A long guide to giving a short academic talk (2022)

"Once you write the slides and script, it’s time to practice… a lot."

All great speakers are look great because they practice and iterate on the material and end up with polished presentations that they've given dozens or hundreds of times.

I don't present nearly as much as I used to--and I'm mostly not great at doing serious practice runs (as opposed to mentally going through the material)--but I've often observed that my second or third time giving a presentation is usually a bit better than the first.

practicing talks is great at highlighting two things:

- helping you come up with natural, smooth segues between slides/ideas

- making it clear if there’s any missing background/detail you need to add or reorder slides. One of the worst things to do as a presenter is to realize this mid-talk and then start jumping through slides out of order