Thunderfly's thirst for improving presentations is rooted in many hours spent trapped in front of energy-sapping, text-heavy Powerpoint decks. But while getting the slides right is important, and structuring your content is crucial, they're not the whole story. As an individual, you have to try to act as 'naturally' as possible, something that's not easy when you're nervous and struggling with technology to get the right slides onscreen.

A few weeks ago I was at a conference where the keynote speaker punctuated their talk with a distracting 'next slide!' to a hapless lackey offstage manning the laptop. And I've seen all too many academic presenters inhibiting their efforts over the years by remaining half hidden behind the lectern in order to intermittently tap the keyboard. Either way, these distractions act as a barrier between presenter and audience and make it all the more likely that the people who are supposed to be listening to your pearls of wisdom will more likely be engaging their brain on their next meal.

The problem here is that the presenter is having to concentrate on computers, not content. You'll likely be nervous standing up in front of an expectant (hopefully) crowd, don't amplify the chance of something going wrong by going all fingers and thumbs at the keyboard. If you have the chance to walk natually round the stage, you'll put yourself and your audience at ease and come across as more human, and competent, than someone chained to the lectern.

The little gadget that goes a long way to solving these problems is still the exception rather than the norm, so a plea to presenters everywhere - try and get your hands on a wireless presenter. There are loads on the market, and you can spend well in excess of 50 quid on a large box festooned with baffling buttons. We like our stuff faff-free on Thunderfly and when you're worrying about what to say next, you need something that's easy to use and hard to mess up. After three years of use, the wireless presenter from Kensington (affiliated link) definitely does the job in the field.

It has only four buttons: two to move back and forward between slides, one to black out the screen - very useful if you want to get your audience's full attention - and a laser pointer if you like that sort of thing (or are a cat owner). A little USB stick pops in the computer, turn your Powerpoint/Keynote presentation on. It just works does a simple job very well.

Crucially, it allows you to get out from behind the lectern and move around the stage and the remote is simple enough to operate by touch without having to continually check you're pressing the right button.

If you've got an iPhone/iPod and a Mac, you can do a similar job for much less money...in fact just 69p with the Keynote Remote (iTunes link, not affiliated) which will connect over wi-fi or bluetooth and allow you to remotely change slides as well as look at your speaker notes. Nifty, although potentially not as reliable as the infra-red goodness of the Kensington, particularly when working with unfamiliar technology. Although Apple gear is rapidly increasing in popularity, you're still far more likely to be presented with a Windows set-up when presenting at a conference etc. Of course you could take a Macbook along and plug it into the projector, but that's for another post...

Preparation remains the big deal when it comes to giving good presentations, but giving yourself the freedom to move around the stage and free yourself from the lectern will do wonders for your confidence and engagement with the audience. So beg, borrow or buy a wireless presenter - you might be surprised how much difference it makes.

There's a cracking (and lengthy) post by Christopher Fahey and Timothy Meaney building on their talk from this year's SXSW conference: Conversation is the New Attention. There's a lot of good stuff in there, including an inspiring story about a presenter using only his smartphone for speaking notes and wandering amongst the audience as he spoke. While it's worth a read just for that, I want to highlight something towards the end of the piece, which draws on John Medina's fine book Brain Rules.

Fahey and Meaney talk about the problems of keeping your audience's attention in a presentation - at a tech-y conference, people may start to fiddle more with their phones, in a university tutorial a student may simply fall asleep (happened to me last week). In an attempt to avoid this fate, the authors talk about Medina's four characteristics of 'attention':

1. Quality. Search engines will scour the internet for any images they can find which may be related to your enquiry. These will generally have been optimised to fit onto a web page. That is, they will be low resolution 'thumbnail' images specifically designed to be viewed on a small monitor.

When you blow that image up to fit on a Powerpoint slide, you'll find yourself with something blocky and distinctly amateurish which will detract from the information you're presenting.

2. Copyright. Google Image searches will list *any* images it can find. As such, they are likely to contain a lot of copyrighted material which you have no right to lift and use in your presentation. It only takes one email of your slides to an interested audience member and they could easily end up in the public domain, with or without your knowledge. If those slides contain copyrighted images, you could find yourself in hot water.

Even if you vow never to email your slides to anyone, there's no sense in getting in bad habits you'll just have to undo later. Learning how to use images properly gives you the skill you'll need for a publication or big conference presentation.

3. Ditch Google, get Creative. Images under Creative Commons (CC) licence are your friends. There are a variety of licences under the CC umbrella, but as long as you credit the image creator (generally, the photographer) and aren't planning to do any major re-editing of the original, you'll be OK to re-use any images with a CC licence.

Where to find them? Flickr has a huge range of images, many of which are Creative Commons. A good way to search them is through the Compfight search engine. Just click on 'creative commons' in the sidebar, enter your search term and away you go. Clicking an image takes you to its Flickr page:

Check the image licence (1, above) - it's summarised on the page but you can get more details by clicking through. This one says you are free to copy and transmit the work as long as you attribute the creator of the image, don't use it for commercial benefit and agree not to alter it.

Then move up to 'actions' and click on 'view all sizes' (2):

Then just download (4) and paste it into your Powerpoint with some text crediting the image. For this image I would suggest: Flickr user 'mobile disco': "I Love Peckham post-its" (there's no real name given for this user, if there is one, use that instead).

Ta-da! You have a high quality, correctly licensed image from the very creative Flickr community, rather than the lo-res, copyrighted fare of Google Images.

Further reading:

11 ways to use your image poorly - classic Presentation Zen post on the best way to use your image in a slide (hint: *fill* the screen).

Easy-peasy guide to crediting images - great flowchart to help you check you're doing it right.

Where can you find good images? - more Presentation Zen goodness, list of alternative sites for good, roylaty-free images.

Last week, I talked about the lizard brain, and the way it tempts you to follow the line of least resistance whenever you encounter a challenge, or try to do something new.  This week, I’d like to suggest one way that you can break out of your normal routine, by reverting to what Warren and I call one of the ‘tools of the trade’ – pen and paper.

It is easy to start a project – presentation, report or figure – by switching on the computer and opening up a familiar piece of software.  The first thing that many people do when preparing a presentation is open up Powerpoint, and click onto those inviting text boxes: title here; bullet points go here.  Copy and paste the slides from the last presentation you gave, tweaking the date and venue on the title page.

 But when you fall into this pattern, the medium takes over, and it becomes more important than the message you’re trying to get across.  When you find yourself going onto autopilot, it’s a great chance to stop, reflect, and go analogue – get out paper and pens.

Paper allows you the chance to really explore what it is you’re trying to achieve, before you get bogged down in the technicalities of making that happen.  We often ask people on our courses to have a go at drawing a figure which shows data that we’ve given them, with only some coloured pens and A1 paper.  They’re often uncomfortable at sacrificing accuracy, but going analogue provides them with a chance to think through the decision-making process of which data to focus on, and how to present it most effectively.  Those are the key concerns, rather than worrying about how to get the chart wizard to show what you want.

Getting out a pen and paper also stimulates bits of your brain that might otherwise be neglected; research suggests that writing by hand has a powerful impact on the parts of your brain involved with cognitive processing and working memory, and using techniques such as drawing pictures or mindmapping can help you see new connections, highlight priorities and can also suggest new ways of communicating your message. 

Once you start adding in coloured pens and post-it notes, you can really embrace the flexibility and creativity of going analogue.  And we practice what we preach!  Planning for our most recent course (contact us if you’d like to know more, or book us to help your organisation) looked like this:

Over the last couple of weeks we've concentrated on data visualisation, emphasising the importance of clear, unfussy methods which don't obscure the story of the data. A good figure can be very powerful, but may not be enough on its own to convey a message. In particular, if you are giving a presentation in person, I suggest that projecting a succession of figures onto a screen - no matter how well put together they are - is not the best way to get your point across.

Memorable images are key in giving a good presentation - even if you have 10 killer figures that you'd like to present to your audience, run through them all on Powerpoint and their power will quickly wither away to naught as your audience suffers information overload. They spend so much time squinting at the screen, it really doesn't matter what you're saying as they've stopped listening.

A better idea: select the very best two or three figures which support your argument and mix them up with some visual aids which, while not carrying the same intellectual weight as your carefully compiled data, are just as important in making sure your ideas stick in the mind of your audience.

Let's say you're giving a presentation on those accused of offences during the recent English riots. It would be very easy to put together a series of figures cutting the data in various ways, as the Guardian have done here. Without commenting on the attributes of these particular figures, showing too many of them in a presentation risks diluting their power through loss of context.

There is an argument that sticking to plain figures serve a purpose in taking the political heat out of an issue, and refocusing on the evidence. There is some truth in that, but I would argue that researchers often go too far the other way and forget that after looking at umpteen tables and figures, it's all too easy to forget what we were talking about in the first place.

The riots are clearly a politically charged issue; images should be chosen with care. They might convey a message of community recovery such as the one above, or could emphasise lawlessness, as with this powerful but more conventional image from Greece in 2008 (mouseover both images for credits):

Garr Reynolds (Presentation Zen author and Thunderfly pin-up) puts it well:

Statistics...are just abstractions. But when we hear the story amplified by compelling photography...the issue becomes concrete.

As long as the image is a good fit with your evidence, then it provides a crucial hook for your audience, reminding them of what the data contained in your carefully crafted figure means in the 'real world'.

Next week, we'll look at how to quickly find high quality images that can be reproduced in your presentation or report. For now, I'd love to hear your views on using images in conjunction with the traditional academic figure. Do you think they help make an argument? Or does using images like those above risk overshadowing the research data?