We’re delighted that you want to talk about your research work or other scientific topic at the Atlanta Science Tavern. Because the audience that attends is different from others that you may regularly address, we thought that some tips about what works best, based on our experience, will help you prepare your talk.
Guidelines Summary
- Involve and engage your audience, speak with them, not at them
- Limit your talk to 40 - 45 minutes. We will signal you with a "T" hand signal and indicate 10 minutes left, 5 minutes left, and wrap-up
- Strive to make your talk into a conversation, not just a lecture
- Don't use (or limit) the use of Power Point slides
- Above all, have fun and help the audience have fun!
Eight Guidelines for Speakers at the Atlanta Science Tavern, by Sidney Perkowitz
Sidney Perkowitz is a physicist at Emory University who also writes about science for non-scientists. He gave a great talk at the Atlanta Science Tavern in September of 2009 about Hollywood and Science. Click here to listen to a podcast of his talk.
Sidney helped us develop the following rules and guidelines for our guest speakers. Please read these over and let us know if you have any questions or concerns that we can help address before your talk.
1. Your audience is diverse. Some are professional scientists or science educators and there might even be some experts in your particular field. Most, however, are people who enjoy hearing about science on a conceptual level but don’t do science in detail. If you gear your talk to be understood by smart, interested college students who are not science majors, and remember that ideas trump details, you’re at the right level for Science Tavern attendees.
2. Limit your talk to 40 – 45 minutes. We’ll help by signaling you when you have five minutes to go, so you can move into your final points and wrap-up. This will leave time for a Q&A session, though that can go longer than 15 minutes.
3. We like PowerPoint or other visual presentations and can provide appropriate facilities. However, to help ensure that your talk stays within the time limit, follow the rule of thumb of about one slide per minute, or even fewer slides.
4. You probably have excellent PowerPoint slides already made up for your professional talks. Consider carefully if these are appropriate for this non-professional audience. Dense displays of text, images or tabular information on a given slide may be necessary detail for a research conference, but may be more than this group can readily absorb.
5. As much as possible, use simple language to explain your science rather than specialized words, abbreviations or acronyms that the audience may not understand. In cases where only the special words will do, define them the first time you use them.
6. If your presentation requires mathematics, consider presenting the mathematical relations in graph or tabular form rather than as equations.
7. Although your work is extremely important to you, its significance may not be obvious to non-experts. Your introduction should tell the audience, first, why the research you’re describing interests and excites you; second, why it’s meaningful in the context of your scientific area or science in general; and third, why it’s important for people and society.
8. Along with tip 7, it never hurts if your final summation circles back to your introduction so your listeners really get it as to what your work means, and goes out the door with its key ideas clear in their minds. If your talk leaves the audience acquainted with a new (to them) scientific idea or two, or an intriguing question that’s yet to be answered, that’s a Science Tavern success.
ScienceCafes.org Guidelines
Here is some information from the main Science Cafes web site for additional guidance. This will further help you prepare your talk for our audience:
