Customer Reviews

The Craft of Scientific Presentations: Critical Steps to Succeed and Critical Errors to Avoid

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I give about a dozen technical presentations a year at trade shows, and I learned a lot from this book. I am changing my Powerpoint slides using many of the tips in this book, including complete sentence in the headline. I had designed my slides to help me remember my points. I should have been designing them so the audience could understand them. Besides giving me a better understanding of what I am trying to accomplish, the book was a fun read with numerous stories from the famous and not so famous. There were times it was actually hard to put the book down.

This is the first of Michael Alley's books that I have read and I'm ordering his other two "The Craft Of..." books tonight. He is terrific at getting technical information across in an engaging and entertaining way. The book is full of short stories about scientists (some famous, like Einstein, Feynman and McClintock) and incidents, which he uses as examples to get his points across. A critical resource for anyone who gives technical presentations. I'm buying copies for each of my graduate students.

After decades of sitting through terrible technical presentations by hapless fellow engineers (who, to be fair, had never been given the time or opportunity for the proper training), I'd had enough. With plenty of examples of misguided slides to serve as comic relief, I created a one-hour seminar containing the essentials of an effective scientific presentation. Since 1999, I've offered the seminar a few times a year at East Coast and California sites of our (very large) corporation for free at lunchtime, for anyone who cared to attend. So far, nearly 1500 people have done so.

Michael Alley's text is a perfect fit with the advice I dispense. Although we've never met, it's apparent that our analyses of the problem areas in bad technical presentations are very similar. He and I stress many of the same points, a key one being to place a sentence title (or "message", as I put it) at the top of every slide.

I've always wanted to point my audiences to a deeper reference than the slides and notes that accompany my (intentionally short) talk. Michael Alley has supplied that reference.

Highly recommended.

Bob Leedom

This book suggests ways to go beyond the "stock" powerpoint style presentation scheme of titles and bullets to create better presentations. What do I mean by better? Basically, the goal is to create a more narrative presenation. Rather than a presentation of lists of facts, a good scientific presentation also tells a story, and at the same time elucidates a finding in clear detail.

Getting someone to think or create a presentation in this way is a difficult thing to teach, and so the book takes a conversational tone and has plenty of examples and counter examples. It also discusses the various expectations of author, audience, and other politicos who might be in the room, and suggests ways to meet those expectations. I recently put the tactics to good use, for instance, I had picutres of the actual elements of the apparatus over schematic as I spoke about them. It was very effective, and kept the audience engaged.

Bottom line, I recommend this book if you want to improve your style or if you are nervous about starting out in the world of scientific presentation. It also helps with confidence to know you've worked hard on improving your style, your audience will appreciate it as well.

This book details a history of scientists and engineers that have made excellent presentations and why. The book then effectively contrasts those styles with poor presentation techniques. The author also presents readers with different methodologies for presenting to diverse audiences. Every suggestion is supported with historical instances of presenters that communicated their ideas effectively. The book proved not to be another "how to make cool PowerPoint slide book." The majority of the text is invested in the structure of the presentation. The book serves as a "how to" for undergraduates, post doctoral fellows and speech trainers alike.

I present daily at medical school in Italy - my job is teaching how to present in fact. This book suggests what to do and what to avoid when facing this dramatic situation. Great stuff here concerning every aspect of preparing and delivery of a talk. Loved it.

Although this is a little old fashioned in its style and content (particularly the photos and graphic style), I was sufficiently engaged with the content and anecdotes to read it right through in one evening. I learnt some new facts and had an insight into the style and ideas of someone who approaches fine lectures and presentations with great care. This made it worthwhile. It is a delightful change not to be assaulted by ego or self assurance. There is one irritating characteristic of style - the repeated use of "granted".

The presentation of theory, data and opinion to audiences is ubiquitous, in schools, universities, scientific conferences and in media and public relations fora. What should be the case that the message is primary and the medium secondary has been eroded. The roles have to a degree been reversed, largely through the accessibility of Powerpoint. Creating an argument, building a case with data and inference, the very nature of education, is difficult and not something which can be done by all. What had been relatively easy for some, to make a presentation interesting and persuasible to an audience, but difficult for many, seemed to be available through the default options of the Microsoft software. And the diffusion of the methodology was immediate and pervasive. It is almost impossible to go to a meeting, conference or school without there being some form of Powerpoint without attendant trivia, irrelevance or distraction being dominant. Many people have suffered either through sitting in front of a presentation or from preparing one. There has as a result been something of an industry in presenting alternatives. This book is one of the outcomes.

This is a very interesting and accessible account of what can be done with slide presentations to get the message across and to make it memorable. It is useful in giving hints and examples of what to do and how to do it. It benefits from having been developed from personal experience and there are a plethora of examples and anecdotes that give substance to the points made.

As a primer on how to make a presentation it is valuable and worth reading and building upon. But there is a theory implicit in the craft. The idea that a statement of the outcome should be presented and then data and examples presented to substantiate the statement, is dependent upon the notion that there is a "fact" that can be presented and the audience has to be helped to acquire it. This may be suitable for engineers, medical scientists and practitioners in general in many fora. It may be less suitable for those who are in the media, the humanities and the social sciences, and indeed in the sciences, where the propositions are less definite and more speculative and hence need to be presented as questions, where the data are not primary.

This is not to say that the message of this book is not important. All presenters should look at this and learn. But this is not the craft tool, the sought after and ubiquitous jackknife, that can be used to make presentations interesting and persuasive. It needs to be read in conjunction with work such as Edward Tufte's critique of Powerpoint and his theory driven, aesthetically created, work on visual representation of data. The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint: Pitching Out Corrupts Within, Second EditionThe Visual Display of Quantitative Information, 2nd editionIt can also benefit from reading what has been denigrated as a clone of Powerpoint but which does actually go beyond to make important points about what can and should be done slide:ology: The Art and Science of Creating Great Presentations.

This is a useful book and well worth examining. But there is a whole theory and practice out there that serious presenters should examine and incorporate into their work. The art of practice is reflective practice, incorporating theory while doing Educating the Reflective Practitioner: Toward a New Design for Teaching and Learning in the Professions (Higher Education Series). To do the practice without contemplation of the theory can lead to the outcome that is "death by Powerpoint".

As a practising teacher and scientist of more than 15 years I have seen all too many useless presentations (that includes, honestly, a few by myself!). As a result I am convinced that everyone who has to give presentations as part of her/his professional life should read this or other comparable books. I particularly like this little book, as it contains a wealth of clearly written advice on how to give presentations solidly built upon the experience of the author and accounts of many renowned scientists. The value is increased by accounts of the disastrous effects of many deeply rooted human pitfalls that one can learn to avoid. Overall an excellent and highly recommendable book, particularly for those who claim that they do not need this kind of advice.

Too oftentimes presentations that use Powerpoint are dull and the audience loses focus in following the speaker - the speaker in this case might as well be talking to a tree for the 30 minutes he or she is allotted to present their life's work. After reading this book, if you apply the concepts from this book in your presentations from then on, your technical presentations will become much more interesting to everyone and everywhere. Your audience will be able to grasp difficult technical concepts quite a bit faster because of this style of presenting. Even if you are not in a scientific major, it is worth a read since you, as a listener, in the future will encounter technical presentations in which your job depends on you disseminating that information - this book gives you the steps needed to be able to absorb the main concepts from the presenters.