[Reading] Lecture 02 - How to Give a Good Research Talk

First, we should understand that this article focus on the situation that the audiences are the people who may not know much about your works, and you are presenting a technical talk. Knowing your audiences is important, it determines what kind of materials should be put in your slides. To make sure that everyone can get something from your talk, give enough and clear information instead of too much details. Giving example would be a very good way to explain our idea.

The author also tells us how to prepare the slides, but I think some of them are out of date. For example, I don't think perparing the slide by typing is a bad idea, handwriting is not always good for everyone.

I do like the way introduced by the author about how to help re-orient the audience. By saying something like "This is what I have discussed so far, and now I'm going on to cover these areas," we have another change to re-catch the attention from some people who are already lost. I have used a similar skill in my talk before.

Another important concept is : avoid the temptation to conceal problems you know about in your work, get your audience to help you do your research! I think most people would try to hide thier weakness instead of doing this, so I'm a little surprised at this philosophy.

Reference:
Simon L Peyton Jones, John Hughes, and John Launchbury, "How to give a good research talk," SIGPLAN Notices 28(11) (Nov 1993).
http://research.microsoft.com/~simonpj/papers/giving-a-talk/giving-a-talk-html.html