Preparing speaker’s notes and practicing your talk

1. Preparing speaker’s notes and practicing your talk Jane E. Miller, PhD

2. Overview • Review of slide design considerations • Speaker’s notes • Practicing a talk

3. Preparing your talk • Even if you are a confident extemporaneous speaker, you must prepare. • Visual materials • Prepare slides (see podcast on designing slides). • Oral explanation of visual materials • Prepare notes to coordinate with slides. • Delivery • Practice timing. • Too long? Too short? • Check clarity with a guinea pig audience.

4. Review: Design considerations • Average of about 1 slide per minute of allotted time for your talk • Fewer slides if they are • Complicated charts or tables • Involve anecdotes or quotations • Succinct text • Simple, clear charts or tables

5. Reasons to use speaker’s notes • Flesh out material on the slides: • Remind you of full sentences • Provide illustrative anecdotes • Prompt about aspects of tables or charts to emphasize. • Keep you on time. • Remind you not to just read the slides .

6. Where to put speaker’s notes • In PowerPoint, can type them into the “notes page” • Either view them on split screen (if technology supports it). • OR print notes out hardcopy to use as you present the slides. • Print notes out with large type (~14 point), so you can read them!

7. Screen shot of speaker’s notes view • Here is the “notes view” for one of the slides earlier in this presentation. • Top panel shows the slide as it will be projected onto the room screen. • Bottom panel shows the text box you will be able to see on the computer screen.

8. Contents of speaker’s notes • Introductory sentence for slide. Either: • Paraphrase title, • Restate title as a rhetorical question. • “Vanna White” if needed to: • Describe a chart or table. • Coordinate with handouts. • Summary sentence if slide covered a lot of info • Transition sentence to next slide • Explain where slide fits in the overall analysis.

9. Speaker’s notes: Length • If your notes are longer than will fit with 14 point type, you are probably trying to say too much about that one slide! • Split material across more slides • Or cut some of what you were going to say

10. Wording of speaker’s notes • Paraphrase information on your slide into complete sentences. • Write in the first person. • E.g., if your slide shows • 1988–1994 • US • Sample of infants (N=9,813) • You couldsay: • “We study a random sample of about 98 hundred infants born in the United States between 1988 and 1994.”

11. Rehearsal • First, practice talk alone, using your slides and speaker’s notes. • Check timing, especially for short talks. • Check sequencing of topics. • Evaluate slide layout and contents. • Evaluate speaker’s notes. • Practice coordinating “Vanna White” motions and script. • Make adjustments to slides and notes. • Practice again.

12. Rehearsal with test audience • Enlist a guinea pig audience if you will be presenting • To a new type of audience for you • Interdisciplinary audience • Applied or lay audience • About a method you haven’t explained before • Your test audience should ideally have training and interests similar to those in your intended audience

13. Points to evaluate • Logical story line • Vocabulary and metaphors • Types of charts and tables • Relative depth and emphasis of different sections • Whether questions you ask and answer fit that audience’sinterests: • Implications of study for • Policy • Practice • Research Should be familiar to audience.

14. Summary • Prepare speaker’s notes to: • Coordinate with your slides, • Cover the needed content, • Explain layout of diagrams, • Help you stay within allotted time. • Practice presenting, check • Time, • Order of material, • Clarity of definitions, examples.

15. Suggested resources • Chapter 12 in Miller, J. E. 2015. The Chicago Guide to Writing about Numbers, 2nd Edition.

16. Suggested online materials • Podcasts on • Designing effective slides • Explaining a chart or table live: The “Vanna White technique” • Comparison of paper, speech, and poster

17. Suggested practice exercises • Study guide to The Chicago Guide to Writing about Numbers, 2nd Edition. • Questions #2 and 4 in the problem set for chapter 12 • Suggested course extensions for chapter 12 • “Reviewing” exercises 1 parts g, i, j, and m • “Writing” exercises #4 and 5 • “Revising” exercise #4

18. Contact information Jane E. Miller, PhD jmiller@ifh.rutgers.edu Online materials available at http://press.uchicago.edu/books/miller/numbers/index.html