Guidelines

From EESwiki

5 guidelines for a 5-minute presentation

1.Formulate your take-home message.

When preparing your presentation, think of a simple message (one or two sentences) that you want to get across. For example: “With this study, we now have seen, for the first time, that ... . However, I think that the authors did not yet address appropriately that ... .” Then construct your whole talk with the purpose to “hammer this message home”.

2.Provide motivation.

It is important that you answer the question: “Why should I care?” for your audience. Do this even if the results of the paper do not convince you. Therefore, the context of the research (“big picture”) should be addressed even in a 5-min presentation. Tell the audience what the issues are and why (in which context) they are interesting.

3.Focus on the essential points.

This is the most important rule: Do not report everything (methods, results) that is in the paper. It is your job to extract the most important/interesting aspects. In 5 minutes you should usually focus on a single question and a central result.

4.Use an illustration.

For a 5-minute article summary, this is not a strict rule. However, if it is possible to explain an issue or a result with a simple graph at the blackboard (or white-board), you should take this advantage.

5.Stick to the time limit.

This is a strict rule that applies not only to the 5-min presentations, but to any talk you ever give. Consider that your audience is prepared to listen to you for a fixed, limited time, but will get annoyed if you go overtime. Nobody will complain if you finish early (3 instead of 5 minutes).

Suggested structure

1) First, provide us with some basic information: Title of the article and of the journal (which issue?) Names and affiliation of (main) authors (up to three names, in particular first and last authors are important).

2) Second, explain and motivate the research issue and provide some brief information about its context. Material for this part can usually be found in the introduction of the paper, sometimes also in the discussion. This part can take up to 2 minutes.

3) Third, briefly explain what the authors did. Do not explain methods in detail, unless one of your main point is about methods. Then clearly state the result you want to highlight. Here, a short graph may be helpful. This part can take 1-2 minutes.

4) Finally, mention the most important consequences of the result in the context of the bigger picture. In this part, you may also give your opinion about the work (ranging from: “excellent, what especially impressed me was ...” to “I don't know why this paper was ever published. The major flaw is that the authors did not ...”) Depending on the length of the other parts, also this part can take 1-2 minutes.

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