Talking the talk: giving oral presentations about mammals for colleagues and general audiences

This paper is based on an oral presentation delivered at the 89th Annual Meeting of the American Society of Mammalogists in Fairbanks, Alaska on 25 June 2009, where I was honored to receive the Society's Joseph Grinnell Award for excellence in education in mammalogy. The motivation for the topic of my presentation was the many 'bad' talks all of us have endured at scientific meetings and in other situations. As I do for undergraduate and graduate classes, rather than providing a list of seminar 'dos' and 'don'ts,' I presented a practical demonstration of many of the 'don'ts' I have observed and then attempted to present the same information incorporating as many of the 'do's' as I could. In other words, I delivered a bad and then a good version of the same presentation. My goal was to provide the audience with advice that would be useful when presenting information about mammals to scientific colleagues and the general public (e.g., service clubs or school groups). Given that it is impossible to recreate aspects of my performance using the written word, my purpose here is to summarize my opinions about the key elements of good talks. The goal of a talk should be to maximize the likelihood that it will be perceived as interesting, thoughtful, and purposeful and that the key takehome message(s) will be understood and remembered. It is my strongly held belief, especially with the now essentially universal use of computer slideware (e.g., PowerPoint), that an opportunity exists to enhance the usefulness of oral presentations but a real risk of muddling them to the point where the intended message is lost. I also make some recommendations about how to avoid common pitfalls of using this software. DOI: 10.1644/09-MAMM-A-271.1. Key words: Grinnell Award, how to, opinion, oral talks, presentations