Some pointers to

an effective
technical talk
Krishna Jagannathan
September 4, 2015

The Challenge
A technical talk is an opportunity to impress your
audience and to get them excited about your work
It is not an exercise in information transfer

No one cares about your

work
Your primary objective should be to catch the
attention of a typical, indifferent listener
At a high level, focus on conveying the following
1.
2.
3.
4.

What have you done?

Why is it important? Why should your listeners care?
What was the key challenge/difficulty? How did you overcome?
What is the take-home message? One key intuition to remember?

Three stages
Tell them what you will tell them
o Positioning and motivation

Then, tell them

o Main contributions
o Challenges encountered and overcome

Finally, tell them what you told them

o Recap and summarize the main contributions and significance
o Take home message, key intuition, lessons learnt

Three things that matter

Slides
Soundtrack
Delivery

Slides are just props

Visual Anchor to the Soundtrack
Sparse slides, no complete sentences
o Roughly 12-15 slides for a 20 minute talk
o Outline slide is overrated!

Be as visual as possible
o Block diagrams, toy models..
o If something can be explained with a picture, do it!

Equations: only keep the most essential ones

o Never go over long derivations or proofs youll lose your audience

Bullet points are boring

Bullets may be useful in listing advantages, disadvantages
etc.
It would be silly use bullets to describe a system model, for
example draw a picture!
Bad examples: (this slide is one!)
N sensor nodes on a plane
Rayleigh fading channel between them
Nodes interfere within a radius R
Moral: Bullets have their uses, but dont make your entire talk
with them!!

Slide title should

summarize the slide
Bad examples:
Conclusions
Properties of FFT
Convergence rate analysis
Instead consider
XYZ algorithm is optimal, efficient
FFT efficiently implementable, scalable
Policy XYZ converges exponentially fast

Slides: miscellanies
Use legible backgrounds and font colours
o PowerPoint theme colours and fonts are usually okay
o Beware of using random colours on ppt or beamer

Choose a legible font, maintain font consistency

o Sans Serif fonts render better on projectors, esp at lower resolutions
o TimeshasSerifs
o Avoid illegible, highly stylized, or flippant fonts

Caption all figures, label axes, readable font size

Soundtrack
Practice, practice and practice
Practice again
Be pithy, technically precise
Speak slowly
o We Indians speak too fast perhaps we confuse speed for fluency!

Delivery and Body

Language
Face the audience, dont look at the slides while
speaking
Dont fidget around; No self-touching gestures
o These habits immediately give away a sense of insecurity/tension

Maintain eye contact with individuals in the

audience, gradually shifting your gaze
Emphasize important intuition, results with
appropriate pauses/flourishes

Oh, did I mention

Excitement?
Energy and Excitement
A great talk you know it when you hear one
You know it when you give one!!