POLS 2580

Presentation Workshop

Updated Dec 4, 2025

Overview

Plan for today

• Presentation Templates

• Paper check-ins

• Post-presentation traditions

Presentations

General advice

• Tell a story

• Less text is more

  • Bullet points > Sentences

• Figures > Tables

  • Take time to explain your figures

• Goldilocks level of detail (Not too much, but not too little)

• Practice!

  • Budget roughly a minute a slide
  • Write script if you need to, but don’t read from it during your presentation

Slide structure

• Motivation

• Research Question

• Theory

• Expectations

• Data

  • Summary

  • Descriptive Table and/or Figure (Optional)

• Design

• Results

  • Summary

  • Table (Optional)

  • Figure (Optional)

• Conclusion

• Appendices (Extra Slides Optional)

Template

Let’s open up the template and explore.