However, the point is to avoid panic, which is accomplished both through careful preparation of the content of the talk and through practice. She had made things hard on herself in the AWM session by opting to make her presentation without using slides. If she had been giving a technical talk, she certainly would have used slides, which she considers indispensable. While leaving the preparation of effective slides to the third speaker in the session, Gerald Farin of Arizona State University, Chang pointed out the value of slides in helping to guide a listener through a talk. While a written paper is not necessarily linear, she said, since a reader can move around in the text at will, the listener at a talk does not have the luxury of returning to a previously made point.
Slides can also serve as the speaker s notes, and they can be useful in pacing the talk.
Farin advised speakers to check the room and the projector before a talk. SIAM president Margaret Wright likes to choose a motif or theme for her technical talks. For her talk at the AWM minisymposium, titled Giving a Technical Presentation at a Technical Conference, she settled on the idea that speaking is like acting, with soul, method, and technique coming into play in both, and with the speaker taking the parts of author, director, star, and understudy. Content, the most important element, is defined by the speaker, Wright said. The subject of the talk might be a new theorem, or it might be a new proof of an existing theorem.