The Craft of Scientific Presentations: Critical Steps to Succeed and Critical Errors to Avoid

A revolution is occurring in the way that scientists and engineers are making presentations. The revolution is small, but many of the scientists and engineers breaking away from PowerPoint's default structure of a topic-phrase headline supported by bulleted points are making names for themselves: Janine Benyus, Brian Cox, Jill Bolte Taylor. This book tries to present the essence of that revolution by showing you what distinguishes the excellent scientific talks on TED.com as well as excellent presentations at scientific conferences and in technical meetings. After reading this book, you will know when to blank the screen during a scientific talk and how to empower that part of the presentation. Also, for those occasions in which you do use slides, you will create scenes that are truly for the audience, rather than the sad practice of projecting slides that simply present the speaker's notes. If you want to give a mediocre presentation, do what everybody else does. If you want to communicate your science and engineering in an understandable, memorable, and persuasive way, consider this book.