Anna Koop

From blog posts to presentations to dissertations—why should people bother with you? Be quick and clear about your point.

I recently gave a talk in the Psych department on my research. Overall it went well, but I lost the thread (and a few people) partway through the talk. What was the problem? Not having a succinct summary of my contributions is a big issue. It’s coming, but oh-so-slowly. The other problem was that, although I had a clear outline, I forgot to keep referring back to what my contribution was. Why I was telling this particular group about this smattering of things?

The outline was:
        Introduce the grand question (How do we connect sensorimotor data and conceptual knowledge?)
        Go over some historic attempts at answering this.
        Explain our take (Knowledge is about experience).
        Go through pros and cons of our approach.
        Existing results.
        Future plans.

Around the end of the historic attempts, I forgot to keep referring back to the grand question. I did it a few more times, but not consistently or clearly. As Rich and Leah both commented, I didn’t make it clear that “Knowledge is about experience” was our approach. And I really wasn’t clear about the pros and cons. It’s a nice outline and would have been infinitely stronger if I had kept coming back to our shtick. Succinctly.

Another issue might have been trying to pack too much into a one-hour talk, but that’s a post for a different day.
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Various ways of phrasing this point:
Get to the point clearly and quickly.
Tell people why they should care.
What are you actually doing? State it clearly and refer back to it.

Rob DesJardins’s point—that the research question is like the chorus of the song, and the sections of your talk/proposal are the verses. Keep coming back to the chorus.

Quotes from Rich—
        List your points and make them small enough to hang on to: “Weird thing, weird thing, weird thing”         and then explanation of how those weird things contrast existing things. What they mean.
        “Be firm about your approach.”
        “Be more explicitly comparative.”