How to make sure your talk doesn't suck (2011) [pdf]

The biggest signal of someone being an amateur when speaking (or writing) is discussion of the process of creating the presentation. Polished professional speakers don't talk about "when I started writing working on this presentation, I wasn't sure how to talk about X." They just put together a presentation describing the result or topic and present it without talking about all the work that it took to create. The process of creating it seems very salient and novel to the creator at the time of creation, but the audience doesn't care.

People who are nervous or give public talks only rarely will regularly fall into this trap. I think it's related to self-handicapping in presentations, but is distinct, and I have not seen it mentioned in looking at a few "presentation pitfalls" articles.

Pleased, but not surprised, to see the thought and effort Tong puts into communicating ideas. His notes on Quantum Field Theory are still an excellent go-to introduction for masters students and sheds light on a number of otherwise tricky to pin down ideas and topics. And, somehow, makes them seem comprehensible and straightforward for the must part.

As for this, the bit about never going over time is incredibly valuable advice, and one I /still/ see regularly ignored, often flagrantly, in Physics seminars.

Good advice, obviously, but there are different types of practice. I was always grateful that, amongst other things, my (wider) research group had weekly meetings with talks, mostly from students who were all expected to do it to get practice and friendly feedback. The next level up was a national conference, where you got the chance to do a short talk in a sympathetic atmosphere, where it was frowned on to be hard on students. It was common to rehearse talks for major meetings in front of the group too for comments.

I've been horrified on occasion subsequently to see students thrown in completely cold to give important talks, including at major international meetings.

The link to the article on slide 26:

Suggestions For Giving Talks - Robert Geroch (Enrico Fermi Institute)

https://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/9703019

For beginning speakers, I feel the number one piece of advice is to practice the talk. Practice to an empty room if necessary, all the way through. If you're like me, it's extremely painful the whole time, but I always regretted not practicing enough.

Telling people to use a laser pointer instead of a mouse pointer is terrible advice.

Design slides to work without a pointer. If you can't, use a magnified mouse pointer.