The seminar program is designed
to develop skills in understanding, abstracting and presenting academic papers
in anaesthesia and related subjects. The college tutor allocates subjects to
trainees. It is then up to you to present this work to your colleagues. Remember
that there are two keys to successful communication – having a message to
present, and presenting it in an effective way.
The Friday morning seminars are
08:00 breakfast, 08:10 first seminar, and 08:30 second seminar. If you are in
the audience help the presenter by sticking to these times.
You must:
Prepare a seminar
with a conclusion that will interest the audience. Decide on the
message you want to get over, or the question on which you want
discussion to focus. Demonstrate a critical faculty.
Prepare
PowerPoint visual aids (copy to JE).
Use them as an
aid to your talk, as an illustration and summary of the things that
you talk about.
Bring your
presentation on a medium the PC will accept. The network PCs in the
CSB will accept USB pen drives, floppy disks and CD-ROMs. Or you can
download your presentation from the Internet.
You must not:
Turn up late.
Exceed 15 minutes
talking time.
Project slides
and just read them out. This is the most common major problem.
Talk while facing
the projection screen.
Use tiny font
sizes. Project the show on a PC screen. Hold a standard pen at arm’s
length and move backwards until the pen appears longer than the screen
is wide. If you cannot read the type easily at a glance, the audience
can’t either.
Present the
entire allocated paper without critical editing.
I advise you to:
Rehearse your
talk for timing.
Bring your
presentation as a Microsoft PowerPoint Slide Show – use the ‘Save
As’ command. This will cut out all the playing around with opening
presentations and finding the slide show button.
Copy it to the
Desktop before starting.
Use standard
PowerPoint formats and design templates. They have been carefully
constructed to communicate effectively.
Check the
spelling and get it right.
Have a take-home
message.
Put a blank black
slide last in your presentation and ask for questions.
I advise you not to:
Put more than six
lines of text on a slide – and never more than eight.
Use more than
twelve slides. Often, using fewer is better.
Experiment with
different fonts, builds and slide transitions. This looks messy and
distracts people from the message. Save special effects for special
messages.
Write in capital
letters. It’s unreadable.
Mumble, read from
a script, and lack eye contact with the audience.
Bring lots of
presentations on one disk or drive, and hunt amongst them for the
right one while we wait for you to talk.
Try reading How to Present at Meetings, by George M Hall. BMJ Books 2001. ISBN 0-7279-1572-X.
