[I wrote a post with the same title in 2010; this is an updated version.]

In a week you’ll be giving a talk about your work to 600 people at a conference, or perhaps to five people who will sign off (or not) on your thesis. Depending on your area and the type of talk, the questions following the talk may not be very friendly. What should you do? Practice, practice, practice.

A practice talk is usually given to a small audience anywhere between a few weeks and a few hours before an important talk. It is followed by a feedback session that can easily last five times longer than the talk itself did. Often, multiple practice talks are necessary before the presentation becomes really polished and good.

This post is about getting maximum benefit from a practice talk — this is important because they are very time consuming.

The speaker needs to:

• Have a legible slide number on every slide. If these aren’t there, people taking notes can’t easily refer back to specific slides later on.
• Reserve a room, acquire a projector, and have everything setup and ready to go at the arranged time. Have all of the adapter dongles that you need on hand. If anyone is calling in remotely, this should also be taken care of by the speaker or by someone who has agreed to help the speaker, and it needs to be done before the talk is scheduled to start.
• Have practiced the talk alone first. It helps to have memorized what to say when transitioning between slides. Memorizing an entire talk is usually overkill. Focus on transitions and on getting the talk started smoothly; most of us have a much easier time continuing to talk about a topic than getting started.
• Have an appropriate number of slides. Speakers vary widely in terms of delivery speed and amount of content per slide, but 1.5 to 2 minutes per slide is probably about right. In realistic situations you will be cut off if you exceed your time budget. At proposals and defenses there is usually not a strict time budget, but going over time is strongly frowned upon.
• Have a pen and paper available to take notes after the talk. You cannot remember 150 detailed suggestions about things to change.
• Arrange for someone to time the talk. Sometimes it is helpful to get timings on individual slides.
• Act on the feedback that is given.

Each member of the audience must:

• Listen to the talk as if it were being given for real. Interrupting the speaker should be handled according to whatever protocol will be in force during the real talk. Generally this means few or no interruptions.
• Arrive with a pen and paper, or equivalent note-taking gear.
• Provide detailed feedback in a constructive and respectful fashion.

In my group this is usually the procedure:

1. I give a bit of context: remind everyone what the speaker needs to accomplish, what kind of background and temperament the audience is likely to have, etc.
2. I introduce the speaker.
3. The talk is given, minimizing interruptions to get a good timing estimate.
4. Starting with students, the audience asks questions as if they had just heard the real version of the talk. The speaker responds accordingly.
5. Starting with students, the audience makes general comments about the delivery of the talk.
6. We go through the talk slide by slide, giving feedback and trying to figure out what to add, delete, change around, etc.

Finally, a bit of advice on making slides:

• Don’t put text too close to the edges of slides; some projection systems crop a bit.
• Colors often look different when they go through a projector, and low-contrast colors can be completely invisible on a screen. Use a small number of very high-contrast colors. I typically use black on white for almost everything with some bright red or blue for emphasis.
• Minimize the number of animations.