Postgraduate Life in Practice Guidelines for Presentation on the - PDF document

Postgraduate Life in Practice Guidelines for Presentation on the Dissertation Project (Week 7, Summer term) Aims The purpose of the dissertation presentation is to allow you to develop and demonstrate the skills of verbal presentation acquired through seminar work and other dimensions of your programme during the year. These skills are both specifically relevant to an academic career, where presenting work at conferences and research seminars is a regular expectation, and widely transferable to other fields of employment. The presentation also provides a valuable opportunity to obtain additional feedback on your dissertation project at a still relatively early stage of your research. Timetable The presentation will take place during Week 7 of the summer term. Specific rooms and times for each programme cohort will be made available a number of weeks in advance. Some cohorts will be combined so as to allow for a wider range of feedback (and a grander sense of occasion). As well as giving your own presentation, you should participate actively in the whole of your session to support your peers, and should come prepared to formulate and ask constructive questions. You are also welcome to attend other sessions if they do not clash with your own. Choosing a Topic The presentation should be on your dissertation topic. This may have changed since the submission of your dissertation proposal during the Spring term, and you will not be held to the proposal in any way. In what manner you approach the topic in the presentation depends on you. You should give an overall sense of your aims with the project, naming your key authors and texts and saying something about your method of reading them. From there you have options: you can choose to present in more detail on a narrower element of the project that you have researched over the opening weeks of the Summer term; or you can set out a series of questions you have and problems you expect to face as you conduct your research. Preparing the Presentation Successful presentations engage and interest the audience and effectively communicate knowledge and concepts. A presentation should have both a verbal and a visual element, and it is obligatory to use supporting materials of some kind , whether powerpoint, prezi, overheads, or handouts. The university provides useful powerpoint templates at https://www.york.ac.uk/staff/external-relations/brand/templates/ By now you will have heard enough good and bad presentations (whether in a seminar room, in a lecture hall, or in a conference environment) to be able to judge what constitutes a good one. Preparing your own presentation is a challenge, however. To help you meet this challenge, there is a PLP lecture on presenting your research in Week 3 of the Summer term. Performance The presentation should be 7-10 minutes long , with 10 minutes as a maximum time. We will expect good time keeping . Be aware that when you are nervous, you will tend to speak more quickly, so practice your presentation well in advance, and time yourself doing it. 1

Pace and variation in your tone are important aspects of performance. Too quick, and your audience will lose what you are saying...too slow, and they may lose interest. Audibility is also important. Try to vary the tone you use; to highlight particular points, to emphasise contentious points, to ask questions and to draw conclusions. Another aspect of your presentation is your relationship with your notes and visual materials . You’ll need to decide whether you are confident enough to use notes alone, or whether you want to write out the presentation in full. If you use notes, remember that when you are nervous it is easy to lose your thread, so make sure you have enough on paper to remind you of what you need to say. At the other extreme, it’s easy to ramble when you only have notes, so ensure you know how long you have for each section and stick to your timing. Think carefully about how you use your visual materials . Don’t use slides simply as ‘wallpaper’. They need to be making a particular point rather than simply distracting the audience. Try to put captions on any photographs but avoid too much text. In particular, don’t have reams of text on the slide that you then proceed simply to read out. Finally, keep it simple. If you do want to use fancy graphics, animation or recordings then make sure they work. Remember that the presentation should be relatively formal. Think about how you stand in relation to the audience, and make sure to look up from your notes or script to engage directly with the room. Don’t slouch, lean, or move around too much. Don’t jingle coins or keys around in your pocket, or wave a pointer randomly over the audience. Don’t be offhand, casual or flippant. Don’t apologise for anything in the presentation. Find ways of presenting ideas at an early stage of research as “hypotheses,” “work in progress,” etc. Don’t forget that one of the main aims of the presentation is to get useful feedback on your work, so be honest with your audience about what you know and don’t know at this stage of your research. Intellectual Content Your presentation should be well organised . That is to say, it should have a clear introduction where you communicate your topic and your research questions/hypotheses, should present your main points within a clearly structured framework, and should end by drawing some provisional conclusions from the material presented, even if it is at a preliminary stage. You need to think about capturing your audience’s imagination right from the start of your presentation. Think about going from your title slide directly to a juicy quote, or a scene from a text, or a question or idea that captured your own imagination and made you want to do the project in the first place. It can be effective to go straight from your title to outlining your main aims and planned structure, but there are other creative ways to begin too. Have an argument to present, or at least one that you are planning to test. This is something you should have discussed with your supervisor. What is the hypothesis you are testing, or the research question(s) you are asking? What have previous scholars said? How is your work contributing to such debates? Be careful not to sound as if you’ve decided already what the outcome of your research will be. Don’t be afraid to raise questions that you’re still trying to find answers to. Think carefully about how to pitch your presentation. Your audience is your peers and your convenor (rather than, in most cases, your supervisor). You therefore need to ensure that you 2

offer enough basic information to understand what might be quite a specialist topic, but that you also acknowledge the complexity of existing debates, and push your analysis to the right level. Questions After each presentation the convenor will usually ask a question or two and then ask for other questions from the floor. This will last about 5 minutes. If you don’t understand a question, say, “I’m sorry...could you repeat the question?”, or “Can I just clarify what it is you’re asking?” Be prepared for questions that aren’t really questions (the one that begins, “this is really more of a comment…”) and think about how you can respond constructively to them: the time-honoured improv technique of “yes, and…” can be useful here. Be prepared to think on your feet. Most of all, approach the question session in an open-minded manner, ready to learn from others as well as to inform them of what you are up to in your research. Don’t forget that you only need to give the presentation to pass the task: after that it is about making people aware of what you are doing and getting ideas from them about how you can do it better! 3