and you know, let's face it, none of us really have had a lot of explicit training

in presentation as scientists.

So, ok, we're not experts. We may not be experts at public speaking,

but I would actually suggest to you that we are all experts at listening to talks.

Think about the number of hours that each of us has sat in a chair, in a lecture room,

in a seminar, in an auditorium, listened to journal clubs, to all kinds of talks,

we've spent hours and hours and hours listening to talks.

So we're experts at knowing what a good talk is because we know what we want delivered as an audience member.

So, if you think about it, why do we go to a talk?

Well, we're interested, obviously, in learning some about interesting and novel science.

We are going to listen to speakers who we think are credible and knowledgeable

and doing novel work.

We are responsive to speakers who are enthusiastic and who just keep us awake

and we want a talk that is well organized, clear,

a talk that we can follow, a talk that's not laden down with jargon

and a talk that gives us enough background to understand

what's going on, we want to be able to see the data, understand it, interpret it

and then make our own decision about the science.

So, we're all experts at listening to talks, why can't we just translate what we know

we want as an audience member into how we give a talk as individuals.

Let's think about something; how many times have we each seen a slide like this.

We've seen it a zillion times, right, we're sitting there, in a chair,

listening to a seminar, a slide like this comes on.

And we have no idea of what to look at.

Are we supposed to read all of this text?

Are we supposed to look at this figure, or that figure

or that figure?

We're overwhelmed visually and we've all seen this slide a thousand times.

Now, I just want to make a quick disclaimer.

This was not my work and I'm not suggesting for a second that the authors of this really gorgeous paper

would have shown a slide like that.

But, if I were giving a journal club on that topic, I might have produced a slide like this for you

in trying to tell you about these data.

So, when we think about what we know instinctively is just a disaster, why do we keep doing it

again and again and again?

I think that we need to know some basic rules about power point

and how to structure a talk

in order to enable these visuals to work effectively

as we're teaching, as we're speaking about our own science,

as we're presenting journal clubs.

So, what I'm going to do is first of all go through some basics about power point

and then we're going to think about how you structure a talk

in order to lead a member of the audience through the data

in a way that they will understand each piece that you're presenting and

be able to really understand what the take-home message is.

First of all, what font should you use?

It turns out that some of the default fonts in power point and keynote

are exactly wrong. The font you should use is a Sans Serif font.

What is a Sans Serif font?

San Serif fonts are fonts without little doober-hicky lines

and stuff at the bottom of letters.

And that's to be contrasted with Serif fonts, which have all the little doober-hickies at the bottom of each letter.

So, why do you use one and not the other?

Well, visual psychophysicists have discovered that using a Sans Serif font when you're projecting text

onto a screen like this makes it easier for the audience to read the text

quickly. These fonts down here, the Serif fonts, this is the font if you have novel you were going to read it in bed,

it's very easy to read.

And that's why books are printed with Serif fonts,

but you should choose, and there are a range of choices that you can make,

one of the Sans Serif fonts for your scientific presentations.

How big should your font be?

Again, be careful of some of the default font sizes.

One of the defaults in Power Point is astronomically huge,

bigger than this one right here, it's like 42.

It's way too big! You don't need that.

So, the range of font sizes that you should use are shown here.

Anywhere from 18 down to 36, with one exception.

We often, in our scientific presentations, will want to insert a reference to a published paper,

which isn't really the focus of the slide, but we want to have it up there

for scientific accuracy.

So, under those circumstances, you might use a 14 point

font, to put your reference at the bottom of the slide.

Other than that, just work in this range and you'll be good.

Avoid using capital letters. This makes it clear why.

It's actually really hard to read all capitols.

And secondly, in this age of email, I think we all know that capitalizing everything

is the visual equivalent of shouting at someone.

So it's just not polite. In addition, when you're thinking about titles

or how you would actually capitalize words,

use a sentence format. In other words, don't capitalize every word

of your title or your text down here.

Having capitals of every word slows down the eye and makes it difficult to read.

So, remember, the text and the slide is really there for the audience to be able to read quickly

and easily.

Color schemes are really important and thinking about the background of your slides.

Now, we've all seen a lot of slides that have

very fancy backgrounds and in fact,

you want the simplest possible background.

For example, a plain white background with dark letters,

either black or blue.

That works very well; it's high in contrast

and the only thing that appears on the slide is the information that your audience needs

to understand this slide in the context of your talk.

Avoid using the fancy patterned backgrounds.

You don't need your company or university logo

on every slide. You do not need a DNA double helix

running down every slide.

All of that is extraneous. Maybe it might appear on your first slide,

but then get rid of it.

Streamline it down to as simple as possible and think about the contrast of letters.

So dark against light works really well,

light against darks works very well. A black background with white letters

or bright yellow. Again, high contrast, easy for the audience to read.

When should you use which? Well, if you were to give a talk

for example, at a very large symposium, with hundreds of people,

a very big room, psycophysically, and in terms of the projector,

the contrast is greatest if you use a dark background

and light letters, under that context.

So it's easier to project at high contrast.

If you're teaching in a small room, or you're in a circumstance where you're worried about people staying awake,

then I would use a white background, with dark letters.

That is actually more effective.

However, you do want to think about your science.

For example, in my science, I use a lot of fluorescence, photomicrographs, where I actually prefer a dark background

because the contrast, I want people to be dark adapted so they can really see my data.

So in one of my scientific seminars, regardless of whether I'm in a small room or a big room

I use a black background.

It just works better for my science.

There are certain color combinations that you should avoid. Red/green is bad:

this is incredibly difficult to look at. In addition, a large fraction of the population is red-green color blind

and finally, red is really angry color. I actually saw an entire seminar once

with the background color of the slides that was red and

I was so agitated by ten minutes into the talk, so avoid that.

Other color combinations can be equally bad

and this is bad not because the colors are unpleasant

but because the contrast here is not big enough

for an audience member to actually read

the letters against this background. This is important because in science we're often

creating, for example, these cartoons, of, for example, of a signal transduction pathway,

where you want each protein to be a different color.

So we're always looking for a new color for a new protein as we're going through

a flow of talk, but we want to make sure that each protein that might in fact be this blue color

would then have a label on top of it that's high contrast. For example, for this, it might be black instead of green.

Let's think now about how to lay out a slide visually in Power Point

so that it's really easy for an audience member to follow the content of your talk.

First of all, I strongly recommend that every slide a heading at the top

and the best heading is actually a statement, a simple sentence

that says in plain english what the bottom line of the slide is.

Now you might say, Sue, excuse me, this is not a statement, and you're right

ok, busted, this is really going through an outline for this particular talk, but in my science talks

every slide is headed by a statement.

If you're going to include text in a slide, it's very important to just limit the amount of text.

I really, strongly urge you to use no more than two lines of text

in a text block. Why is that?

The minute you show a big block of text like this, I have lost you as an audience member.

You don't know at this point whether you should be reading all of this stuff or listening to me.

And if you as an audience member are now distracted and confused about what you should be doing,

I as a speaker have lost control of my talk.

So, don't use things like this, there's one exception, there might be a wonderful quotation that you want to include in your talk.

For example, a quote from The Double Helix or a quote from the beautiful writings of Ramon y Cajal

if you're a neurobiologist. And under those circumstances it's great to include the full text.

What I recommend you do if you do include a quotation, is rather than read it word by word,

instead sort of paraphrase it as you're going along.

You might say, well, the reason for limiting blocks of text to just two lines is

if it goes on forever, people in the audience are going to have to make this huge effort

to read it and that will preclude them from paying attention to what you're saying.

So, you can paraphrase a quote, that's very effective, unless it

is very poetic and you want to do a dramatic reading, and that's fine too.

Lists should be short; try to limit your lists to just three items.

Avoid like mad long lists and if you're going to have a list,

I strongly recommend that you use the animation feature in PowerPoint

to unveil your list one at a time.

So, when you're talking about item one in your talk,

that will appear. And only when you're ready to talk about item two

does that second item appear

and likewise, when you're ready to include item three, that will come up as well.

Be very generous in a slide with empty space.

It's more effective, it's more powerful for the audience.

And this is why. If you start to just load your slide with stuff,

it's visually overwhelming and often, you can get into a situation,

we've all been in seminars before, where something is very, very, very close to the edge of the slide

and there's a slight misalignment between the projector

and the screen that then results in stuff getting cut off.

And we've all been at talks, where someone says "oh, I'm sorry, If you could have seen the slide,

then you would have been able to read it."

Well, just leaving some space at the different edges, the boundaries of the slide

and don't forget about leaving some space at the bottom.

If you're in a room where everyone is sitting at the same level,

people in the back are trying to see over one another's head,

so if you're stuff is too close to bottom, some people in the back can't see it.

So, leave space on all three sides and a little space at the top, again for the misalignment problem.

Ok, let's think about the style of these slides. I urge you

most wholeheartedly to include a simple image

on every slide.

What, most slides? No, every slide.

In every slide of one of my scientific presentations, there is an image.

Why is that? Here's the deal.

We audience members who are listening to a talk take in and process information

in quite different ways from one another. Some of us

are readers and that's the reason for having a sentence at the top of each slide.

Some of us are going to take in information by reading.

Others of us are very visual. If we have an image on the slide,

then that appeals to the vision, we're primates, we're very visually oriented

so we communicate through pictures.

And the third way we talk in information is by listening.