You, your slides and your posters: allies or foes?

Abstract

In the first few blinks of an eye after you stumble onto the stage, or make an opening stab at your slides or poster, most of your audience has likely made up its mind—and you may not even have “started” your presentation. Perhaps the projector isn’t working, or your microphone has a mind of its own, or you apologize for not finding the room in time. Perhaps your visitor(s) caught you eating at your poster, or you just returned from chatting with a colleague across the room and found someone squinting at your fine print. Whatever the case, the rest of your performance serves as confirmation of your audience’s bias and first impressions. And besides you, your slides and your posters have their own agenda, subplot or series of subplots that reflect you, your expertise, your authenticity, your passion for your subject, and your attention to issues like relevance, context, clarity, citations, acknowledgments, respect, consistency of fonts, spelling, and those excruciating details in your visual aids that you can’t bear to leave out, and even their artistic composition. At your poster, you have just moments to pitch the importance of your work. As for your oral presentation, remember that your audience may have already sat through several presentations that day. I use my expertise as a writer and director of plays as well as a professor and entrepreneur (with experience at trade shows) to elaborate on effective presentations at a conference: embracing your audience’s needs; gaining trust; the importance of clarity, citation and acknowledgement; the importance of “story” and admitting setbacks; those crucial first few seconds, and your first few slides; and how to identify and avoid potential traps and pitfalls.