Chemist: How to make scientific presentation

Good oral presentation skills are vital to a career in the chemical sciences as well as many
other fields. What ever you do when you graduate from the University odds are that you will be
required to make oral presentations as part of your job. In the industrial community such
presentations offer a quick synopsis of proposals and progress reports. A lousy five minute
presentation, can spoil weeks of work preparing written materials. Similarly, in academia, the
ability to clearly convey scientific information in an oral presentation is critical to both teaching
and research.
While there are no strict rules about how to give an effective presentation, there are some
guiding principles. This hand-out will attempt to provide an overview of these principles in
helping you prepare a better talk. These will be covered in greater detail in the pages that follow,
but here is the main idea behind each.