Ten Habits for a Better Science Talk

The three earlier posts in this series are about the talk itself: what I look for when I watch one, how to build one slide by slide, and how to pitch it to the room you are in. This one is about the speaker. It covers what you do in the months before a talk and what you do once you are standing in front of people.

It is built on an article I recommend reading in full: Joanne Kamens’s “10 Steps to a Perfect Science Talk”, published on the Addgene blog in 2016. Kamens wrote it for life scientists, but almost none of it depends on the field. I have kept her ten steps and her order. For each one I give the short version of her advice, then what it means in our lab, and a link to the earlier post where that topic already has more detail.

Her opening point is the one to keep in mind throughout: every science talk is also a job talk. Someone in the room is deciding, quietly, whether they would want to hire you, collaborate with you, or invite you back. Kamens notes that two of her own jobs came, indirectly, from someone seeing her speak outside an interview. That is true of a lab meeting, a class project presentation, and a conference session alike.

1. Watch great talks on purpose

Kamens’s first step is to study speakers who are good at this, not the average lab meeting, where results tend to be presented in the order the experiments were run. Her bar is a conference keynote or a TED talk. For early-career examples she recommends the Young Scientist Seminar Series and the science and career talks on iBiology, and she suggests watching how those speakers talk without looking at their slides or notes, build suspense, and keep their slides simple.

What this means for you: watching is a skill, and passive watching teaches you very little. When you see a talk that holds the room, whether it is a keynote at a conference or a recorded talk online, write down three things afterward: how it opened, how the speaker moved from one section to the next, and what you remembered an hour later. Many conferences in our area post recorded talks online. Do this a few times and you will start to see the same handful of moves in every good talk.

2. Tailor every talk to the occasion

Kamens warns against reusing one prepared talk everywhere. Find out who will be in the room, their career stage and their fields, and ask the host what they hope to hear. Her own cautionary example is a joke that did not land with an interdisciplinary audience.

This is the whole subject of Presentation Strategy by Venue, so I will not repeat it. The short version: a lab seminar, a full-paper conference session, and a presentation-only slot are three different talks, even about the same project. Ask before you build the deck, not after.

3. Tell a story

People remember material better when it arrives as a story, Kamens argues: cause and effect, kept simple, with a reason to want to know what happens next. Include the obstacles and how you got past them, and think hard about the order.

The research version of that story is the spine in How to Build a Good Research Presentation: motivation, problem, gap, question, method, results, meaning. The part students most often leave out is the obstacle. “We expected X, the first prototype did Y, so we changed Z” is more memorable, and more honest, than a method that appears fully formed.

4. Start preparing long before you are asked

This is the step I most want you to adopt, and none of the earlier posts cover it. Kamens’s advice is to keep a running slide file and drop into it, as they happen, anything that might belong in a future talk: a striking result, a good image, an idea, a story.

In our lab, that means one running deck per project, started now, not when a deadline appears. Each time something works, or fails in an interesting way, add one rough slide: the figure, one sentence on what it shows, the date, and where the data and code live. Photograph the setup while it is still on the bench. It takes two minutes at the time. Building that slide from memory three months later, for a conference talk, can take an afternoon, and the photo may no longer be possible. When the invitation comes, you will be choosing from material, not trying to recall it.

5. Choose content you know and care about

Kamens’s advice is to present what you know deeply and care about, keep jargon to a minimum unless you are sure the room shares it, and favor what is new to the audience: methods, details, “aha” moments, and where the work is going. Scientists, she notes, would rather hear something new than a rehash of what they already know.

For us, the trap is the background slide nobody needed: a general introduction to VR, robots, or large language models in front of a room that works on exactly that. Spend those minutes on what only you can tell them. When you do need a term the audience may not know, define it on the slide and keep talking; do not stop to read the definition aloud.

6. Practice in front of real people

Practice is the only way to get good at this, Kamens writes, and most of us give a formal talk too rarely to improve by accident. Rehearsing in front of an audience tells you the real length of the talk and which parts do not work. She recommends that graduate students and postdocs form small groups to practice for each other and give supportive feedback.

Graduate Research Presentation Expectations covers how to rehearse alone: out loud, timed, until you land on time consistently. This step adds the audience, and the audience matters. A friend who has never seen your project will find, in one run-through, the slide where you lost them. Any talk you give outside the lab should get a full practice run inside the lab first. If you are asked to sit in on someone else’s practice run, give the feedback you would want: specific, kind, and about the talk rather than the person.

7. Hone your slides

Kamens asks for large, easy-to-see images, professionally labeled graphs, and, for important talks, peers to check the slides for typos and clarity in a big room. Show cool visuals, but do not overdo the effects; a video or animation is worth it only if you can get it working reliably.

The concrete numbers for this, such as font sizes, one idea per slide, and readable axis labels, are in How to Build a Good Research Presentation. Her proofreading tip is worth adding: look at the deck projected in a real room at least once before the talk. Typos, low-contrast colors, and too-small labels that look fine on a laptop screen show up immediately at the back of a room.

8. Predict the questions and prepare the answers

Kamens suggests asking your practice audience for questions, writing down the ones they ask, preparing short, clear answers, and keeping a few extra slides for them. When you truly do not know an answer, she says, never make one up: say you will get back to the person, and then do.

The earlier posts already ask you to write out the five hardest questions a critical listener could ask, and to keep an appendix of backup slides for them. Her last point deserves to be said again plainly: “I don’t know, but I will find out and get back to you” is a complete and respectable answer. An invented answer is the one thing in a Q&A that is hard to recover from, because someone in the room usually knows.

9. Resist the urge to say everything

Kamens’s rule of thumb is about one slide per minute, and then cut a few more. Never run over your time. Talks that run long lose the audience to their phones and eat the question time, and they make the speaker look unprepared. One topic or one story, done well, beats a tour of everything you have done. In her words, “more is almost never better.”

The budget in How to Build a Good Research Presentation shows why the cutting is unavoidable: a reasonable outline for fifteen minutes adds up to about nineteen. Results you cut are not wasted. They go in the backup slides, or in the running deck from step 4 for the next talk. Finishing a minute early has never once hurt a talk I have watched.

10. Be enthusiastic

The last step is energy. If the speaker sounds bored, Kamens points out, the audience will be bored too. Aim for a conversation with the room rather than a lecture at it. Enthusiasm comes from knowing the material well and practicing it, which also lets you work without notes. When you stumble, keep going; the audience is following the story, not checking your words. Experienced speakers can also bring the room in, with a show of hands or a question to the audience.

Two practical notes from me. First, enthusiasm is not volume or speed. It is mostly looking at people, varying your pace, and sounding like you want them to understand. Second, working without notes does not mean memorizing a script. Know your first two sentences cold, so nerves have something to hold on to, and know the one sentence that carries you from each slide to the next. The rest you can say in different words every time, and it will sound better for it.

Putting it together

Of the ten, most of the work happens before you reach the room: watching good speakers, keeping a running deck, choosing what to leave out, and practicing in front of people who will tell you the truth. On the day, what is left is to tell one clear story to the people actually in the room, and to sound like you care about it.

Read Kamens’s original article. It is short, and it links to more of her career advice for scientists. Then pick one habit from this list to start this week. My suggestion is the running deck from step 4. It is the only one you cannot catch up on later.