How to present a review paper at a conference?

Question

I sent an abstract of a review paper for oral presentation to a conference, and it was accepted. The presentation will be about the most important developments and contributions made in the last decade on my specific area of research. Now I am preparing the speech, but I am not sure how to give a 12-minutes speech about all the work that has been done (it's a lot). Can someone give some suggestions on how to do a nice presentation about a review paper?

Answer 1

Hi! If you have some time before your presentation, I highly recommend you consider joining a Toastmasters chapter near you. You will learn the best practices of speaking in public including in situations like yours, AND you will have opportunity to practice your presentation in front of an audience of your fellow toastmasters, and get valuable evaluations with feedback that will help you improve your presentation. You'll also become very comfortable speaking in front of an audience whether it be a boardroom or a large conference hall!

Ok now some other tips - identify your 3 main points only. Don't need to tell about every detail, people have short attentions spans and 3 things they can remember. Write those 3 as bulletpoints in your notes. Then divvy your time up - intro - body - summary

Tell them what you're going to tell them - brief intro

Tell them - 3 main points which you know so well you don't need to read your notes just speak from your heart

Tell them what you told them - summarize the 3 points and close

you can pick 3 of the specific advances to highlight in your presentation and then tell them there are (x) many more in the paper

or you can do overviews for your bullets - that is, one topic is the many advances that were made, such as blah blah blah that did this and blah blah blah that did that. 2nd topic might be why is that important, what are the ramifications, what does it mean? And 3rd topic might be a look to the future.

So you see even within your paper you have a few different ways to approach your presentation. What is it you most want them to know and why, what is the purpose of the conference, to educate, to spur to action, to attract funding, industry symposium, all of the above?

Hope that helps :)

Cheers!