Getting Started
As an author/speaker at SNUG, you have two methods to convey your ideas: A published paper and an accompanying verbal/visual presentation. Each medium has its own characteristics. Since your formal paper will be read in the SNUG online proceedings, you should use your presentation as a "discussion" rather than a "reading". Verbal presentations read from technical papers come across as dull and monotonous. Consequently, you need to prepare a separate script for your talk. Your verbal/visual presentation must be created for listeners who are watching you and your slides, not for readers. Readers set their own pace, absorbing input according to their individual needs, but listeners do not have this advantage. Therefore, you will need to control the pace according to how long it takes the audience to absorb your ideas.
For these reasons, the written papers and technical presentations require different methods, different verbage, different illustrations, and different ways to present argument and proof. The precise language and style used in written papers are not suited for oral presentations. Long sentences, when spoken, cannot be followed easily since a listener does not have enough time to reflect on a complex idea without falling behind the speaker. Nor can a listener look ahead to anticipate what you will be saying next in order to place an idea in context. Unfamiliar terms may lose a listener since there is no chance to look up definitions, while technical abstractions or complicated formulae can lead to complete confusion.
It follows that the script for your talk requires a different approach than your paper. Because your paper has been selected for SNUG, your audience will grant that you are technically proficient and that your work has a basic adequacy. Many of them will have already read your paper in the online proceedings. Attendees will expect to hear you discuss your techniques, talk about your approach, and support your conclusions.
You should be less formal, less analytical when speaking to the audience. Your gestures and personality should give life to your words. Emphasis and inflection become very important tools. You should organise your talk so that the sentences are simpler and shorter, and the main points are repeated to aid memory and understanding. Speak slowly and clearly while utilizing emphatic pauses: These pauses require a listener to absorb the preceding point.
Organizing Your Talk
Each user presentation is allocated 30 minutes. About 20/25 minutes of this time should be allotted for your presentation; the remainder will be used for questions. Plan to use all of your allotted time. A presentation that is too short is as undesirable as one which runs over so you will need to adjust and trim your timing in your rehearsals.
As you prepare your presentation, please plan on some time with the audience for Q&A.
Put Across a Few Key Points
The audience has a professional interest in your subject. They want to find out how your ideas will affect their work, or better yet, how they can use your ideas for their benefit. In your relatively short presentation time, you can transmit only a few key points to the audience, so concentrate on what is most significant and hold to relatively simple relationships. Your audience can confirm your more complex points by reading your paper. Explain with familiar examples or analogies, and compare your new material with existing technology that is well known to your audience. Resist using jargon because your jargon may not be as widely used as you think. If you must use a word that may not be familiar to the audience, define it.
- Follow a Simple Outline
- Introduce your problem. What led to your work? What were your goals?
- Describe your solution. Tell how you did it.
- Why is your solution a good one? What are its disadvantages or limitations?
- Suggest other applications.
- Do you recommend further development along the lines of your work? Why? Or why not?
- Summarize what it all means.
Tell your story in a straight line, and make one point lead to the next. Comprehension is better when the subject is organised simply.
Planning Your Slides
Since good technical talks are an effective mix of verbal and visual elements, spend about as much time on your slides as you did on your paper. Good technical talks are an effective mix of verbal and visual elements. Plan a series of slides that progressively disclose your subject by building from cause to effect, simple to more complex, and questions to answers. Do not bury your points in too much detail and make sure that the text on your slides is concise. Each slide should express only a few closely related ideas, concisely stated. Too much information prevents understanding and too many details prevents easy reading! Use your slides to assist your words and to keep you on track.
How Many Slides?
Use the minimum number of slides that will allow you to convey the essence of your paper to your audience. Remember to plan on Q&A time with your audience. You have 30 minutes for your presentation. Experience tells us that most SNUG talks do well with between 10 to 15 slides.
What to Illustrate
You have probably been working on the subject of your paper for months. What is perfectly clear to you must be made clear in minutes to people unfamiliar with your work. Your slides can help you to accomplish this goal. Since words have limitations you may want to illustrate what you cannot verbalise, what you want to emphasise, or what takes too long to describe. Graphs, drawings and photos can often explain what language cannot. Use your slides to hold attention, enliven, clarify, restate, explain, and interpret. Ears have trouble accepting numbers and abstractions. In addition, quantities and relationships must be visually compared. When you digress from the topic of the slide on the screen, use a blank slide, coloured and shaded, not white, to darken the screen. Furthermore, it will confuse your audience if you say one thing orally and you display something else visually on the screen.
- Consider these graphic ways to make points clearly and quickly when you plan your slides:
- Introduce Key Items -- Outline slides focus attention on key ideas and orient the audience. An outline of your major topics should be your second slide, just after your title slide.
- Trends -- Line graphs show trends or correlation effectively.
- Comparisons and Proportions -- Bar graphs are best for comparing magnitudes. Pie charts are good for showing relative parts of the whole.
- Symbols -- Symbolic diagrams and flow charts are useful if not too detailed. Use standard symbols if possible.
- Structure and Relationship -- Simple schematic diagrams effectively convey the structure of systems or relationships of objects. Show only what is necessary to explain how a thing works.
- Tables -- Do not use detailed tables. Tabular data is more legible and more easily compared on graphs or charts. If you must use a table, keep it simple and include only items that you will mention.
- Duplicate Slides -- Use duplicate slides when you need to refer to a visual more than once.
Suggested Slides
Please submit your presentation in the following electronic format:
- These four slides should be included in your presentation:
- Title Slide -- The first slide in your presentation must contain the title of the paper, author name(s) and affiliation(s).
- Purpose Slide -- The second slide should state the purpose of the work you will describe (i.e., the problem you have addressed).
- Outline Slide -- The third slide should present a concise outline of your presentation.
- Conclusion Slide -- The last slide in your presentation should state your major conclusions.
Because SNUG is a professional technical conference, the work presented should be identified primarily with the speaker and his or her co-authors. Therefore, the company, university, or other organization for which you did the work should be identified only on your first (Title) slide.
Preparing to Present
Rehearsal is the most important part of preparing your talk! Please do not let it slip by! Thorough preparation will improve your performance and make you more relaxed.
Plan to rehearse several times—alone, with your spouse or friend, with co-workers, with your boss, and with your department. In rehearsal, the primary task is to find out how you sound. If possible, record and play back your talk. Listen for words with fugitive sounds, that are hard to say, or difficult to comprehend, and replace them with words that come through loud and clear. Keep in mind that you are speaking to an audience. If you were a member of that audience you would appreciate a presentation that is clearly communicated to you in conversational language. Also, practice varying your speaking level and intonation. Instead of speaking in a monotone, let your voice emphasise key points. Rehearse your talk with your slides until you can practically ignore your notes. One way to reduce dependence on your script is to underline key words to recall ideas.
Remember that your talk is a combined verbal / visual presentation. Let the slides carry the message visually at points throughout your presentation, but do not completely rely on the visuals. After the audience has had time to comprehend a slide and you are elaborating on a subject, it is most effective if you do not have the competition of the projected image. Use a blank slide at those times.
Look in a mirror to observe your gestures, stance, and facial expressions. Use your hands only when you want to emphasise specific points. Pace your rate of speaking according to the familiarity of your subject. When introducing something new, slow down. After rehearsing alone, practice in front of your associates at a formal session. Rehearsals with an audience will help you discover how listeners will react. They can tell you where to polish, where to put in another visual, and when to offer more explanation. Have someone help you time your rehearsals, and then trim or extend the material as required to keep your presentation within the time limits. Ask your rehearsal audience to think of questions that may come up. Make a list of probable questions the conference audience might ask, as this will help you during the discussion period after your talk.
The SNUG audience will be a group of professionals, all of them interested as proven by their presence. But remember that many of them may not be well-versed in your particular topic. They came to learn from you. Address your talk to them, not to colleagues familiar with your work!
Dry Run Presentation
About 95% of what makes a presentation good is a good presenter. Good presenting skills are developed through practice; therefore, all authors are urged to practice by doing dry-run presentations. Schedule some time to give your SNUG talk to colleagues who are both familiar, and unfamiliar, with your work. Your local Synopsys representative is also available to help you practice your SNUG presentation. Feel free to contact your local Synopsys representative to schedule a dry run.
If you do not know who your local Synopsys representative is, please contact the SNUG India Team.
How Should You Dress?
This is a commonly asked question. Some presenters wear suits and ties, but most wear more casual-dress clothes. You should wear something that looks nice, since you will be standing in front of your peers, yet wear something that you are comfortable in - that is the most critical requirement. Please, no t-shirts, jeans, shorts or sandals! What Happens in Your Session?
Your session will be presided over by a Session Moderator who will introduce speakers, control timing, and preside over discussion periods.
Giving Your Talk
Oral communication depends largely on what listeners receive through their eyes. If you are alert, enthusiastic, and confident, your audience will sense it. Be eager to share information and you will convince your audience. Do not read your paper, instead converse with your audience as you might talk in a conversation.
You will have a lavaliere microphone (in rooms that are large enough to require a microphone), so you will have more freedom of movement, but you must remember to face your body in the same direction as your head when you speak. Normally, of course, this is towards the audience. If you talk while looking back at the screen, the microphone sound will be poor, and if you then look down at your notes and speak, you might speak too loudly into the microphone. Stand in the direction of the audience, and speak distinctly with normal volume. Also, do not use the optical pointer if you are nervous. When you use a pointer, point to an object when first mentioning it, then turn off the pointer. Otherwise, the pointer will casue unnecessary distraction.
With a well-prepared, well-rehearsed talk, supported by clear, readable slides, you can be confident in giving an excellent technical presentation that will enlighten and educate your audience at SNUG. Your presentation and your paper, published online, will enhance your professional reputation and bring credit to your company or university.