will
have no effect on the speaker’s grade, so I urge you to be candid and
constructive. Your evaluations may however affect your grade, so I encourage
you to take them seriously. The communications specialist will also
videotape all student presentations. The tape will be available for some
amount of time after the presentation. If you want to keep the tape for an
extended amount of time, you should bring your own.
The evaluations will allow you to get feedback on how the audience reacts to
and perceives your presentation, and the videotape will allow you to see
yourself as the audience sees you. Most people seem to have an incredible
Fear of seeing themselves. It is usually not that terrible. And everybody
who has brought up the courage to examine the tape in detail has found it to
be extremely helpful.
You should understand that the fact that a paper is presented by a student
may occasionally take its toll on the material. The discussions after the
Paper presentations and the review lectures are meant to smooth out such
Problems, but they are not a perfect remedy. This is the price that you have
To be willing to pay for the opportunity to practice speaking in public.
