First, organize your talk: 1.

Identify the important ideas Your work (or the work you are presenting) likely has many details but only one or two main ideas; structure your talk around these main ideas. 2. Create a Talk Outline Your talk should be organized in a top-down manner. You should have the following main sections in your talk: * Introduction, The Big Picture: what, why, how, and why we should care (motivation). Be sure to include: o a statement of the problem being solved (what) o motivation and putting the work in context (why and why should we care) o a high-level view of the solution (how) * Details of solution * Results demonstrating/proving your solution * Critic of Work (possibly compare to related work) * Conclusions & Future Directions for this work The talk should be organized as the important ideas first, the details second, conclusions last. Each section of your talk should be organized in a similar manor: high-level important points first, details second, summarize high-level points last. Next, Design your slides 1. Slide Organization Your slides should be organized like an outline--a few main points, with sub points under each one. Your slides are a guide for your talk not a word-for-word copy of your talk. List specific points that you want to talk about as sub-topics of each main topic. If there are particular details that you want to discuss, outline them on the slide and keep written notes for you to refer to in your talk rather than writing all the details on the slide. 2. Summarize Main Points You should have a summary slide of the main ideas at the end. If applicable, Include a list of open questions and/or future directions of your work. 3. It is okay to waste space Add just enough prose prose to present the main points and highlight the main parts of each point. Use phrases rather than complete sentences and use large fonts. You can use acronyms and abbreviations sparingly, however you should say the complete name when you talk about about them. For example, if you abbreviate processes to procs on a slide, say "processes" when you talk about the point not "procs". Similarly, if your create an acronym for your super fast multi-cast implementation, SFMC, and refer to the old slow multi-cast implementation as OSMC, then say "our super fast multi-cast" and "the old slow multi-cast" rather than "SFMC" and "OSMC". The exception is for well-known acronyms such as PVM, MPI, API, JVM, etc. 4. A picture is worth a thousand words Use figures and graphs to explain implementation and results. It is very hard to describe a system implementation without having a picture of the components of the system. 5. Number of Slides As a general rule, it should take 2-3 minutes to talk through the material on one slide, so for a 30 minute talk you should have about 13 slides. If there are too many ideas in your work to present completely in 30 minutes, then pick one or two

(the most interesting/important parts) that you will discuss in detail, and present the other parts at a higher level. Also, you can create back-up slides for specific details that you don't plan to talk about, but may get questions about. Next, preparing your presentation 1. Provide a talk road-map Tell the audience where you are going with your talk. * Give audience a road-map of your talk at the beginning by using outline slides Immediately after the title slide, put up an outline slide and tell the audience the main organization of your talk. Another alternative is to first have a few slides motivating the paper's general topic, then put up an outline slide giving the audience a road-map of your talk. * It should be clear when you start a new high-level part of your talk Use good transitions from one slide to the next, and from one main topic to the next..."We just talked about the implementation of foo now we will look at how well foo performs for synthetic and real workloads. You may want to use the outline slide at other points in your talk to provide a visual transition between parts of your talk. 2. Repeat Your Point There is a rule that says you have to tell your audience something three times before they really hear it: 1. Tell them what you are going to say. 2. Say it. 3. Summarize what you said. This is particularly important for figures and graphs. For example: 1. This graph show how the A algorithm performs better than the B and C algorithms as the number of nodes increase 2. The X axis is number of nodes, the Y axis is execution time in seconds The red curve shows the execution time of A as the number of nodes increases The blue curve shows ... 3. Thus you can see that as the number of nodes increases above N, the A algorithm performs better. This is because of increased message traffic in algorithms B and C as shown on the next slide... 4. Talk to the Audience Don't read your slide off the screen, nor directly off the projector. It is okay to stop for a second and refer to your notes if you need to. 5. Practice Give a practice run-through of your talk in front of an audience of at least one other student. Stand in a room for 30 minutes (or the duration of your talk) and talk through all your slides (out loud). This should be a timed dress rehearsal (don't stop and fix slides as you go and don't let your audience ask questions or suggest fixes until your practice talk is over; you want to force yourself to talk through your entire talk). You should assume that there will be about 5-10 minutes worth of questions during or after your talk. If your talk is too long, you should cut out some material to get it to fit into the time slot (your audience will not mind if your talk ends 5 minutes early, but they sure will mind if it goes 5 minutes over). Even if it is not too long, you should think about slides that you can skip during your talk if it ends up going too long. As a practice talk audience member, you should jot down notes of places in the talk where you have suggestions for improvements, or where something seems unclear. After the presenter is done with his/her practice talk, you should talk through the things you wrote down. It is also good to give the presenter some practice answering audience questions. If you can think of some questions like this, it

is good to ask these to the presenter at the end of his/her talk. 6. Nervousness: How to fight back * A well organized, practiced talk will almost always go well. If you draw a blank, then looking at your slides will help you get back on track. * Taking a deep breath will clam you down. One trick is to try to remember to take a deep breath between each slide. * Slow down. Take a few seconds to think about a question that is being asked before you answer it. It is okay to pause for a few seconds between points and between slides; a second or two of silence between points is noticeable only to you, but if you are talking a mile a minute everyone will notice. * Bring notes. if you are afraid that you will forget a point or will forget your elegant transition between slides 11 and 12, write these down on a piece of paper and bring it with you. However, you don't want to have a verbatim copy of your talk, instead write down key phrases that you want to remember to say. * Give at least one practice talk to an audience. * Be prepared to answer questions. You don't have to know the answer to every question, however you should be prepared to answer questions and able to answer most questions about your work. Before you give the talk, think about what questions you are likely to get, and how you would answer them. You may want to have back-up slides ready for answering certain questions. * It is okay to say "I don't know" or better yet "gee, I hadn't thought about that, but one possible approach would be to..." or to refer to your notes to answer questions.

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This article will be useful for people who wants to speak in front of a crowd without any fear. Glossophobia or speech anxiety is the fear of public speaking. If you have those sweaty palms, shivering hands, squeamish feelings in your stomach, rapid breathing, and a dry mouth before you go onstage, take comfort in the fact that you are not alone. In fact, it has been found that more than 95% of people are scared of giving a public speech or performing a public act and this goes way above death and spiders in the list of things that people fear the most. We must understand that a little amount of stage fear is actually good. It helps us prepare and boosts up our adrenaline and pumps up our energy levels. But it should not be so acute that it starts to cripple our confidence and our career. Here are a few ways in which you can alleviate your stage fear.

Prepare and Practice

A person who fails to prepare is a person who is preparing for failure The two Ps, thorough preparation and practice is the best possible key to a good presentation. Go through the material carefully and organize what you have to tell in a way such that the audience will find it easy to understand and assimilate. Anticipate all the easy and hard questions that may come your way while you do the presentation and

also make a mental note of how best to answer those questions. This will prevent you from balking when someone asks a question. Once you are sure that you have prepared very well your confidence levels will automatically boost up and your nerves will hold longer than you had expected them to once you are on the stage. Practicing again and again will go a long way in ensuring that you make a great presentation. Once you have decided on what you are going to speak, concentrate on how you are going to speak. The major work is done and so now we can start ironing out the nuances. Stand in front of the mirror and see how your body, and in particular your hands move. Notice your pitch and the speed at which you deliver the words. Too fast and it shows that you are nervous and your audience will have a hard time catching up with you; Too slow and they will start slumbering. Maintain a moderate pace so that they can ride along with you.

Come to terms with the fact that things can go wrong

Now that you have done your two Ps you must also accept the fact that you cannot control anything that is outside your sphere of influence. People from the audience can treat you with negative remarks or gestures but you should never allow them to get on your nerves. This can seriously injure your performance. The best trick to deal with this is to imagine your audience doing something silly (like wearing funny clothes, or having whiskers drawn on their faces). This will soothe you and make you more tolerant with your audience. Also be aware that you can indeed make a mistake sometimes. After all everyone is mortal and we are prone to making errors. Every single person in the audience would definitely have had their own embarrassing moments. Accepting this can drastically reduce your fear of making a mistake. Mug up your opening line so that even if you are too nervous to think, you can spit up the opening line. A few minutes into your speech you will start warming up.

Relax
It is very important that you relax the day before your big day. Take the speech thing out of your mind and indulge in something that you love. Listen to music, have a nice long bath, water your plants, rent a funny movie and laugh your head off. Make sure you get ample amount of sleep the night before the speech. This will leave you feeling fresh and confident the next day. On your big day make sure that you eat something light. You dont want to be feeling queasy along with everything else. Make sure that you arrive at your destination well before the scheduled time. But you also dont want to arrive too early and spend a lot of time worrying about your performance. Once you are on the spot you can do some stretching, shoulder and neck rolls and arm swings to alleviate the tension in your muscles. Take a few deep breaths and try to relax. Smile, because studies have shown

that when we smile we automatically tickle the pleasure sensors in our brain. Smells also have a relaxing effect on people (esp. jasmine and lavender). You can spray some on your Kleenex and inhale it to reassure your brain that everything is OK.

Tips and Tricks on Stage

Before you go onstage talk to someone to make sure that your voice is fine. Have a sip of water and then walk on to the stage with a confident upward posture. Remember that people are here to watch your performance and not to watch you. Try not to be selfconscious. If you feel your legs shaking, lean on the podium or try walking. Dont carry notes with you as they will betray your trembling hands. Carry three by five cards that fit smugly in your palm. Dont fidget or put your hands in your pocket. Browse through the audience and identify a few friendly faces all around the room. When you are talking, take turns to look at those faces. This will give the illusion that you are making eye contact with everyone and will also prevent you from fixating at any one point of the room. If you do make a mistake DO NOT panic. Instead be happy that the worst is over. Move on and complete your performance with aplomb. Once you start practicing all this you will find that performing on stage is not a big deal after all. So purge all your self-doubts and deliver your speech with splendor and confidence!