Add stuttering resources to presentation guide

[zaneveld]

Some useful resources are here:

https://sphsc.washington.edu/stuttering-and-fluency

Text can also be taken from this response: The goal of this advice is to minimize how much stress and cognitive load you have when presenting each slide. Basically the idea is to do a lot of work up front to make the slides easy to present, so that when you are actually presenting (in whichever format) the presentation almost runs on autopilot, and you can focus all your mental energy on strategies for delivery & connecting with the audience.

1. Design each slide so that it makes a single, simple point. You get to design your presentation, so you may as well make it as easy to present as possible. Everything on the slide should in some way support, reinforce or elaborate on that single point. Here's how you can do this starting with a (not very good) starting slide.

A typical kind of slide we all make when we first start making a presentation is a bullet-point list equivalent to a written paragraph.

Maybe our points are:
a. Sexual selection leads to the development of secondary sexual characteristics
b. Characteristics useful for sexual selection may trade off with predator avoidance or other sources of fitness
c. Parental investment theory is one explanation for sexual selection.

It would be tempting to put these 3 points on a slide, and then write a few sentences out on paper to memorize and say about each. However, this would be a big mistake - I would find such a slide very difficult to present compellingly. I'd be reading for a looooong time, and the audience would get bored. The language would often be very technical, and sound odd when you read it out loud. The audience would also have to jump between reading the written text and listening to what you're saying. If these differ at all, studies have shown it decreases comprehension over just written text or just speech alone.

Here is what I would do instead:

-- Break up our 3 main points into 3 different slides. Write the main point of each slide as succinctly as you can in one phrase in the title of each slide. If I forget what to say or what the slide is about I can always literally read the title and it should jog my memory. This also helps folks who zoned out for a minute, or who might have missed something you said.

-- Instead of adding lots of text to each slide, add 1-2 meaningful images, figures, or diagrams that directly relate to what you want to say. For example, if I wanted to talk about how parental investment theory explains cases where females have elaborate displays or compete strongly for mates, I might show in one image a case where males have an elaborate display and in the other a seahorse or Jacana bird (or another example I wanted to use) where males are more choosy and females compete for them. A few explanatory labels or phrases are OK, up to maybe two sentences. But definitely not more than that.

-- Instead of writing out text ahead of time, I would not write anything out. Then, once I was happy with my title and very visual slide design, I would just try explaining it conversationally, as one would to a friend. I'd try a few times until I was happy with what I was saying. THEN (and ONLY then) I would write down roughly what I said in order to memorize it. When we do Investigative Biology it is AMAZING what a big difference this technique makes. Pre-written explanations tend to be super-technical, don't always bring the audience along, and often aren't even that relevant to the main point. When folks have to explain what they've shown the explanations tend to be much more down-to-earth, correct, and compelling. Since everything you're going to say is now something that you would normally say in conversation (if maybe a little bit more science-y) it can be much easier to present.

-- When practicing / developing what you will say, be sure that if you are showing a figure you've explained what it is testing, what the axes represent, what any colors represent. You also want to relate what the results mean back to the overall question or biological hypothesis of the paper. If that explanation is long, its sometimes best on its own slide after the figure.

-- Again, all your slides should be strongly visual. The visuals should not just be pretty pictures or random cartoons, but specifically relevant to what you will say. So if you are talking about how sexual selection can lead to competition between members of the lower parental investment sex, you could show and very briefly discuss an example in some animal. This could still only be two sentences worth of text that you're saying on the slide. For example, "Sexual selection can lead to competition among members of the sex that invests less in reproduction. For example, in this image two male elk are competing during mating season."

2. The more technical what you are trying to say on a slide is, the more it helps to make a custom diagram or visual to help walk the audience through the slide. For example, if you just list methods as text it is extremely painful to try to read them and bring the audience along. Often a simple diagram showing the experiment or analysis really helps. One common trick is to make highlighting (big yellow boxes around key text/parts of figures/parts of tables) pop up by duplicating the finished slide with the highlighting box (use the shape tool in Google Slides/Powerpoint to make it), then deleting it from the first slide. This can help reader figure out what they should be paying attention to.

3. Just as you add visuals to support your point, you also remove visual elements that don't help communicate your point. For example, delete random decorative graphics that don't relate to the point. Remove images that you don't talk about / that aren't consistent with what you're saying. Remove unnecessary text (you can keep brief text labels or short statements, but if you see a paragraph it's gotta go). Stretch all images (in Google slide or PowerPoint hold down the shift key so they keep their aspect ratio/don't get distorted) so they fill as much of the slide as possible while still having room for your title, allowing viewers to see details. Align images so the edges match up vertically and horizontally, so viewers eyes can focus on the image and what you're saying about it, and not the arrangement of the images. You can use proportional stretching (stretching with shift held down) and cropping to help the images line up nicely. There's also an 'Align' button where if you select multiple images you can have the program line up their top edge.

4. Carefully check each slide to make sure that it logically connects to the slide before and after it, and you know how you are going to connect the two. Often I have to rearrange slides to make the transitions easier for me when I present. In other words, the exact same slides can be much harder to present if they are in the wrong order. Note that the order you present results in doesn't necessarily have to be the order they are presented in the paper, if another order would make for a less stressful or more dramatic presentation.

5. Look for moments of drama. Often papers try to answer big questions. Results may pose additional questions. Really building these up can make for fun moments. For example, in the elephant tusk paper we saw, the researchers had lots of control experiments to show it really was that tusks were shrinking, not that all of the elephant was shrinking. So I worked with that group on transitions to those experiments that made sense and would be fun/dramatic to present: "So we've seen that tusks are getting smaller. But could that just be because the whole elephant is smaller? In other words, is selection really acting on tusks specifically? To address this, the researchers tested the hypothesis that elephants were getting smaller overall in response to poaching. (transition into slide on comparing elephant size over time in elephants).