 In Britain in most universities we teach students how to present at a conference. And that's regarded as an important skill but we became very aware discussing the colleagues from other university systems that that doesn't happen necessarily in every country. One of the things that John and Peter and I wanted to do, was give you some flavour of the teaching we do. I, in the past, have taught post-grad students in my university how they should present. We're going to do it both with examples about how you should do things. a dwi'n gilydd y llunio. Mae'n gilydd yn gwybod a'r meddechau. Mae'n cael ei wneud i'w llunio i fod sy'n dwi'n cynlluniaeth gyda'r ledr amser. Mae'n cael i'r ddechrau'r frontau yr unrhyw i'r llunio. I'm going to show you some of the simple rules that I think can ensure your and my success in pre-communication. Now this, for me, is one of the classic mistakes. Shout it out in capitals in uppercase. Now can you see the difference between a paragraph in uppercase and a paragraph in lowercase? This is easier to read. It's easier to read because of the variability in the letters. As your eye goes along the line it sees the T's and the I's and the P's because there's variability in the height of letters. Now when I go downstairs and look at those posters some of them will be written in uppercase. I have never read more than half a sentence in a poster written in uppercase because my eyes glaze over and I think, What the hell? Life is too short to read a poster in uppercase. But again you don't do it in a presentation either because that is more difficult to read. Now it may seem obvious and everybody laughed but I've seen it at this conference already and it's only the first day. This is another problem we've seen at this conference and of course it's very important that you can read what's on the screen. Now I do understand the beauty of design and wide open spaces that show what well-organised minds we have or empty minds. This is very beautiful but which is easier to read. Aerial 14 or Aerial 24. Now I put on here a general rule which is the rule. You'll see I'm using our corporate watsits because I have to. Because I'm being filmed and I'll get into trouble when this goes on YouTube if I haven't used the corporate watsits. Now we use Aerial because Aerial has no serifs. The serifs are what's on Times New Rome. We use Aerial because it's easier to read for dyslexics. Times New Roman is much more difficult for people who have reading difficulties of one sort or another. An arm and dated size is 24 with Aerial. If you use Verdana which is also very good for dyslexics you need to be 28 because it's a slightly different sized font. But do think about the size of font. It's very very important because what matters is that you can be read. Now the other thing that can be quite useful is highlighting certain words for emphasis. Now in our university mandated style we change the typeface. As well as making it bold we change the typeface to make it stand out. Because most people when they look at a slide read it very very quickly. And what you want to happen is that the key words to bounce out of them almost to be flashing. Probably not as we'll see in a moment. Now some people like to use animations. You know there is a wonderful menu in PowerPoint, the animations menu. Do you know it's so boring waiting for these words to come up? I mean okay I can use the menu to do animations aren't I clever? But has it helped with communication? What earthly use was that to anybody? You know I have sat through conference presentations when words have bounced in. When they twirl 12 round and round and round and you can't read the bloody title. You can't read it. So be very careful of animations. Now you will have noticed that in our house style we do have one animation that tells you when the subject I'm talking about changes. So when a line comes across that means I'm changing subject. So when I move to animations you've got a little line across. Now another way of doing that is to use the background colours that you get in PowerPoint. So for example when I'm not using the house style every time I change topic within a lecture I change the background colour because it's a subliminal way of saying to people this is something new. It's a very simple tip but it does mean that you're not using colours randomly just because you happen to like a particular shade of green. But you're using colours to communicate to give a message. So all but the simplest animations are best avoided because the important thing is that you are communicating science. There we are you saw it come across there. OK now something that John brought up was the issue of blackout. Now in this conference centre we're very lucky because blackout is good, the screens work very well and everything else. But I have regularly been to conferences where I've seen something like that. Now that looked more or less OK on my computer. Can anybody read it? You can just about. I can't read anything. Can you read that one? Again that's another one where the contrast between the colours has been worked better. You have to be aware that what looks good on your computer probably doesn't look good in a room with curtains that don't work, perhaps a broken Venetian blind, the door being opened, a very poor quality projector. Because that often happens at conferences, even EAA conferences. John reminded us, happened at some venues at Istanbul. OK, the next thing I wanted to say was... Did anybody read that slide? Congratulations. Your emphasised words? No, it's the right size. Oops, I'm trying to go back now. I can't go back. I meant to say that I just had time to read your emphasised words. Right, well you can just read the emphasised words. Thank you, Martijn. The point is that if you put up a slide like that, nobody, but nobody in the minute, two minutes you show a slide in a normal presentation will read any of it. Now I have seen a lot of slides like that today and they told me nothing. Because I couldn't read them or if I could read them, I didn't have time to understand them. So if you managed to read all the information on this slide, well done, congratulations. OK, so less is more. The key point to presenting is the essential information. The detail doesn't matter. Now lots of people have the temptation to back up their arguments and to show how clever they are by putting lots of data on their slides, lots of information. Now you just don't need that because nobody is going to ask you of the detail at the conference except for the three colleagues you know who follow your work and have read the papers you've written anyway and are just showing that they're cleverer than you are. For most people, the information does not matter. The information matters when you publish. That is where you back up your ideas, you show that science is repeatable and verifiable and of course that's what real science is, repeatable and verifiable. But in a conference presentation, if you do that, you will lose your audience, their minds, their eyes will glaze over, they'll start thinking about lunch and then before long like John, they'll be fast asleep. My supper couldn't sleep apnea as well so I have no excuse. OK, now looking, I was looking for a good example of a bad slide and I thought it would probably be wiser if I chose a slide that I had made because it wouldn't have been fair to borrow some of my colleagues and I think this is a very good example of a slide that I made. Now, I will be frank about this slide. The only point of this slide is to say, look, I published something about this, aren't I clever? That is the message of this slide. But isn't it a mess? Too many pictures, lots of words on the pictures that you're mine because they're in blue and green, blue, green and red. Your eye is getting distracted to that so you're not actually reading the text above it. It's a mess. Don't do it, less is more. See, this is another key problem with projectors that they're not all as we expect them to be. Now, most of us have been to conferences where this has happened. Now, I did that deliberately but I've seen it done not deliberately, very, very simply because the projector has not been properly set up with the screen. So what you do need to do is when you lay out a PowerPoint you need to leave a margin. That space is not there to be filled. It's not like doing a medieval map and drawing a dinosaur in the water so that you don't have a space on it. No, what you do need, again, all around so that if it hasn't been properly set up your words can be read otherwise it will end up like that. External links. Now, I have lost count of the number of times where I've been to a conference particularly when it was somebody talking tech and they said, I'm now going to show you my demo and they sort of start filling the computer and they put sticks in and out and everything goes wrong and you seem to think they've lost interest in the lecture because they can't get it to work. And then, when the YouTube, you finally do get out of the World Wide Web what you find, but the video is unavailable and that's a real video that I did at home because I didn't think we'd have a World Wide Web connection here. It was unavailable, so what did I look? I looked like a fool if I linked to a video which doesn't work. I've always asked myself why do people need to show us the video or the demo that shows how clever they are? Because they're insecure. If you can present your ideas in a simple way show and communicate, that is the way you get your message over. Now, something John spoke about was the use of colloquial and dialect phrases. And as John said, it's particularly a problem when we talk about people who don't speak received standard English as we used to call it Queen's English. It's particularly difficult because until after the Second World War those ways of speaking English were thought badly of in British society. So people may feel that you are criticising the way they speak if you say you're not going to be understood by an audience. But as John said, our Glaswegian colleagues but colleagues from other parts of the United Kingdom may not be instantly understandable to all listeners. So if you do have a regional accent I'm lucky I don't really have a regional accent except it's probably southern. If you do have a regional accent you do need to work really, really hard in communicating. The other problem is that many presenters do what I do and they walk around and they try to engage with the audience and try to make people laugh. And when you do that as a presenter it's very easy to slip into the use of phrases that your non-native speakers may not understand. Now I put one in here which is actually in dialect. It's a dialect phrase. If it ain't broke don't fix it. It doesn't really mean anything in our context very much. If many people in the audience who aren't British will know what ain't is which is a dialect form of verb is not in many English dialects. So we have to be extra careful of where native English speakers are because we've lived in England for a very long time. Or even if we're American or North American or from the other parts of the English speaking world the English that we use that is universally understood. Sometimes I've been to conferences where you listen to somebody talking and they don't really know if they're talking to you or they're talking to themselves. Mumbling is a very big problem at conferences. I've seen people sit behind the desk behind their computer. I've seen people talking. You do not need to look at the screen when you are presenting. If you're looking at the screen it means you don't think you've prepared your PowerPoint properly and you need to look to see if the slides are in the right order. Okay, it has happened to me at the last EAA that I got two slides in the wrong order. Quick double take. I don't think anybody noticed. I wouldn't have noticed because I don't tend to look at the screen. But it is very, very important that you have eye contact with your audience and you engage with them. Why? Well, in this, this is an area where giving a presentation is like being a teacher. Now when I lecture in the university I need to know if the students have gone to sleep, whether they are following what I'm saying, whether they've understood me. Now the only way I can know that is by getting eye contact and seeing because if they haven't understood immediately. But if I'm talking like this and yeah, well it's actually busy. I'm never going to know. So you don't look at the screen. The screen is there and it will take care of itself in any way you can see it there. You don't turn around, you face your audience and you engage with your audience. Okay, and the last thing I wanted to say about this is speed. I remember talking to a colleague at the conference and he said to me, you know, I've prepared 20 minutes. I've only got 15 so I'll just have to give it a bit faster. No. That's going to be a disaster isn't it? Speaking fast, particularly with non-native speakers, means that nobody will understand. Okay, another thing that is a difficult question is whether you should just simply read the words on the slide. Now sometimes this can be very helpful to non-native speakers because they have a synesthetic experience of reading and hearing the words at the same time. So it can be very, very helpful. It's also very helpful when people are nervous because, you know, let's face it, we all get nerves about giving presentations. The problem with it is it can become a bit boring because if I simply read the words on the screen, why am I reading them out? I just showed the slides. Why make you listen to me when they're all the words are there? So you have to strike a balance. But we've dealt with this. Look at your audience, project your voice, fill the room with your voice and speak as clearly as you can. Okay, another question that is really difficult and I don't know the answer to this, but one of the most important thoughts is whether you should read your paper from a script or whether you should do what I'm doing here and just waffling on and on and on. Now there are pros and cons to both. Now, for me, one of the important things if you're a beginner presentation is that if you have a written script, you know exactly how long your paper lasts. So if your paper written it down, you read it out in 12 minutes slowly, you know that you're going to go into that room and give a 12 minute paper. And there's another reason which is that you might forget to say something important. I sometimes give presentations and I sit down and I think oh my goodness, I forgot to say so. Usually it's the most important thing. That's just life. Usually nobody notices but that's not what I've noticed. So again, if you have a script, then you can be sure you won't forget something that's really important. The one you have to remember is that conference presentation is a type of performance. You're just like an actor who is interpretive. You're not interpreting Shakespeare. You're interpreting science. So every word, every emphasis that you use is a way that you are communicating. Now if you are good at reading you can do that. But you know there are so very many people who give conference presentations like this. In this presentation I should explore some common mistakes by presenters of conferences and show how simple words can ensure a success in communication. That is so boring. Just imagine if I'd done that for 15 minutes. You'd all, some of you are asleep. You'd all be asleep if I did that. So that wouldn't be a good thing. And there is one last thing. Now I'm very lucky that I speak relatively good Italian and when I was learning to present conferences in Italian language I found it better for me that the words were all written down because I got I got the the accent's right on some of the words. I got my masculine's, feminine's and plural's and singular's right because you know English people don't really bother with that stuff. So it was a big help for me to have a written text to work from. But the problem is when you read in another language your personal accent is stronger. So I know that when I speak Italian I sound less English than when I read Italian. So there's a play off there. You have to make the decision in another language which is going to work better for you and that will change through time. The better you get at it the better you will get at bullshitting sorry it's what I'm doing here bullshitting for the 20 minutes that I'm going to throw. 20 minutes more. Yeah, your time is up. Only a couple more slides. No, we've got it into time today. No, only a couple more slides. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry in pen and time. I am a professor. Do you not understand these things? I am a professor. I will talk for as long as I like. OK, so John did this beautiful. I don't know how you got that timing right. I guessed. Now there is nothing nothing more annoying than somebody who doesn't keep to time. Now however interesting their paper is you get to that quarter of an hour and you start thinking this is going to shut up. Particularly if it's the coffee break. Yeah. You want to get away. You are stealing other people's time if you overrun. You are reducing the opportunity for discussion. It's very, very important. It's about respect for other people. If you got given 15 minutes that's the time you got given. Whoever you are. If you're still doing your PhD or if you're an emeritus professor like John whatever it is you got 15 minutes that's the amount of time you get. But you have to remember that if they gave you 15 minutes it wasn't 15 minutes to go up and put your PowerPoint on. And then all the other stuff you've got to take 3 minutes of anything. So if you've got given 15 minutes prepare 12. If you've got given 20 prepare 17. That way you would always finish on time. Now last year at Vilnius I gave a paper about bronze age hordes on the last day and it was one of the most boring sessions I've ever been in. Because you know let's face it bronze age hordes on the last day. Anyway it's something I'm interested in it turns me on. So I gave this paper and I talked for 10 minutes and I had 20. Afterwards lots of people came up to me and said that was the best paper in the session. You were at the session. And I realised afterwards that it wasn't the best paper in the session. It's just that I finished early so everybody thought it was the best paper in the session. And so they liked my paper for no apparent scientific reason. Success. So somebody came up to me in the airport the next day we were waiting for a flight and he said you know that was a great paper and I said why? Why did you finish down? And that was brilliant. But no you understand what I'm saying. Don't steal other people's time. If you want success finish early. Now that may seem sorry just to go on a bit about this that may seem a bit counter intuitive because to finish early you have to tell people their stuff. But by telling people their stuff they'll go home with more in their house. One way sorry. Now one of the things people do is they put in too many slides. You have to understand that for most people they take a few minutes to read a slide. You have to leave the slide on the screen enough time for everybody to read that slide. And if they're non-legal speakers it may take them a little longer particularly if you have sentences that go on for more than two lines. So if your nobody reads your slide there was no point in making that slide. It's a waste of your time and your audience's time. People need to focus particularly if they've just looked at their watch to find out if you're going to finish they don't need to focus back on the screen. They might be taking notes if you're really that interesting. Now one of my colleagues I won't tell you who they were came to my university for a seminar a 45 minute seminar with 400 slides. 400 slides. Now we let him go on and on for an hour and a half he'd not even shown 20 slides. Can you imagine? We hadn't even got beyond the introduction. Now obviously that was not a success. Now I think that for a 15 minute presentation you need to aim for 10 maximum 15 slides. But that doesn't mean you put everything on those 10 15 slides. Ok, conclusions. Now what I've done on this slide is I've summarised all the things I've already said and generally speaking in a presentation what you would do is you would read these to remind people of what you said and I dealt with eight different topics in this presentation. But I'll tell you something that's actually what I said. I didn't need to show you a slide recapitulating, did I? Because what I'm selling you is that presenting is like marketing. What you're doing is you are selling yourself by me and you're selling your ideas and my ideas are the best. You know? So if you come on to my shop and buy my ideas you'll have a much happier career as an archaeologist. So selling selling your ideas, selling yourself is all about marketing and presentation. Now I have deliberately overrun as John Paul said. Thank you very, very much.