Speaker：Prof. Yulong Li

Location：Room 1113, Wankezhen Building

On November 25th, Dr. Yulong Li gathered the whole UHPB members and held a workshop about scientific presentation skills aiming to improve students’ oral expressions. All UHPB members as well as a number of other attracted undergraduates also participated in this workshop with aspiration and crowded the meeting room.

The workshop consisted of two main parts involving PPT skills and presentation logics respectively. We learned from a video documented by Dr. Susan some practical tips on arranging our PPTs. Followed are some basic tips summarized from the video:

Typing format:

1. Use a sans serif font.

In western fonts for Roman letters, there are mainly two classes: serif and sans serif. Serif fonts usually have a style of decorating curving calligraphy and non-standardized thickness, while sans serif fonts simple letters and uniformed thickness. Sans serif fonts are clear and simple, and therefore easily grasped. Among sans serif, Arial and Comic Sans are most frequently used for a plain sight of texts.

2. Use a proper letter size.

Unless for some dramatic effects, try to control your letter size between 18 and 36, which would be favored by the readers. However, when you are typing references, you may want to use 14 instead.

3. Avoid all capital letters.

Readers are more familiar with lowercases and thus would be easily confused with a text full of capital letters. You may want to use italics, bold, or underlines for emphasis, but you should probably avoid sentences with all letters capitalized.

PPT backgrounds:

1. Avoid fancy pattern backgrounds.

You don’t need a fancy drawing of cell or a double-stranded DNA on each slides. Try to use a simple background with a single color. For small rooms or daily teaching, a combination of white background and black texts will fit suitably, while dark blue background and white texts are divine for a lecture in a big meeting room or hall.

Avoid the red-green combination, which quickly exhausts the audience’s eyes and distracts their attention.

2. Try to include a simple image on each slide.

Audience will be easily tired of tedious words and letters. To keep them active, try to put a simple image on each slide which may break the dull style of texts and help you arrange your slides beautifully.

Text editing and arranging:

1. Use a simple sentence as the heading for each slide.

To emphasize the theme of each slide, you may want to put a heading on each slide to remind the audience (as well as yourself) the core idea that you want to express. Make sure that the heading be brief, precise, and easily comprehended.

2. A lists should contain no more than 3 items.

Keep your lists short. A list too long may bore the audience and make the rear points less attractive. When you are showing a list, unveil your points one by one. This will minimize the distraction of the audience’s attention and help them focus on the idea you are explaining at the moment.

3. Put only a few points of interest on one slide.

Limit the number of highlight ideas on each slide so that the audience can pay full attention on the one or two points you present.

4. Avoid large bulks of text.

Cut the text on your slides. Large bulks of text may make the audience undetermined whether to listen to you or to read the texts. Too many words also make the audience feel difficult to tackle with your PPT.

Slide transition:

1. Avoid fancy transitions between slides unless you have a good reason.

An animation of exaggerating rolling or dazzling flipping for slide transition may distract the audience and snap your flow of logics, so use simple animation for normal transition. If you feel a special animation more proper to illustrate the association or the main idea of the content you are about to present, use it sparingly.

Data choice:

1. Explain your data and eliminate the unwanted annotation.

Try to involve all the data you show on the slides in your speech. Do not skip figures or data that you have decided to show the audience—this will confuse the audience and make your speech less convincing.

In your computer, the figures might be full of annotations for a clearer sight and deeper comprehension, but you may want to eliminate the annotations unrelated to your presentations for a briefer slide. For example, when showing an illustration of mouse brain, if you want to talk about Hippocampus, erase the annotations for cerebellum or medulla oblongata. You may use Photoshop to achieve this.

2. Limit the quantity of data you present.

Avoid crowding your slides with a large bunch of data. You do not need to show all the data—only the crucial will do. For unimportant data or those you are not very familiar with but will not impair the logics if you skip them, just do not put them in your PPT. It will make your speech less convincing if you cannot explain confidently the figures you present or just skip some you show. Less is more in this case. Note that this does not mean one should throw all the important data away, but that you should treat each data you decide to show seriously.

For more details, you may download the video on this page.

Dr. Yulong Li gave the UHPB the second part on scientific logics around The capsaicin receptor: a heat-activated ion channel in the pain pathway, a Nature article published in 1997, as an example. Dr. Li urged us to dig into the research results and to spot some hidden questions. For this article, you may want to have a thinking of the method they used to clone the capsaicin receptor gene and the technology they used to investigate the electric response of this receptor towards capsaicin.

Besides the technic aspect, comprehending the data is also a vital part. You may want to understand the meaning of pA-mV graph or the heat maps in this article, and deduct some electric properties of this receptor through the figures.

To widen your sight into this research, you may try to see beyond the results and find their logics to achieve the works. For example, how can they decide the transmembrane domain of this receptor and why did they do this? What would you do after discovered this receptor for capsaicin? (Search if it can also answer to other forms of stimulation, like heat, perhaps?) How to make this work seemingly more meaningful? (Try the extracts of different species of peppers, perhaps?) What haven’t this research team done, yet? (in vivo experiments, for example.)

Dr. Li imparted a wide arrange of skills for the arrangement of logics during presentation or daily scientific research. With his humorous lecture style and the habit of catching students’ unaware to ask some creative questions, the atmosphere was pleasant and active. We all learned a plenty of practical techniques to engage in our presentation preparation, paper reading, and daily scientific researches.

*Followed are the video and the paper mentioned above. You may download them for uncommercial purposes.