怎么做好英文报告(来自一个外文期刊主编的讲座)
玛丽莲梦兔
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2020年08月01日 08:15
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塞翁失马原文及翻译-遗骸拼音
来自一个催化方面国际著名期刊主编的讲座内容，希望对大家有用！
Speaking to an audience
Speaking or writing. As a scientist you want your colleagues to admire your work as much as you do. That means that you have to inform them about your beautiful work by seminars and by publications. Presenting a seminar shouldn’t constitute a problem, because we all have been speaking longer than we have been writing. The advantage of speaking is that you see the audience and can use its reaction as feedback. You can vary the volume and pitch of your voice, the speed of delivery, introduce pauses, and use your arms and body language. In writing, you do not have all these possibilities, thus you must concentrate much more on any small detail. Speaking is easy, but not always is speaking about science easy and certainly not in a different language.
Audience. Both in speaking and writing, you must know your audience. To whom are you speaking, to 10 or 200 students, to PhD students and professors, or to a mixed audience of young as well as old students? If 10% of your audience is not really interested, it is only one student when your audience consists of 10 students, but it is 20 students in an audience of 200 students. This means more chance for trouble! When lecturing to large classes it is not only important to be able to present your work well, it is also necessary to be a good actor who can adapt to the situation, avoid difficult situations in the audience and thus keep the attention of the whole audience.
Studies have shown that the audience attention continuously drops with time during an oral presentation and that even the most interested persons cannot keep their attention very well for a period longer than about 45 minutes. Even that is already a long time and you should do everything to keep the audience awake. You can do that by varying the speed of your seminar. Always the same speed, even at the ‘right’ speed, is very monotonous and makes people fall asleep, vary the rhythm and the intonation. Clearly announce intermediate conclusions to get the level of attention up again. Your final conclusion must be the high point of your speech. Work up to it at the end. In this way the span of attention of the audience will start high, decrease with time, will be pulled up at intermediate conclusions, and pulled to a high level at the end.
Nerves. Although you have produced wonderful scientific results and are sure that you can explain everything to everybody, everybody who speaks is nervous before and during the first minutes of the speech. That is good. It produces adrenaline that allows you to perform better. Nervousness should, however, not last longer than a few minutes into the talk and practice and knowledge of speaking techniques will give you the needed confidence.
Preparation. The preparation of a seminar takes time. Therefore, start
preparing at least a week before the talk. First define the aim of your talk and the conclusion. Only if you are crystal clear about these two, will you be able to prepare a coherent speech. To help in the preparation, you might do the following: First write down on a piece of paper all facts and ideas that you can think of, like in a brain storming session; use words, not sentences. Second, select from this long list of possible items the ones that will interest the audience. List them in a logic order. Third, condense all this in just a few words, the main headings of your speech. Write them in large letters on memo cards.
Now you have a clear idea of your seminar and you should prepare visual aids for your presentation. Prepare PowerPoint pictures or overhead sheets, or make proposals of what to write on the blackboard. The number of pictures depends on the time available for your speech. Years ago the rule of thumb was that one should on average not present more than one picture per three minutes. Today, this seems to have gone down to one picture per minute. Do not just use figures from your manuscript; adapt them for your talk. A reader has all the time to study a figure, but in a talk the attendees have only limited time to read and understand the figure. Keep the figure simple, use colours to show differences, but do not overdo it. Choose colours that even colour-blind people can see. Avoid tables, use bar diagrams instead (but the reverse in publications!).
Once you have the visual aids prepared you will almost know your talk by heart already. Nevertheless, you now must practise it several times. First, do it at home for yourself. This will show you if the timing is correct, if you have enough, too few or too many slides. Then ask a few friends to act as your audience and present the talk just as you will have to give it in a few days. Ask your friends to criticize your presentation as much as they can. They should watch every detail, time, contents, order, mannerism, anything. Only after that are they allowed to ask scientific questions. If you have real friends, who understand that their critique is not to destroy you but to help you, your confidence will have increased very much and you will be ready for your real talk. If the rehearsal with your friends did not go too well, then it might be a good idea to do it one more time, now taking their advice into account.
Audience contact, mannerism. If you are nervous, you do not like to look at the persons in the audience. However, this makes things only worse, because the audience looses confidence in a speaker who does not seem to be interested in its audience. Thus, don’t look all the time at the floor or at the ceiling, be brave and watch the audience. Do not always look at one and the same person either; go with your eyes from one part of the audience to the other. Scan the audience. In this way every person will get the feeling that you looked at him or her and he or she will
be careful not to fall asleep.
Try to get rid of manners that only show your nervousness, like walking and (men) keeping one hand in your pocket all the time. Ask your friends to pay attention to these items in your rehearsal as well.
Presentation. Your talk should at least contain three clearly distinguishable sections: introduction, main part, and summary and conclusions. In the introduction you must introduce your subject. Why did you do this work? What was known before you started your work? What were the questions that you wanted to answer? This will give you the incentives of your work, to which you can come back in the final section. In that final section you summarize the main results and conclusions and you can compare them with the original incentives. This will allow you to conclude something about future research.
In a long seminar it may be a good idea to present a slide with an overview of your talk. If the main body of your talk is complicated, you can give subsections as well and announce these subsections during your talk. In this way you help the audience to keep track.
Visual aids. Slides or overhead sheets are to help the presentation; they should not be the presentation itself. You are the speaker and the audience must concentrate on you. Therefore, do not make the reading of the slides time consuming; use key words, never sentences. Don’t make it a reading exercise. Use clearly readable lettering (Arial ?) and of sufficient size. In a long room, for a large audience, you must at least use 24 point lettering otherwise the people in the back cannot read your slides. Colours can be useful, but they should help not distract. Do not use pictures in the background.
Avoid tables, use bar diagrams or figures instead, but keep them simple. An oral presentation should concentrate on qualitative aspects and trends. The audience should understand your results and conclusions, but if they are interested in your quantitative data they should read your publication.