Center for Analysis and Design of Intelligent Agents

Be confident - even if your presentation is perfect, presenting it with a self-demeaning attitude or comments will make your audience feel you could have done better. A presentation can never be better exceed your attitude!

Be brief - Why use more words when you could have used fewer? Avoid baroque terms that add nothing but unnecessary ornateness, like “utilize” instead of “use”. For every sentence or bullet in your presentation, constantly ask yourself “What do I really mean?” and “Can I cut even closer to the chase?”.

Make an outline before you start to create slides - This one is hard to follow! But it saves time if you can, and probably makes the presentation clearer.

WHO IS YOUR AUDIENCE? - It doesn't matter how much you prepare if you miscalculate your audience.

Practice, practice, practice - Did you think you could just create the slides and then get up there and do a killer presentation? Well, you're probably wrong. Run through your slide deck several times and do your presentation the way you plan to do it, polishing and pruning each time.

Turn the clock on - You should time your presentation every time you practice. This will tell you how likely you are to go over the given time limit. And you will go over the time limit if you don't practice with a timer!

Begin with an outline - What is the structure of your presentation? If it's a 6-minute presentation you don't really need to give an outline, but I want you to do so anyway.

Introduce the key question - What is the key concept? This may be different to the title of your presentation. This should be your second or third slide.

Get down to it - Organize your points / contributions / results around in a way that makes it easy for your audience to follow.

Summarize what you said - Give a short summary of what your contributions are. (When you have only 6 minutes you may skip this step.)

Describe the potential impact - Why do your results matter? In what way will the world be different due to your work? Don't exaggerate, but don't be afraid to think far into the future – the distant future in which direction your results point.