The Oral Presentation

As noted in the Syllabus, one of the major learning objectives of this course is to provide you rigorous training in technical communications, including oral presentations. In this course we emphasize the Assertion-Evidence presentation style because of its many advantages in terms of delivering information and audience retention, but also because it requires substantial effort on your part to produce the final product: simply dumping your written report into a PowerPoint won't get you very far.

The main resources for preparing your 176 presentations are:

The remainder of this wiki page summarizes the Assertion-Evidence format that we use in this class and provides a few extra resources and tips along the way. All of this information and quite a bit more is available on Michael Alley's Assertion-Evidence Approach page, and all credit for content on this page goes to him, except where otherwise noted.

Submission Process

The presentations should be submitted as PDF or PPT files 3 hours before class on the day of the presentation to the appropriate Canvas dropbox. The dropboxes will be specific to your section; incorrect submission will result in a 5 pt penalty. If you miss the deadline there will be a 10 pt penalty; please bring your presentation with you to class in this event.

Grading Rubric

Your presentations will be evaluated on the following aspects:

Motivation

As an engineer you have knowledge and skills that aren't shared by most of the population, and this inherently separates groups of people into two categories, technical and non-technical. A few people have probably heard of Bernoulli's Equation, but even fewer know what a boundary layer is or why it's important, and sometimes even the basic tools like calculus that you use every day can be dismissed as unnecessary by the very people who benefit from them. Regardless of whether someone shares your technical background or would rather you shut up with your nerd talk, your role as an engineer makes it incumbent upon you to communicate your knowledge and advice to non-technical, as well as technical, audiences on a regular basis. Consider that according to the AIChE Code of Ethics, you're expected to use your knowledge and skill for the enhancement of human welfare, and along the way you're expected to

Importantly, both of these activities will require communication on your part; the most likely form of that communication will be by speaking to an audience or individual. It's therefore imperative that you convey your knowledge and advice as effectively as possible, whether the audience is technical or non-technical.

The Assertion-Evidence Style

The default PowerPoint layout hasn't changed significantly since its introduction in 1987 by Robert Gaskins and Dennis Austin. As a consequence several bad habits have become embedded into our collective presentation habits, including but certainly not limited to

The Assertion-Evidence (AE) format is far more effective at communicating ideas and enabling retention, and fortunately has a very simple structure: a headline sentence is supported by visual evidence. Check out these examples compiled by Michael Alley at Penn State, each of which are excellent presentations in the assertion-evidence style by undergraduate students:

There are three types of slides in the AE style: the title slide, content slides, and the conclusions slide. In all three, the headline sentence is always supported by visual evidence.



The Title Slide

A common error in the beginning of scientific talks is to create a length, jargon-filled title slide that serves to do nothing except make you feel important and make the audience feel like they're in the wrong room because they have no idea what you're talking about. Consider this one:

Oh goody: it's the first slide and you've already introduced jargon--"AMDE"--to summarize something I didn't understand in the first place: Atmospheric Mercury Depletion Events. Instead of bowling me over with your field's specialized jargon, consider instead a title slide in the AE style that orients the audience to your subject:

Notice the style of the presentation's title: it describes in plain language what will be discussed in the presentation, and provides visual orientation by means of an image and plot. A common mistake in presentations is to leave the title slide too soon by stating in an almost obligatory way, "here is my title and here is my name and the names of my collaborators." Instead, force yourself to spend more time with this slide and stay there until the audience, through your words and the visual evidence you have supplied, has a chance to comprehend the key details of the title, and--by extension--the topic of your presentation.

Sometimes the Title Slide will be followed by a Mapping Slide if the talk is expected to be lengthy or the connection between sections deserves special emphasis. Most of your talks for 176 won't require such a slide but the AE style nevertheless includes guidelines for creating such a slide; download the Presentation Template or the AE Introduction slides for examples.

Content Slides

Before introducing the AE Content Slide style, consider this slide regarding analog-to-digital signal conversion:

The default PowerPoint layout used here, sometimes called the Topic-Subtopic structure, is based on three fundamentally weak propositions:

Similarly, some presenters compound the situation by adding graphics to produce a sort of hybrid abomination, the Topic-Subtopic+Graphic slide:

Unfortunately, adding graphics to the Topic-Subtopic structure only adds to the amount of information the audience must assimilate, often leading to information overload. Consider what might go through an audience member's mind upon seeing the slide shown above:

How can we keep the attention of the audience? How can we allow them to re-orient themselves when their attention inevitably strays? We capitalize on the structure implied by the style, "Assertion-Evidence": an assertion is made using a full sentence headline, and this assertion is supported by visual evidence. Consider an AE content slide for the same digital acquisition slide:

With almost no explanation you can probably understand the message of this slide because you can read the full-sentence headline assertion and you can follow the visual evidence.

This is not to say that you should dumb everything down so that the audience no longer needs to listen to what you're saying. In fact, in most scientific presentations, you're going to have to explain why the evidence you've supplied is indeed evidence. In many instances, your evidence will be a plot of one variable against another and then you're going to have to explain why the relationship is important and what aspect of the plot is the evidence of your assertion. In the digital acquisition system slide, for instance, you'd have to explain that the entire graphic constitutes the "digital acquisition system" and then explain the important points of the assertion by highlighting--verbally or graphically--what each graphic is supposed to imply.

There are several variations on the AE style for different evidence styles--figures, equations, call-outs--that you can review in the Presentation Template or AE Introduction slides.

The Conclusions Slide

If you've seen a fair number of presentations then you've undoubtedly come across a final slide similar to this one:

Put simply, this is a waste of a slide: this slide tends to be displayed the longest (as you answer questions) yet it has no information and provides no way for the audience to recall what the purpose of your talk was. Instead, why not put the last slide to work by including a helpful summary? Of course, we again use the assertion-evidence style:

In this way the most important point--the "take-home message," if you will--can be emphasized again, or even for the first time if your presentation time is severely limited (as it is in our course). Importantly, your final slide should have two characteristics:

Finally, there is no reason for an entire slide just to ask for questions; a simple "Questions?" at the bottom is sufficient because you're undoubtedly going to inform the audience that it's time for questions.

Formatting Guidelines

Style

To create an AE slide, keep to the following guidelines:

These three points might seem simple on the surface--and they are--but you'll find that it requires significant effort to compress complex ideas into one or two slides structured in this way, especially when you've only got a few minutes to give your presentation.

Typography

Again, three simple guidelines:

Layout

Here's the magic three again:

To these three I would add a fourth of my own: use a 4:3 aspect ratio rather than 16:9. Most projectors will letterbox 16:9 to become 4:3 by compressing your text and introducing ugly bars on the sides.

Citations

If you use images or graphics from an outside source then you also need to include a citation. The citation should be included near the graphic (below it, for example) and can be in one of the following simplified formats: