Preparing a presentation

Giving a presentation is often a dreaded part of surgical training and ongoing academic development. It requires a set of practiced skills which are not formally addressed during training. Once presentation skills are developed, however, speakers gain confidence and may even enjoy giving future presentations. The purpose of this mini review of educational psychology and communication research is aimed to provide practical tips for optimizing presentation design, delivery and effectiveness. A useful educational theory that is helpful in understanding effective learning from presentations is cognitive load theory. This theory acknowledges the limitation of the temporary or working memory (WM) to hold only seven to nine novel items at one time. These items will be lost permanently if not rehearsed or if there is not enough WM free to process the information into the long-term memory (LTM). Therefore, reducing the cognitive load or content of our slides could facilitate enhanced learning of new material. An evidence-based method to reduce content on slides in order to increase effective learning is chunking theory. This centres around how information can be chunked in meaningful ways to facilitate recall in smaller units. For example, take the four fat soluble vitamins – A, D, E and K – which could either occupy half or more of the WM capacity or be chunked into a single unit. Chunking these into one unit frees up the other six units to process this information meaningfully into the LTM. For instance, one might recall that there used to be a department store named DEKA and this encompasses all of the fat-soluble vitamins. Grouping multiple information sources together in similar spatial proximity reduces the audience’s mental effort needed to learn. Figure 1 illustrates visuospatially scattered text, numbers and graphics that need higher mental effort by the viewers as they attempt to integrate these elements whilst listening to the presenter. This cognitive loading or split attention is minimized by grouping these elements together as demonstrated on the left side of the figure. This reduces the WM load which facilitates processing the information into the LTM. The same principle can be applied to presenting photos, illustrations and graphs. Cognitive load research demonstrates that the audience will learn better from visuals and verbal narration than from visuals, narration and text together. A good example of this is watching a subtitled movie. As we try to listen, follow the scenes and read subtitles, we are bound to concentrate less on one of them. Once we turn the subtitles off, the experience is much improved. Therefore, where possible, refrain from using redundant text to improve the audience’s attention on you as the presenter. The redundancy principle is simple to remember, less is more! This principle suggests that people learn better from animation and verbal narration than from animation and on-screen text. Therefore, you could replace on-screen text with your narrative as the animation plays. Practical tips for slide design are given in Table 1. As the purpose of presentations is to convey knowledge, avoid puzzling the audience with vague and long titles. Choose a title that is brief and to the point. Brainstorm your main ideas about the topic on a piece of paper before reaching out to your computer. Then, link these ideas aiming for an easy flow as this facilitates your speech making as well as slide design and layout. Sometimes, it is useful to summarize each idea into one sentence as if this was the ‘take home message’ from each idea. It may be useful to search the internet for other presentations on your topic to optimize your structures and ideas. Audience engagement can be enhanced by contextualization of your talk. For example, in a lecture on an obscure and potentially boring pathological topic, wrap the topic in a clinical case. Choose emotionally rich cases to maximize the audience’s attention and engagement. The software programmes available for slide design offer an increasing amount of themes templates and animations. While it may be tempting to employ exotic slide themes and animations, these are more often not distracting and may actually malfunction on the day of your presentation. As far as possible, minimize the complexity of your slides. Slide backgrounds or themes work best as a solid colour with no underlying pattern. Use a contrasting colour for your font and ensure your colour combination facilitates easy reading. Some good examples are black on white, yellow on blue and white on black. Often your institution or funding body requires you to brand your presentation with their logos. Do comply with the branding guidelines of your institution, but where possible minimize the presence of branding logos to title slides only to minimize visual cognitive loading. Font and bullet point formatting need to be carefully considered. Ensure your chosen font is easily legible. Your font size should be as large as possible to allow readability for those most far away from the projection. Bullet points should be double-spaced and kept as succinct as possible. There is no exact consensus in the literature as to how many bullet points or how many words per bullet point are ideal. Opinions range from four bullet points with four words each to seven bullets points with seven words in each. An easy rule is the ‘triple-seven’ rule by Pratt which says ‘no more than seven bullets, no more than seven words per bullet, no more than seven lines per bulleted slide’. Loading bullet points individually