Making your presentation memorable
Audiences engage significantly more and retain more information when presentations have a strong opening and closing. This section will provide strategies to take advantage of these critical moments to make a clear, memorable impression on your audience.
This video introduces strategies for increasing your audience’s engagement with your presentation by creating effective opening hooks and meaningful conclusions.
As you watch, think about the most memorable presentations you’ve seen and what made them so engaging.
Activity: Finding the perfect hook
Step 1: Free write for 3 minutes on one of the following topics. Set a timer and do not stop writing, not even to fix your spelling!
- I was most excited about my research when…
- A moment in my research journey that was terrible at the time, but is funny to me now, was when…
- Why am I really doing this research? (Besides all of the money and fame, of course)
Step 2: Choose a short section of your freewriting, preferably one featuring strong emotions. Practice telling an imaginary audience about this moment out loud, as though it were a story. What is the plot? The setting? Who are the main characters?
Step 3: Connect that story to your research (if the connection isn’t already obvious). Some connections might include:
- Overcoming a personal challenge that is similar to the problem your research addresses
- A theme like love, adversity, courage, failure, or humility
While it is often easier to free write about your research, you might be surprised by what emerges when you write or talk about how your life experience intersects with your research topic. Remember that your audience have lives outside of their research too, so opening or closing your talk with a brief anecdote or story can help them to connect with you and your research.
Use the module menu to go the next section: Translating complex research for an audience, where we focus ideas to distil your work down to fit into a presentation or poster format.