These are tips designed to help you give a presentation that is meaningful
both to you and to your audience within your allocated time (min 10, max 15 min).
Note that time alone does not ensure success; you could spend half an hour and say nothing or spend 7-8 minutes and make an important point that the audience will take with them.
First, decide how long you are going to talk for. Keep in mind that if you
choose the duration allocated to you in the program (most likely 10 min),
this provides the audience with plenty of time to ask you questions. If you
choose the maximum, you forego questions and the meeting moves on to the next
talk.
Now, to create your presentation:
- Think what is the point that you want to put across to your audience, for example showing off some new capability for your meteor observing station or showing that your observations fit a particular model.
- Then put that into 2-3 slides (graphs, images, text); make a separate conclusions slide where the point you wanted to make is stated explicitly in large letters.
- The rest of the presentation (title, introduction, a brief description of your experiment and/or equipment, additional conclusions, etc.) may now be filled in.
The most experienced speakers try not to use too many slides! As a general
rule, use fewer slides than than the total time in minutes. For example, in a
12 min talk, keep the number of slides between about 6 and 10.
Note that this also depends on how fast you can go through each slide; you do
not know what that is unless you PRACTICE. In any case, practicing your talk
at least once reduces the chance that you will be stopped by the session
Chair before you had the opportunity to make your point. So, for your own
sake, and that of your audience:
***PRACTICE, PRACTICE, PRACTICE*** :-)