Posted: June 4, 2024

3 tips on presentation structure from a talk by a famous science communicator

Wednesday morning was carrying the scintillating promise of a meeting-free, work-from-home day. The coffee maker was gurgling in the background. My calendar pinged. The famous Norwegian science communicator, Jo Røislien, was speaking at our faculty. Well, not a work-from-home day, then. Instead, I get something more exciting: a talk about science communication. So, I stepped on my bike for the 15-minute cycle to campus, only to arrive completely soaked by random heavy rain. ugh, this better be really good.

And, thank god, it was good! Jo shared valuable advice about communicating science when it really matters (read: COVID-19). It wasn't just the content of his talk that stayed with me, though. The structure of his talk was also really good and he was able to keep us all hanging on to his every word for a full hour. In this post, I share three tips I learned from Jo about structuring a talk to keep your audience engaged.

Define clear chapters

The first tip is to define clear chapters in your talk. In his presentation, Jo told a string of stories. Each story ended in a single-sentence summary that seamlessly led into the next story. These single-sentence summaries are really powerful. Describing your idea in a single sentence is a magical skill when it's so so tempting to keep rambling on. Simple statements are easier for us to understand than long, woolly sentences.

However, you need to divide your talk into atomic units that can be summarised in a few words. It's far easier to follow what you're saying if you chop your problem into nuggets of information. It's like passing the message to the audience thread by thread instead of dumping a tangled mess. Help your audience by unravelling the threads for them.

So, Tip number 1: divide your talk into atomic chapters that you can summarise in a single sentence.

Use tricks to keep your audience hooked

The cleanest structure in the world is not going to save you if your audience gets bored. And this is hard to avoid. The longer the talk is, the more rabbits you need to start pulling out of your hat to keep people engaged. Jo had a whole Mary Poppins bag full of tricks:

He started his talk with a story that I couldn't unite with the topic of the talk. This peaked my curiosity: when will he explain the link?
He subverted my expectations. He showed a picture of a national COVID press conference, then said: "this made me really happy". Now you have to keep listening to discover what the hell this is about.
He would single out a person in the audience when he used phrases like "I can tell you." He showed that he was speaking to us, not to some hypothetical group of people outside of the seminar room.
He added more interaction and video snippets towards the end, when we started losing focus.

At the end of the talk, he said that he planned every one of these moments. And he did this effectively: never did I drift off. We all know how hard it can be to stay focused on a talk, even if you want to. The speaker needs to work pretty hard to help the audience stay on the ground. So tip number 2 is: plan regular "attention-interventions" to keep your audience on their toes!

Go out with a bang

The expectations of the audience are high now. You've given them digestible bits of information. You've kept them hooked right until this moment. It's up to the ending now to either make your talk memorable or have it peter out like an untied balloon.

In any presentation, a good ending summarises the content of your talk. You can actually use those 1-sentence summaries from Tip 1 to summarise your talk! Jo took it one step further, though.

Jo's talk was about a conceptual framework for science communication. He said effective science communication requires 4 components: trust, emotion, storytelling and creativity. He not only summarised those points; he told us how he used those exact four components to convince us. It was like Poirot finally revealing how the murder took place—satisfying as heck. What better way to convince people of a communication framework than to show that it works?

Add value to your conclusion with a call to action to really leave a lasting impression. Jo's ingenious call to action was: "Use this conceptual framework; I've shown you that it works." I left the talk inspired and excited to try it for myself; that's the power of a satisfying conclusion.

So the last tip is: end your talk with a strong summary and a call to action that makes your audience feel good.

Putting it all together

We learned three tips from Jo on how to grab and keep people's attention during presentations:

Divide your talk into clear, atomic chapters that you can summarise in a single sentence
Plan regular interventions in your talk to keep your audience engaged and on their toes
In your conclusion, go beyond a simple summary and inspire your audience to act.

In the end, you can gather all the tips in the world, but practice makes perfect. Jo said: rehearse your talk before you give it, and present lots and lots of times. He gave a hundred talks before he got to this point. It's your turn now. Try out different techniques and take moments to reflect on them to find what works. Be intentional. but most important of all: have fun, and your audience will be bound to feel it too.