INTERNET DIFFUSION PROJECT

Several research and technological projects have been activated. I am going to describe the results of the Internet diffusion project.

The main goal of the project is to analyze Internet diffusion among households, companies, nonprofit organizations through the use of domain names.

Ask yourself

•does the audience need to see this information?

•what am I going to say when I show this slide?

The problem is that if you do not practice your presentation, you will not be prepared for the fact that in reality there will be nothing that you can say when you show this slide, apart from repeating what is on it. There is nothing complicated on the slide, no tables, no strange words, no pictures, in fact nothing that the audience would not be able to understand if you simply stood in front of them and told them.

This is the kind of slide that should be cut completely. Instead, when you show your title slide you could say something like this:

Hi, I am here today to tell you about a completely new project—the first in Eastern Europe in fact. The idea is to find out how much the Internet is being used among various categories of users: households, companies, nonprofit organizations [you can count on your fingers to highlight each category]. To do this we are looking at the numbers of Internet domain names by type. My idea is to tell you where we are at the moment. Then it would be great if I could set up contacts with those of you here who represent other Eastern European countries. You might be interested to know that we estimate that there are around 25 million domain names registered in our part of the world and this represents . . ..

7.9Avoid repeating the title of the slide within the main part of the slide

If the title of your slide is How to free up space on your disk don’t have a series of bullets introduced by The following are ways to free up space on your disk:

7.10Use only well-known acronyms, abbreviations, contractions, and symbols

In the following examples the shorter versions are in brackets: as soon as possible (asap); to be confirmed (tbc); for example (e.g., or eg), that is to say (i.e., or ie); information (info); against (vs); research and development (R&D); and, also, in addition etc., (& or +); this leads to, consequently (> or =); 10,000 (10 K); 10,000,000 (10 M).

However, don’t use abbreviations, acronyms, and symbols unless they are well known. If you explain a new acronym in Slide 2, by Slide 3 the audience will already have forgotten what it means. It is much easier for them to see the full words.

7.11 Choose the shortest forms possible

Use the shortest words and shortest phrases possible. Here are some examples:

regarding = on; however = but; furthermore = also; consequently = so; necessary = needed

We needed to make a comparison of x and y. = We needed to compare x and y. There is a possibility that X will fail. = X may fail.

Evaluating the component = Evaluating components

The user decides his/her settings = Users decide their settings The activity of testing is a laborious process = Testing is laborious No need for the following: = No need for

Various methods can be used to solve this problem such as = Methods:

7.12 Cut brackets containing text

Brackets tend to contain examples, definitions, or statistics.

Natural fibers (wool, cotton etc.,)

ISO (International Organization for Standardization) approval

In the examples above, it is generally not necessary for the audience to see the information in brackets, you can simply say

We analyzed some natural fibers such as wool and cotton.

Our device has been approved by the International Organization for Standardization.

By deleting the parts in brackets, you will thus have extra information to add when you comment on your slide.

7.13 Make good use of the phrase that introduces the bullets

To save space, don’t repeat the first words in a series of bullets—either incorporate them into the introductory phrase or simply say them when you make your commentary.

In the original example above, the first three words on each bullet (enable, help, and permit) mean the same in this context.

See Chapter 8 Using bullets

7.14 Avoid references

References to other authors’ works, legislation (e.g., EU directives, dates of laws), and manufacturer’s instructions are generally not necessary on slides. You may think they give authority to what you are saying, but in most cases they are just distracting and add unnecessary text to your slides.

You might be worried that in the Q&A session someone might ask you for such details, for example if there is some contention about which author made a certain finding. If so, you can create a separate slide showing these details and only show the slide if someone asks the question.

7.15 Keep quotations short

Imagine that you are doing a presentation on Human Rights and you wish to quote what was said by a judge. There is no need to quote the full text. If you do you will force the audience to read it all and probably also force the audience to hear you reading it all. Your choices are either to paraphrase it using your own words; or you can cut the parts (i.e., the parts in italics in the original version below) that are not fundamental to an understanding of it, and replace them with three dots (. . .). More drastically, you may decide not to use three dots but tell the audience that you have removed a few words for the sake of space (the full quote could be given in a handout)—this leads to the revised version below, which takes a lot less time for the audience to read and absorb.

7.16 Deciding what not to cut

If you think that a particular slide, photo, story, or statistic is likely to help you achieve your objective of getting people interested in your work and in you, and of generally making your presentation more entertaining, interesting, and memorable, then don’t cut it. But don’t keep it just because you personally think it is fun. Try it out on colleagues to test its utility. A presentation with interesting parts, even if less essential than other parts, will be far more digestible than a presentation with only essential parts and nothing interesting.

7.17When you’ve finished creating your slides, always check your spelling

When you become very familiar with your slides it becomes almost impossible for you to notice spelling mistakes. It is also pssobile to udnresnatd cmpolteely mssiplet wrods and snteecnes. So this means you may not see the mistakes.

Presentation software does not always manage to highlight incorrect spellings. To check the spelling of your presentation you need to convert the text into your word processing program (e.g., Word, NeoOffice). Before you begin checking or writing, ensure that

•the automatic spell checker is off, otherwise Word (or equivalent) will automatically change the spellings of words that may in fact be correct.

•the language is set only to English (US, UK etc.,) and not to English + your language. Otherwise the program might alter the spellings of English words to conform to how a similar word is spelt in your language

Microsoft Word highlights words that it thinks are not spelled correctly with a red underline. However, given that you probably use a lot of technical words, these too may appear with a red underline because they are not in Word’s internal dictionary. It is easy just to ignore these words hoping (or presuming) that you have spelt them correctly. But there is a good chance that at least one of these words will not be spelt correctly. It is a good idea to check on Google or Wikipedia if the spelling is correct or not.

Some of your misspellings of normal words may not be highlighted because they are words that really exist. Some examples are as follows:

chose vs choice, fell vs felt, form vs from, found vs founded vs funded, led vs leaded, lose vs loose, than vs then, through vs trough, with vs whit, which vs witch

You can find a more complete list of such words, plus a list of US and UK spellings in another book in this series English Usage, Style, and Grammar for Science.

Make sure your spelling is consistently British or American.