CNS Meeting Oral Presentation Guide

• Time your presentation. A presentation scheduled for 20 minutes means just that! Session chairs will cut off presentations that exceed the given time limit. Speakers will receive 10 and 5 minute warning notices. Do not squeeze a 40 minute talk into 20 minutes by speeding up your delivery or editing as you go. Exceeding your allotted time is unfair to fellow presenters, wearies the audience, and diminishes discussion time.
• Maximize the impact of your presentation. Limit your talk to two or three major points for 20 minute talks. Please do not present the fine details of your methodology and the quantity of raw data you would provide at a laboratory seminar. Rather, present data in summary and provide schematics. Make certain you give some introductory material placing your presentation within a larger research question.
  There is ample informal discussion time during meals and breaks for interested participants to question you about details. Because they are longer, featured talks can be more elaborate.
• Simplify the overhead required to make a presentation. Because of variety of local situations, your talk may or may not need to be loaded onto a single presentation computer before the session begins.
  Be sure any graphics, particularly movies are embedded in the file containing your talk. Most problematic are presentations involving audio; be sure to check well ahead of your presentation time if you really need sound. Both PowerPoint and Adobe Reader (pdf files) should be available; switching presentation applications during a talk introduces unnecessary overhead.
• Test your presentation equipment before the session begins either by preloading the presentation or bringing your laptop.