Name: The craft of scientific presentations
ISBN: 9781441982780

The craft of scientific presentations

"The Craft of Scientific Presentations, 2nd edition aims to strengthen you as a presenter of science and engineering. The book does so by identifying what makes excellent presenters such as Brian Cox, Jane Goodall, Richard Feynman, and Jill Bolte Taylor so strong. In addition, the book explains what causes so many scientific presentations to flounder. One of the most valuable contributions of this text is that it teaches the assertion-evidence approach to scientific presentations. Instead of building presentations, as most engineers and scientists do, on the weak foundation of topic phrases and bulleted lists, this assertion-evidence approach calls for building presentations on succinct message assertions supported by visual evidence. Unlike the commonly followed topic-subtopic approach that PowerPoint leads presenters to use, the assertion-evidence approach is solidly grounded in research. By showing the differences between strong and weak presentations, by identifying the errors that scientific presenters typically make, and by teaching a much more powerful approach for scientific presentations than what is commonly practiced, this book places you in a position to elevate your presentations to a high level. In essence, this book aims to have you not just succeed in your scientific presentations, but excel."--Publisher's description.

What Hacker News says

jrauserJan 2019

For scientific/technical talks specifically, a truly useful technique I learned from The Craft of Scientific Presentations[1] is the assertion-evidence slide.

This type of slide has a complete sentence at the top that makes a substantive assertion. Then the rest of the slide contains evidence for that assertion usually in the form of a diagram, chart or table. This type of slide is the backbone of a scientific presentation.

Generally, Alley's book is extremely useful.

[1]: https://www.amazon.com/Craft-Scientific-Presentations-Critic...

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dmlorenzettiJul 2018

Try framing your material in the assertion-evidence [0] style. Not only does this lead to more informative presentations, I find it helps me organize my story better.

Briefly, rather than using topic titles ("Experimental Setup", "Results"), use assertions ("Sampling occurred over 5 days", "Sunlight causes significant degradation") as titles. Then the bulk of the slide is some information, preferably graphical, that supports the assertion. Reading the titles in order should give you a strong sense of the presentation content.

I strongly recommend "The Craft of Scientific Presentations" by Michael Alley, which covers the assertion-evidence approach, and a host of other practical topics.

[0] https://www.assertion-evidence.com

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ThenAsNowJun 2016

This seems like an opportune moment to suggest technical presenters take a look at Prof. Shewchuk's missive: http://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~jrs/speaking.html

I'm in no way affiliated with him, just found his rant online. I think his points apply to a lot of technical presentations (though certainly not all).

Another helpful resource is "The Craft of Scientific Presentations": http://www.amazon.com/Craft-Scientific-Presentations-Critica...

The bottom line is that the tool itself is probably less relevant than we think it is, though I agree with Tufte that text-intensive Powerpoint is great way to do your critical points grave disservice.

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