How to give your Fish Class Presentation

Title: Don't forget to give the audience your title. It should be short and informative. It should help prepare the audience for what is to come.

Introduction: Make this relatively short, but try to make these points:

• What is the background for the report, i.e., what is the context for the talk? For example, if you are talking about breeding behavior in African cichlid fishes, is it of interest because of evolutionary questions, or from a fisheries perspective, or both? Are you going to present a critical discussion of a single paper or a body of knowledge. Give the audience some reason to pay attention--get them interested, even if its just a statement about why you came to study the problem.
• What is the question? Are there hypotheses to test? What are the possible tests? What tests were applied? Were the tests appropriate and did the hypotheses pass?
• What data were applied to the question? For example, in a presentation on the ecology of a pond, one might wish to compare population structures of centrarchid fishes, or their diets, breeding behavior, etc. Are the data appropriate to the question at hand? Will they actually provide a test of the hypothesis?

   

Results and Conclusions: What are the conclusions of your inquiry? Did you find something novel or unexpected? Are you satisfied or do you think further work is necessary? If you are discussing a body of literature, tell us something about where that area of science seems to be going. If you are discussing a single paper, tell us whether you think it was a successful effort. (Don't complain that it might have been too difficult for you to read or understand--the point of this exercise is to have you gain competence in some area in which you were a novice--if you did not understand it, you should have sought some help from your fellow students or even, dare I say it, the teacher!)

Some tips:

• Be sure to practice--out loud!
• Organize your thoughts--work out ahead of time how you will present the talk, what overheads you may use or how you will use the whiteboard.
• If you are going to use overheads, make sure they are in order, and that they show what you want to illustrate. Make sure that the images are big enough. Use a copy machine to enlarge images such as graphs and tables. The most common problem with presentation overheads is that the text or figure is too small to be seen clearly. The images should nearly fill the transparency.
• If you will need the whiteboard, be sure what you are going to write on it and in what sequence.
• Speak up. You need to project your voice so that everyone can hear without straining. Try to address the audience, not the floor or your notes.
• Speak slowly. No one but you has heard the talk before, so speak slowly enough for us to be able to follow you.
• Use notes if you need them. Don't worry if you haven't memorized the talk (memorization is better, but not at the expense of leaving out crucial information). You may need notes for only part of the talk.
• Stay on the subject. Don't ramble.
• Pace yourself. Try to break the talk into logical segments of a set time each. For example, an introduction of 1.5 minutes, a discussion of alternative hypotheses and data for 4 minutes, and then 1.5 minutes to give results and conclusions. Some speakers spend so much time casually making an introduction that they must rush through the rest of the talk.

   

Remember, you will be expected to be an active participant in the presentations as a member of the audience. As you listen, try to think of questions that might help you or others to better understand what the speaker is doing. If something isn't clear to you, feel free to ask, as it may be that others did not understand it either. When asking critical questions (and feel free to do so), remember that we are inquiring about the methods and data of science, not attacking the person giving the talk. Keep the questions fair and clear, and impersonal. That way, we are all likely to learn something!