Dear Presenters at Medicon 2011

This is Vasumathi Sriganesh and I will be teaching the component of Literature searching in the EBM preconference workshop at Medicon 2011. I am also a champion of INFORMER, in fact of medical students, and so I would like to share some tips that I myself learned at a "Communications Workshop" that I attended recently.

PRESENTATION TIPS

You have a limited time for presentation. You would love to speak about everything related to your study. But you cannot. So here's what you CAN do.

There are two elements of your talk / poster presentation

1. What you will say
2. How you will say it

 

WHAT YOU WILL SAY

Ask yourself

a)    What is your key message to the audience?

b)    What are the highlights of your study?

·         Don’t try to give too many details. Give only the Tip of the Iceberg. Any more detail can be given when the audience asks questions.

·         Oral presenters: Whatever you can confidently speak about – don’t put up on slides - beyond words / phrases / smallest sentences.

·         Tell and show - ie speak, catch people's eye and THEN show the next slide

·         At the end, once again - give your "key message" - which is then what the audience remembers.

·         Poster presenters – let your poster speak. Just say a few lines about what is most important. Then let the audience ask questions. Give simple answers to questions

HOW WILL YOU SAY IT

Give a message & Tell a story: Forget that you are “making a presentation” or "talking about a topic". Tell a story. When you do that it is like sharing it with a group of friends. Topics could be boring, but people can make them great!

Connect with people in the audience: Make eye contact with people in the audience. Don't you do that when you talk to a friend?

Slow down. Just a bit: This is not just about speaking slowly. Most of us tend to not only speak fast, but also pour out a high "Rate of ideas"! We do not give time to the audience, to absorb what we say. So how do you lower the "rate of ideas"? A very simple method is to introduce a PAUSE of a few seconds. 

For eg say - "In my study I found that patients having rest plus the drug did better than patients who took the drug alone". Pause for about 3 seconds. Make eye contact with the audience and then continue. This will let them “soak up” what you just said.

Invite questions:

·      Say “I am sure you have questions; I would be happy to answer them”.

·      Pause for 2 seconds before you answer

·      Answer to the point. Don’t give “another talk” as an answer. (Practice this if you can, with your friends).

·      If anyone is aggressive with his/her question, listen and pause. (Very important). Then calmly acknowledge the other person’s view point and state something like “This is what I found, and it is interesting to note a different view point”. Explain your side once more and wrap it up with a smile.

·      If one individual in the audience tends to ask too many questions / go into discussion mode / ask unrelated questions, politely say “Yes I can answer it, but maybe we could talk during lunch”. And just turn towards the moderators. They will take the cue and stop any extensions.

·      If you don’t get questions, just say thank you and if you wish, repeat your key message. Be comfortable doing this.

“Post-mortem”: Some presenters later tend to go into an “I wish I had done ____. Or I wish I had not done ____.” While analyzing and getting feedback is important, all you need to do is to note it down for improving your future presentations. The past cannot be changed; no post-mortems please! Remember that you had an awesome learning experience. Value it!

Have fun presenting: Medicon is a platform for you to get started. Have fun presenting. All of you are sharing ideas and experiments.

 

Happy presenting!!!

 

With special thanks to Raymond Nelson whose workshop gave me most of the inputs in this hand-out. And to Shivika Chandra for her comments and additions!

Vasumathi Sriganesh

QMed Knowledge Foundation