Prioritise. Select. In a 10-minute talk, you can hope to convey one key idea. So: what’s your ‘take-away message’?
Think of a 10-minute talk as an extended abstract: your aim is to convey the unique character of your research, with just enough detail so that the audience can grasp the big picture and understand what distinguishes your research from other related work.
Plan the time:
If the talk is 10 minutes, then you can’t spend 5 of them on the introduction. Associate time with important points – points essential to convey the character and shape of your research, points important to your line of reasoning, points concerning the implications of your research, and so on.
It is essential to cover enough of the design and structure of your research for the audience to grasp its character. So, your talk should include the classic key ingredients:
1. Research question: including what motivates you to address it, and why an answer will be important.
2. Context: what is already known, what the issues are, what other approaches have been tried or are being tried – in brief.
3. Your research design: what you’re doing, what evidence you expect to find.
4. Findings: what evidence you have produced so far.
5. Take-away message: what you want the audience to remember about your research.
You’ll need balance among these elements: don’t sacrifice the evidence, or your take-away message won’t be convincing. Don’t short-change the context, or the research choices may not make sense. Don’t forget to motivate the question, or the audience might wonder why you’re bothering. And so on.
Start by giving a minute to each of the five – and then allocating the remaining five minutes to the elements that are most important to you to convey. Note the time allocation on your running notes or script (whatever you use to guide yourself during your talk).
Plan the slides:
At 1 slide per minute, you need to contain your key points in 10 slides or so. That doesn’t mean squeezing the material from 20 slides into 10; it means selecting key points and crucial material. Remember: if the audience is too busy trying to read your slides, then people won’t be listening to your words. The purpose of the slides is to focus attention and reinforce key points. If you have important supporting material (e.g., data, analyses) that won’t fit into the talk, keep them to hand in case they’ll help you answer questions.
Practice.
Don’t just guess. Make sure you’ve timed yourself giving the talk in a normal delivery pace at least once. For example, give the talk to some friends or colleagues, and time it.