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Developing a talk

The UW–Madison Writing Center offers helpful tips as you begin to develop a talk, including:

 

How much material can I cover in a ten-minute talk?

In ten minutes, you can only realistically cover the most significant aspects of your project. You don’t have to provide specific details; save them for the question-and-answer period or for individual conversations with audience members. Devote your time to stating your key points clearly and effectively.

How many pages can I get through in ten minutes?

Generally, it takes about two minutes to read one typed, double-spaced page. Of course, this will vary depending on your font, its size, and how strictly you adhere to your script. Practice giving your talk aloud to check your time.

How should I decide what to include and what to exclude?

The composition of your audience determines the content of your talk. The Undergraduate Symposium draws an audience from across the university and the Madison community, so tailor your talk to intelligent non-specialists. As such, they will be intellectually curious and well educated, but they won’t necessarily be informed about the technical aspects of your field. Keeping this audience in mind is crucial for you as you decide exactly what you’ll say in your talk.

What kinds of information will my audience want to hear?

Your audience will want to know how your project impacts the way they view and live in the world. Develop a take-home message: What is the single most important thing you want your audience to understand, believe, accept, or do after they hear you? Try to articulate this take-home message in one or two sentences. If you can’t succinctly express your central message, how will your listeners be able to?

Once you have clearly articulated your take-home message, choose the pieces of evidence that most effectively develop that message, and eliminate those that are redundant or of secondary importance. Convey the complexity of your ideas, but don’t overwhelm the audience by providing them with more details than they can process in ten minutes.

What if I’m not sure exactly what I want my audience to take away from my talk?

Often it’s difficult to zero in on the single most interesting idea in a project full of intriguing information. As you are trying to identify your take-home message, think about what your listeners might find most exciting in your work.

Not surprisingly, presenters and listeners alike often find the most exciting parts of a project to be its objective (why the project needs to be done in the first place) and its significance (how the results, whether they’re final or preliminary or projected, will impact your field or the world more generally).

Listeners want to know how a project will affect them personally, so think about how your work could impact your audience members’ everyday lives. One way to determine what’s most important and exciting about your project is to talk about it with potential audience members. Set up an appointment with your mentor and another one with the Writing Center to explain your project and to solicit feedback about what your listeners find particularly intriguing and relevant.

What should I say if I am not completely finished with my project?

Scholars often present their work before their projects are complete. You have several options for developing a talk for an ongoing project.

If you have preliminary results, you can discuss them in relationship to the kind of results you hope to obtain. Talk about the significance of these results. Do they suggest that more work is necessary? Do they suggest that the final results will be particularly promising or revolutionary? Do they suggest that you need to revise your approach? Do they suggest that the field as a whole needs to revise its ideas on the subject?

If you don’t have preliminary results, you can focus on projected results: What do you think you might find when your results are complete? Why do you expect this? What significance would such results have?

In any case, keep in mind that your explanation of those results, their significance, is more important than the raw results themselves.

Once I have decided what to include, how do I actually write my talk?

First, consider the unique needs of a listening audience, as opposed to a reading one. When we’re reading, we have the ability to re-read a difficult sentence until we fully understand it; we can flip back a page to see how a new idea fits in with the previous one; we can turn back to the beginning to refresh ourselves on the essay’s main argument. When we’re listening to a talk, we can’t do any of these things, and so we depend on the presenter to do some of the work of clarification for us.

Since listeners and readers process information differently, it's not enough to take your twenty- (or thirty- or forty-) page paper and cut bits here and there until it’s short enough to deliver in ten minutes. Think of your talk, then, as an entirely new document that uses your original paper and/or project as its source material. This document will need a more simplified structure, a new introduction, and a new statement of argument geared specifically toward a listening audience.

To begin writing your talk, set aside any writing you have already done, and on a blank page, articulate your take-home message, your project's objective, significance, and the most important pieces of evidence that you might want to include.

How do I organize my talk so that my audience can follow it?

There are many effective ways to structure a talk, but one of the best is to make sure that it reads like a story. Audiences are drawn to stories that seem to be relevant to their own lives, so try to make it clear to your listeners how your project might impact them someday. Keeping in mind your take-home message and the most exciting aspects of your research that you’ve already identified, organize your material into a story that

  • provides a brief introduction stating what you did and why,
  • proceeds by providing more detail about what you did and what you found or expect to find,
  • and concludes by revealing how those findings are significant.

(Note that these are the same basic categories that you probably included in your abstract; here in the talk, you have room to elaborate on the basic information.)

Within this framework, some presenters choose to state their results and their significance in their introduction and then show how they arrived at those results in the body of the talk. Others choose to state the objective and the main problem in the introduction and save the results and significance for the end. Decide what you think would work best and ask your mentor if one of these structures is more common in your discipline.

How can I make sure I’m telling a good story?

Good stories include information necessary to understanding the final outcome. If a storyteller neglects to tell us about an aspect of the protagonist that ultimately determines the story’s outcome, listeners end up confused. Similarly, if you skip straight to a description of your investigation without telling your audience what prompted you to conduct the experiment, it will be much more difficult for them to process the ideas you’ll go on to present. Be sure to provide your listeners with the necessary parts of the story in a straightforward and logical order.

On the other hand, a good storyteller doesn’t give equal weight to every single detail; we don’t often hear about a character brushing his teeth or eating her cereal, because these details don't directly impact the story’s plot. Similarly, you do not need to dwell on every detail of your project. For example, you don’t need to tell your audience what scholars have said about your topic, what brand of test tube you used or how long it took to run your experiment, unless these details directly impact your take-home message. Instead, emphasize the points that are most interesting, most relevant, and most accessible to your audience.

How can I make sure my listeners don’t get lost or miss anything important?

Once you have a cohesive story that is organized in a straightforward structure, use signposts (words or phrases that point out where you’ve been, where you are, and where you’re going) to help guide the audience through your talk. It's okay to be more repetitive than you would be in a written paper: This will help listeners keep track of how all the pieces of your argument fit together.

What types of signposts can I incorporate into my talk?

There are several types of signposts that are particularly useful for listening audiences, and three of them are listed below. When constructing these signposts, make sure that you employ consistent vocabulary. Don’t use the thesaurus to come up with ten different ways of stating your main point; such variation will confuse your audience. Instead, use the same key words to show how all of your points are connected. In a talk, repetition is not a problem; it is the key to effective communication.

  1. Numerical Signposts
    Numerical signposts like “First. . . Second. . . Third. . .” help your listeners understand how several parts of your talk fit together. It also helps them follow a complicated process or zero in on the three (or two, or four) most important ideas you want them to remember from your talk. Numbering may seem overly blunt in writing, but in talks it is extremely helpful for outlining major points or pieces of evidence.
  2. Parallel Structure

    A parallel structure marks transitions between main points by using the same phrase followed by a brief, emphatic pause. For example, if you are giving a talk on the sociological obstacles facing New York City’s five boroughs, you would introduce each section of your talk with the following phrases:

    • “The main obstacle Manhattan faces is. . . .”
    • “The main obstacle Queens faces is. . . .”
    • “The main obstacle the Bronx faces is. . . .”
    • “The main obstacle Brooklyn faces is. . . .”

    While this repetition might seem elementary in a written document, it provides helpful guidance and continuity for a listening audience.

  3. Old-to-New Transitions
    This type of transition explains to your audience where you’ve been and where you’re headed in your talk. They are particularly useful for demonstrating how successive pieces of your talk fit together. Again, repetition of key terms is essential. Here's an example from a talk about the psychological impact of documentary films on their viewers:

    • “I’d like to begin by defining exactly what I mean by the term ’documentary film. . . .”
    • “Now that I have explained exactly what a documentary film is, I would like to focus on the particular example of Sherman’s March to explain how this kind of film can have a peculiar psychological effect on its viewers. . . .”
    • “And so we see through an examination of this example that documentary films can have a very peculiar effect on their viewers. It is not only documentary films that have this kind of effect, however; all such ’non-fiction‚ talks of information, whether on the big or small screen, can elicit similar effects. This larger-scale effect is relevant to us today because. . . .”
How can I make sure my talk is easy for a listening audience to comprehend?

Test it out. Ask several different people to listen to you practice delivering your talk, and afterward ask what they identified as the most important points. If your listeners repeat back the same key points that you wanted to communicate, then you’ll know your talk is effective. If they didn’t pick up on something you feel is important, revise the talk to give more emphasis to that idea. We suggest you test your talk on your mentor, a Writing Center instructor, a friend who specializes in your discipline, and a friend who specializes in a different discipline.

Choose your language carefully and structure your sentences thoughtfully. Many students have been trained to write in an academic style that sounds scholarly, that is, a writing style that is subtle, dense with meaning, peppered with specialized vocabulary, and full of long, complex sentences that vary in structure. That is exactly what you don’t want to do in a talk. Rather than sounding smart and scholarly, it will most likely make your talk sound confusing and ineffective. In order to make your talk as effective as possible, simplify your vocabulary and your sentence structure.

Here are some tips for simplifying your language and sentence-structure:
  1. Keep your audience’s needs in mind.
    Remember that the Undergraduate Symposium audience is composed of intelligent non-specialists. Don’t assume that they know the background information that scholars in your own field take for granted, and don’t assume that they know the specific technical terms that are common in your field. Be sure to explain essential background information and to define field-specific terms in ways that your audience can understand.
  2. Visit the Writing Center’s online handbook.
    You will find excellent advice and examples to help you write clear, concise, and direct sentences, as well as a detailed list of succinct transition words that will help you make clear connections between your ideas.
  3. Break up long sentences.
    Often sentences are long because they contain too many ideas packed tightly together. Sentences with several ideas joined by conjunctions (“and,” “but,” “or,” “however,” etc.) or prepositional phrases (“to,” “for,” “on,” “in,” “because of,” etc.) can confuse a listening audience. Break these long sentences into two or more shorter, more straightforward ones so your listeners don’t miss the important points.
  4. Keep the subject and verb close together.
    Watch out for sentences that have long clauses embedded between the subject and verb, which can make it hard for listeners to figure out which idea is most important. If the information in that clause is vital, condense it or make it a separate sentence. If it’s not vital, remove it. The subject and verb are boldfaced in the following example:
    Original Revised
    After conducting hundreds of interviews over the span of several months, and only after losing access to their most relevant informants, did the researchers, who had only brought enough supplies for eight weeks, discover that they needed to change the fundamental terms they were using to conduct their interviews. After conducting hundreds of interviews over several months, the researchers discovered too late that they needed to change the fundamental terms they were using to conduct their interviews. This problem was compounded by the fact that they had lost access to their most relevant informants and had not brought enough supplies to remain any longer.
  5. Keep the subject and verb at the front of the sentence.
    Watch out for sentences that place the main idea at the end of the sentence, thus delaying its meaning, as shown in the following example:
    Original Revised
    After conducting hundreds of interviews over the span of several months, after losing access to their most relevant informants, and after running out of supplies, the researchers eventually discovered that they needed to change the fundamental terms they were using to conduct their interviews. The researchers only discovered that they needed to change the fundamental terms they were using to conduct their interviews after conducting hundreds of interviews over the span of several months. This problem was compounded by the fact that they had lost access to their most relevant informants and had not brought enough supplies to remain any longer.
Should I read my talk from a script, or should I deliver it from an outline?

Either method can be effective and each has its pros and cons. Choose the format that feels most comfortable for you.

Format Pros Cons
Reading from a script… Helps ensure you remember details.

Allows more control over the length of your talk.		 Can impede natural and spontaneous interactions with your audience.
Delivering from an outline… Lets you have more eye contact with your audience, thereby promoting responsiveness. Requires you to rely heavily on your memory.

Leaves more uncertainty about how long it will take to deliver the talk.

Regardless of which format you choose, begin by writing out your talk word for word. You will probably have several drafts, and experiment with what to include, exclude, how to express your ideas, and how to organize them. Once you have a final draft and read through it many times, you can decide if you would like to deliver it from a script or from an outline of the script.