プレゼンテーションの心得

When you are going to present results of your clinical and/or laboratory study, or report an interesting case at an international meeting, it may be quite natural that you become a little nervous. However, not all participants at a meeting are native speakers of English. Actually, some people are not so good at speaking English fluently, but still they seem to be enjoying the scientific meeting. Most important thing is not to speak perfect, grammatically correct English, but to do an interesting presentation in a lively fashion, thereby promoting active and fruitful discussion among participants. In order to create and do an attractive presentation, first think about whom you are speaking to, and what message you want to give them. A “Message” is not necessarily mere knowledge. Your aim should be to change participants' behaviour after listening to your presentation. Before you start making slides with PowerPoint or other presentation software, make sure there is a clear “story” from an introduction to the last “take home message”, and the logic of the story is crystal clear. To make a clear logic, always keep sentences as short as possible and do not cram so many sentences in a limited space of your poster. Clear figures, tables and illustrations can convey an idea to the audience much more easily than long sentences. On the day of your presentation, just relax and speak in a loud voice so that even a person standing far from you can hear what you are talking about. Never show your back to the audience and do not read sentences on the poster. Even if there are some minor grammatical errors, nobody cares about those things. If you can impress yourself to the audience, you can say you have succeeded with your presentation. Please do enjoy the presentation, not only on the day of presentation, but throughout the entire process of making it!!