I’m assuming his talk is meant to bury Ayurvedic medicine, not to praise it, what with this being The Straight Dope and all.
My tip for a talk like this is to get the audience’s investment in the subject right up front. Find some way to engage their brains - has anyone there seen this in the stores? Have they seen Deepak Chopra? Did they wonder what it meant? Get some heads nodding or some quick comments from them before you begin.
Quite right, although my talk remains neutral on the subject. It actually discusses a recent JAMA paper concerning the finding of toxic levels of heavy metals in some Ayurvedic preparations. There’s only one sentence in the presentation which touches on the issue of the overall value of Ayurveda in the treatment of human pathology:
“A considerable amount of literature exists in Western publications both supporting and refuting its overall efficacy.”
So far, the dry runs are improving. I double-spaced, and that seemed to help somewhat. There’s no time now for note cards, but I staggered the right edges of the pages as Napier suggested and highlighted ‘stop and look at the audience’ points as don’t ask advised and that seems to help too. But the only thing that really seems to be improving the smoothness and making the delivery natural-sounding is constant repetition. Moral of the story: TANSTAAFL. You just gotta familiarize yourself with the material to pull it off smoothly.
Another trick, if you have a lot of cards, is to hold them all in a stack and draw a diagonal line on the edge with a marker. It gives the same benefit, but is a lot quicker than numbering them all. Probably not necessary for such a short talk, though.
I’m sure that it is a bit late for advice, but I have considerably more experience delivering oral presentations than most. For one thing, it’s only a six minute presentation and since you have practiced it several time you likely could have had it basically memorized by now. A six minute presentation would would take all of an hour for me to memorize and ad-lib whenever I needed as long as I knew the material. If you haven’t done that by now I don’t even understand what you are thinking.
I don’t know how much time you have left before you give your talk, but forget the cards and memorize. If you know the material, ad-libbing your errors is instinctual.
This lesson was a strange advantage of starting grad school at some podunck university with no money to bring in presentors. I was required to present my material three times a semester, and I got very good at it.
There are two rules for an oral presentation:
Know what you are talking about.
memorize.
Inasmuch as this is post-Monday night, the big talk is over. However, for folks interested in the general topic - if any exist - I’d also offer this: at times, when I’m not as familiar with the material I’m teaching or talking about, I prepare notes on paper, marking with stars a few of the most salient points, and I leave the paper on the lectern or on a table. I can then move away from that one spot, and when I feel myself running out of steam on one point, or needing to check where I want to go next, I just wander back and take a peek at the page. If I’ve prepared my notes well enough - i.o.w. - if I’ve reduced my ideas to a few basic points - I can refer to them without being tied to them. Again, this is speaking without a script but with a guide, as many posters here have suggested in one version or another.
Yeah, I used to do that with my computer programs in college. Which kind of dates me I guess.