Preparing the Talk

9.2.1 Ask What To Expect

Ask about the room, the technology (e.g. do you need to bring a laptop?), the allotted time, etc. If possible, go to the location of the presentation early. This will

let you see the room and also allow you to make sure the technology is working properly.

Similarly, ask about the norms surrounding the talk you will be giving. By norms, I mean should you expect questions to be asked along the way or saved until the end, do speakers normally use PowerPoint slides or not, is the setting likely to be formal or informal, etc. Even if you plan to give a talk that deviates from these norms, it is helpful for you to know that in advance. If you are giving a talk in a department around the lunch hour, it might be quite likely for audience members to eat their lunch during your talk. They might also forget that you have not eaten, so pack a snack you can quickly eat before your talk so you don’t run out of energy.

Just remember, your audience wants you to be successful. This is especially true for job talks. Whoever is coordinating your talk will be happy to provide answers. On a related point, anticipate equipment/technology problems and have a backup plan in place. If you are using PowerPoint or something similar, have your slides on a flash drive and in the cloud. A colleague of mine said he thought researchers should be prepared to give their talk without slides or notes just in case. While this might be a bit extreme, you should be familiar enough with your own work that you could give an organized and coherent presentation without any notes or visual aids.

9.2.2 Consider Your Audience

Think about the audience for your presentation and adjust accordingly. It is your responsibility as the presenter to meet your audience where they are. That means considering what your audience knows and does not know about your topic, what their interests are in your talk, and what their goals might be for attending your talk.

Suppose your talk is about party polarization following the election of Donald Trump. If you are part of a panel at a conference where every paper is about party polarization and/or Donald Trump, and the audience will all be academics, you might anticipate an audience of specialists on party polarization and presidential elections. If you are giving this talk as part of a job interview for an academic position, your audience will likely consist overwhelmingly of faculty and gradu-

ate students from the department interviewing you, but most of them will not be experts in your particular topic. In fact most will not be in the general field of American politics. If you are giving this talk as a public lecture in your commu- nity, most of the audience members will not be professors, let alone specialists in political science or American politics.

Each different audience requires tailoring the talk to match their backgrounds and goals for attending. When presenting to an audience of specialists, you can get away with using jargon and making assumptions about what they know. However, when presenting to a more general audience, they might become lost or confused with such technical language. However, as noted below, even audiences of spe- cialists will respond positively to a presentation that avoids jargon and focuses instead on clarity.

9.2.3 Practice Practice Practice!

There is no substitute for practicing a presentation, and less experienced schol- ars should practice a talk more than once. This is especially true for young schol- ars going out on job interviews. However, even experienced scholars need to practice their presentations if they want them to be good.

When I help a student prepare for a job talk, we start with a couple of con- versations about the talk, focusing on what to include and what to exclude. I then encourage the student to develop slides and share them with me. I provide com- ments and we talk about the slides. I then have the student practice the talk in front of me. I simulate asking audience questions, but we focus on the presentation it- self. We then might have the student present to a small group, and after taking feedback from them, announce a practice job talk to the faculty and grad students in our home department. Based on feedback from that experience, I might have the student present the talk to me one more time.

Practicing allows you to get comfortable with your presentation. It also helps you get used to how long 10 minutes or 30 minutes (or whatever length of time) feels when you are talking. Most scholars are shocked at how quickly that time passes. Practicing also helps you identify points of confusion in your own think- ing. Finally, practicing helps you identify what is essential and what might be extraneous for your talk. Getting feedback from audiences during practice helps

you understand how audiences might be reacting to your talk. Importantly, prac- ticing a talk also allows you to practice receiving and answering questions.

Practicing allows you to hit your time limit. Whether you have been given 10 minutes or 50 minutes, it is important to hit your target. Never exceed your time limit. Practice your talk so you can comfortably hit your mark. In fact, I have never seen an audience get mad at a talk scheduled for 15 minutes lasting only 12, or a job talk scheduled for 45 minutes coming in around 38. In contrast, I have seen lots of speakers lose their audience by running long.

If your talk is running long during your practice sessions, fix that by cutting something from the talk. You simply must speak fewer words. You should not talk faster. If you try to talk faster, you will feel rushed, and you will also be nervous about the time. The talk will be harder to follow and you will be more likely to make mistakes. Any expert ought to be able to talk about their work for any length of time. For example, you will need to get used to explaining your dissertation on an interview in just a few sentences. The key is to keep what is essential and remove things that are not.

You cannot present everything from a research paper in a 15 minute talk at a conference, and you cannot present your entire dissertation in a 45 minute job talk. It is much better to present a limited amount of information effectively than it is to present a larger amount of information ineffectively. If your project has multiple components (like any dissertation would, for example), simply say early in your talk that your project has several components, but that your talk today will focus on only one of them. You could even invite the audience to ask questions about the other components or to talk to you about them later one-on-one. If you give a good talk about the material you present, your audience will be interested in hearing more about your other research. In contrast, if you try to cram too much into your talk, you risk the audience finding none of it understandable or interesting.

Recently, I have had students record practice job talks so I can watch and listen to them. This allows me to stop the video at any point and offer feedback and advice. Most people do not like to see or hear themselves on a recording, but I think it can be extremely helpful. Especially for important presentations like job talks, I strongly recommend this.

often assume that their experience will adequately serve them, but most often the lack of preparation is glaringly obvious. If nothing else, a speaker owes their au- dience the obligation to be prepared to give a coherent presentation. We have a long-running weekly speaker series in American Politics at UNC. While of course there is variance, I would say that the worst presentations have tended to be given by the most senior scholars we bring in, which I attribute to their lack of prepara- tion.