There is an easy way to do better conference paper presentations that does not require learning new skills.
I am not advising you to talk faster or slower, be louder or quieter, change your voice, choose your words differently or to design better slides. I am not telling you to find more graphics or use color in graphs. Nope, none of that. That might help, but all of that calls for new skills or additional work. Nope, maybe you’d benefit from that, but I am not talking about that.
All you need to do is understand that your presentation is not condensed summary of your paper. That is, it is not a full report on all your work. Its components should not be proportional to the components of your paper. Its components should not be proportional to the work you did. Nope. Your presentation is an ad or preview for your paper.
Focus on the best parts. Focus on the most interesting parts. Focus on the parts that the audience is most likely to be intrigued by.
Focus on your contributions
Your intro, literature review and methodology are important in your paper, but you do not have time for them in your conference presentation..
This means that you might not have to do any of your paper's introduction. Is your research about math anxiety? Well, I’ll bet your audience in your conference session already and care about math anxiety. (If you paper is on something that that audience might not already know about, like SFOR (i.e., Spontaneous Focusing On quantitative Relations), then yeah, you need to explain that.)
You know what else the audience isn’t likely to care about? Your literature review. Sure, it was a bunch of work, but at an academic or research conference, you should assume that you are talking to experts and you don’t need to start by proving your own bone fides. Maybe one quick slide to clarify your construct. Maybe some citations on the slide, but you never take the time to acknowledge them aloud.
Methodology? The audience can probably anticipate it. Unless your project is truly about some novel methodology, blow right by that. “We describe our methodology in the paper, which I hope I am convincing you to read.” Maybe one slide and less than 30 seconds. Put on those key terms that folks who know will recognize and nod at. That’s it!
Do you know what will make your presentation more interesting? Talk about your results/findings. With that that time your saved, dive in deeper. Actually explain more about that table. You know what else? Tell us about the implications. Why do your results matter? Tell us about how you are adding to the scholarship. Show off how smart your work is. Convince us that this is research we should know about. Do that with the best parts.
“Obviously, the literature review and methodology are in the full paper.” If you have just 12 or 20 minutes, spend it on the most interesting parts of the paper.
Now that you have permission to do that—perhaps even orders to do that—how hard will it be for you to figure out what to say? We don’t need you to you summarize the literature or explain methodology. It’s hard to make that stuff interesting, and if people do not already know it, you cannot do it justice in your short talk. But the actual results of your work? Your own excitement and pride will make you a more interesting presenter, just naturally.
Obviously, if you are giving a job talk, that’s a different sort of thing. You have more time, and you are trying to show off your command of the literature and of the methodology—perhaps your methodological sophistication or perhaps your absolute command of the classics. But that is not what a conference paper presentation is about.
Conference presentations are all too short. It is hard to get people to actually download and read our papers. So, highlight your contributions to the field. If people are interested, if you impress them, you’ve given them a reason to read your paper. And if you do a good enough job talking about those contributions, they might cite you in conversation later, too.