More on effective slide decks

Following on from the last post (here) on putting slide decks together, I thought I would put a few tips together for writing academic presentations, as they are a bit different to business presentations.

Firstly, if, when we are creating a presentation, and are 'write a script first' person, once we have the first rough draft of our script, we can work out how many minutes our script might convert to. As a general rule of thumb I tend to present at 2 minutes per slide, but with a new presentation it can be hard to gauge. However, we can simply go to https://wordstotime.com/ and load our word count in. The site will give us a rough conversion to minutes. Yay!

Secondly, In academic presentations, we need to flag what sources we have used in constructing our slide AND our script. We may verbally cite important sources within a presentation, but we also need to cite on the slides themselves, and in the script so we know whose expert views we have drawn on; and so we can connect our audience to other research. While we should get into the habit of including a multiple works citation on each slide, there are two methods for citing on slides:

• Where only one source applies for a single bulleted line, manually add the citation bracket at the end of that line (see image accompanying this post above);
  AND/OR
  
• Add all citations in a multiple works citation bracket elsewhere on the slide... being consistent about placement so our audience knows where to find it. But definitely include a multiple works citation bracket for all other sources used in presenting that slide on EACH SLIDE.

However, if we are quoting, the citation should be beside the quote (see the top and middle slides above for details). We should also have a reference slide - or slides - at the end of our presentation so our audience can see our sources. It should be listed in alpha-numeric order, with DOIs for all journal articles in full APA 7th edition manner, for all the sources cited on any and all of our slides (as per the bottom slide above).

Sam