Category: Presenting

In the course of a PhD degree, there are several scenarios in which you present an idea or piece of work to your peers, who then give you some sort of feedback. Some examples:

• You submit a paper describing your work to a journal. Reviewers then read the work and send back comments
• You submit a grant application to a funding body. Again, this is read by reviewers who then give their comments
• You present your work to a group of people in the form of a seminar. At the end, the audience ask questions about the work
• You present someone else’s work to a group of people - for example, in a journal club. Questions might be asked at the end or throughout

Naturally, getting a big list of comments or questions can be disheartening. But I think it’s important to bear in mind the difference between a those arising from misunderstandings and those arising from disagreements. In all the four scenarios outlined above, my experience has been that any given question or comment is much more likely to stem from a misunderstanding than from a genuine difference of opinion.

This shouldn’t come as a surprise; in research, we are often trying to explain complicated ideas that might not have been described before. There are many opportunities for your reviewers/audience to get the wrong idea. Take comfort, then, from the fact that when your paper comes back from review with 20 comments, the vast majority (at least 80%, in my experience) arise because the reviewer hasn’t understood the work completely.

These points still need to be addressed (usually by rewriting to make the clear up any ambiguity) but this is much easier than trying to argue why you are right and the reviewer wrong. The same goes for comments on grant applications and seminar questions. Next time you’re faced with such a scenario, take a moment to decide whether you’re dealing with a difference of opinion, or just a misunderstanding, and treat the question accordingly.

There’s an interesing question over at Ask Metafilter on coping with a large reading load. This is something you’re likely to have to do several times during your PhD; certainly at the begining, but also throughout when you encounter a new technique or topic. Some of the advice that comes up is good:

• Designate a specific place (e.g. the library) away from home where you can read without distractions
• Don’t be afraid to prioritise the material you think is most important or interesting
• Underline / highlight key sentences (I do this all the time with scientific papers)
• For academic papers, read the abstract, introduction and conclusions, and look at the figures, then decide if it’s worth reading the rest

Telling other people about your work is of massive importance in research and in your PhD – probably second only to carrying out the work itself. There are two main ways in which you’re likely to do this in a research career – writing papers, and giving presentations. Both of these are big topics, and I’ll be writing much more about them. There’s a lot of advice floating around the web on how to give good presentations – here are two examples – but here I want to focus down and concentrate on a very basic skill that I often see people have difficulty with: how to present a complex figure.

Presentations on scientific or research work are likely to have complex figures or diagrams that lend themselves well to being displayed on a slide. A good slide that shows a key piece of information can be the basis for a whole section of a talk, so it’s worth presenting it well. However, I repeatedly see people making fundamental mistakes when presenting slides like these. Here’s how to do it right.

1. Describe the figure

This is the step that people most often miss, but it’s crucial that you do this before going any further. Before you can start explaining what the figure shows, or how it fits into your work, you need to tell people what they’re looking at. If it’s a graph, say what the axes show and what the different datasets are. If it’s a flowchart, say what the different shapes mean. If different parts of the figure are in different colours, explain their significance.

2. Point out the trend you want to show

Now that people know how to interpret the figure, you can draw their attention to what it’s saying. If there is a correlation between two variables, say so. If one data point stands out from the rest, point it out and say what it represents

3. Put the information into context in your work

Finally, you can begin to talk about the significance of the trend you pointed out in step 2.

The steps seem obvious when laid out like this, but I’m constantly surprised at the number of talks I see where the speaker puts up a complicated graph, then skips steps 1 and 2 and straight away carries on talking about their work. Meanwhile, the audience is squinting at the slide trying to read the axis labels. Once you’ve practised these three steps they’ll flow together naturally and you can continue your talk, knowing that the audience has been informed, rather than distracted, by your data.

If you have any other presentation tips, feel free to leave a comment.