1. Speak for Success: Talking About Your Research to a Wide Audience
Lisa M. Parcell, Ph.D.
Sandy Sipes, M.A.
Elliott School of Communication

2. Agenda
Audience
Nonverbals
The Speech/Pitch
Keep Their Attention

3. Know Your Audience 3

4. What are you trying to accomplish?
Present a poster
Present a research paper
Win a competition
Sell an idea
Get a job
Always cater your talk to your audience.
Have an end goal in mind
Frame everything around the end goal

5. What do THEY want to know?
What is your audience most concerned about?
Are they interested in significance or results?
Emotion
Data
For general audiences, realize lit review and methods not of first importance.
Don’t present info to a general audience in the same way you write a research paper.
Lead with significance and results, then ground in literature and methods.

6. WIIFM What’s In It For Me? Put yourself in the other person’s shoes.
Exercise: Turn to the person sitting next to you. Pretend you are doing a poster session at GRASP. The person sitting next to you is the judge. What would her or she most want to know? Tell your partner. You only get one sentence.

7. Nonverbals Speak Volumes7

8. You cannot NOT communicate
Nonverbals are defined by
Culture
How well you know someone
Culture decides how close you stand to someone, how you introduce yourself, what you wear, eye contact, etc.
All of that is influenced by your relationship with the speaker.
Since your work now is in America, you have to play by our rules.
So what does that mean….

9. First impressions Be excited Dress professionally
Wear comfortable shoes and clothing
Be clean, especially hands
Stand up straight

10. Introduce yourself
Shake hands
Make eye contact
Introduce yourself

11. While talking Stand 3 feet or more away Speak clearly and loudly Smile
Don’t cross your arms
Don’t fiddle with your hair

12. Know when you’ve lost them
They lose eye contact
They move away
They turn their back to read something
Thank them for coming by/listening/allowing you to present, etc.

13. What Do I Say? 13

14. Aristotle was right Ethos Pathos Logos Credibility, honesty, authority
Emotion, significance, why we should care
Logos
Logic, facts, results
Successful presentations include all of these.

15. Keep it tight Emphasize significance Tell a story Avoid jargon
Keep it short
Again, show your enthusiasm

16. 27 – 9 – 3 Elevator pitch 27 words 9 seconds 3 messages
Why do we care?
Sandy explains this part. Then we stop and do an exercise with the person next to you.

17. Keep Their Attention 17

18. Make it visually appealing
Use images whenever possible
Use color wisely
Visualize data
Point out all the color and images on the poster.

19. Back to nonverbals Stand up straight Don’t fidget
Don’t read poster or slides
Don’t turn your back
Sandy teaches them how to present posters without turning your back on audience.

20. Have fun with it! 20