Exercises — Chapter 18: Conference Presentations and Posters

Writing and design practice. Presentations are learned by building and revising them, so most of these tasks ask you to produce or fix a slide, a poster block, a pitch, or an answer — not to pick from a list. Where a task is open-ended, a self-assessment rubric follows instead of a single answer. Difficulty is marked ⭐ (warm-up) to ⭐⭐⭐⭐ (extension).

Slides and posters here are described in words (this is a text), exactly as the chapter describes its figures. When a task says "describe your slide," write the headline as text and describe the visual in a sentence — that's enough to practice the design thinking.

Part A — Analyze This ⭐

Diagnose what works or what's broken. Name the specific principle.

A1. A speaker's slide reads, in the corner: "Results." The body is six bullets of dense text, and the presenter reads them aloud verbatim. Name the failure this produces (the chapter gave it a name), and explain the mechanism — why does reading a text slide aloud lose the audience?

A2. Two slide headlines for the same slide: (a) "Cycle Life Comparison" (b) "Our interphase holds 94% of capacity after 800 cycles — the prior best held 80% after 500." Which follows the assertion–evidence approach, and what one-look test tells you?

A3. A poster's title is "Investigations into the Electrochemical Stability of Sulfide-Based Solid Electrolyte Interphases Under Galvanostatic Cycling." A passerby in a crowded hall glances at it for three seconds. What's wrong, and what principle from §18.4 does it violate?

A4. A presenter is asked a question they can't answer and replies: "Well, our methods are standard and the result is robust, so I don't think that would be an issue." Identify the move they just made and why it costs them credibility with an expert audience.

A5. A 15-minute talk has 31 slides. Without seeing the content, what can you predict about how this talk will go, and which heuristic from §18.3 flags the problem?

A6. A talk opens: "Hi, I'm going to talk about solid-state batteries. First I'll give some background, then the motivation, then methods, then results, then conclusions. So, batteries have a long history…" Name two things wrong with this opening and rewrite the first sentence to fix the larger one.

A7. A poster is a single dense block: three columns of ten-point paragraphs, no numbering, no arrows, every figure the same small size, no white space. A genuinely interested reader stops but leaves after fifteen seconds without finishing. Diagnose using the reading path and hierarchy ideas from §18.4.

A8. A lightning-talk presenter took their full 15-minute talk and delivered it in 5 minutes by speaking very fast and keeping all 14 slides. Name the design error (the chapter contrasts two verbs) and predict what the audience retained.

Part B — Revise This ⭐⭐

Rewrite the weak material. You're given the scenario, not the answer.

B1. Redesign this text-dense slide. Here is a slide as a researcher first built it, pasted from her paper:

Slide: "Methods." Bullets: "• Solid-state cells assembled in argon glovebox • Sulfide electrolyte deposited by solution coating at 60 °C • Cycled at 0.5C between 2.5 and 4.2 V • Capacity measured by galvanostatic cycling • SEM and XPS used for characterization • n = 12 cells per condition."

Redesign it as an assertion–evidence slide. Write the sentence headline (what point should a methods slide make?), describe the single visual you'd use as the body, and list which details you'd move into spoken narration instead of putting on the slide.

B2. Convert this "Background" topic slide to an assertion–evidence slide. Bullets: "• Solid-state batteries offer higher energy density and improved safety • The main barrier is interface instability • Existing interphase materials fail within a few hundred cycles." Write one sentence headline (pick the one point that sets up the speaker's contribution) and describe the body visual.

B3. Here is a talk's closing slide: a slide titled "Conclusions" with five bullets summarizing every finding, secondary result, and caveat. The talk ends and this slide stays up during Q&A. Redesign the final slide per §18.3 — what should be on screen during Q&A, and why?

B4. A poster's results section is this paragraph: "As can be seen in Figure 3, the capacity retention of the experimental condition was found to be substantially higher than that of the baseline condition over the course of the cycling experiment, with the difference becoming more pronounced at higher cycle numbers, which suggests that the modified interphase confers improved long-term stability." Rewrite it for a poster: a one-sentence takeaway box plus an interpretive figure caption (apply Chapter 9 — the caption should say what it means).

B5. A presenter's answer to a hostile question — "Isn't your sample size of 12 cells far too small to claim anything?" — is: "No, twelve is fine, lots of papers use twelve, I don't see the problem." Rewrite the answer to (a) extract and address the legitimate technical concern, (b) stay calm, and (c) avoid both defensiveness and overclaiming.

B6. This elevator pitch never reaches the result: "So I work on solid-state batteries, which is a really exciting field with a lot of history going back decades, and there are all these different electrolyte materials people have tried, sulfides and oxides and polymers, each with trade-offs, and the interface problem is really central to all of it…" (and time runs out). Rewrite it as a four-sentence pitch (problem → what you did → result with a number → why it matters + hook).

B7. A 15-minute talk's practice run comes in at 18.5 minutes. The presenter plans to "tighten the transitions and speak a little faster." Rewrite the plan (not the talk): describe specifically what you would cut and how you'd hit ~13.5 minutes (90% of 15) at a normal pace. Reference the one-slide-per-minute check and the "select, don't compress" idea.

Part C — Write This ⭐⭐–⭐⭐⭐

Produce the real artifact for a scenario.

C1. Draft your 60-second poster pitch. Pick a project you've actually worked on (research, a class project, a tool, an analysis). Write a four-sentence elevator pitch using the skeleton from §18.5: (1) the problem, (2) what you did, (3) the key result with one number, (4) why it matters + a hook to keep the conversation going. Then say it aloud and time it. If it runs over 60 seconds, cut until each beat is one clean sentence. Submit the pitch and your timed length.

C2. Build a 5-slide lightning talk. For the same project, design a five-minute lightning talk as five assertion–evidence slides. For each slide, write the sentence headline and describe the visual. Slide 1 = title/hook (a hook in the first 15 seconds), 2 = the problem, 3 = what you did, 4 = the key result (the heart), 5 = takeaway + pointer to where the full version lives. Remember: select one idea, don't compress the whole project.

C3. Write a talk's opening 60 seconds as speaker notes. Using the Specific Aims spine from Chapter 17 (problem → gap → what you did → why it matters), script the exact words you'd say in the first minute of a talk on your project. Do not write an outline of your outline; open with something that makes the room want the answer. Then describe the single slide that would be on screen during this minute.

C4. Design the top third of a research poster. For your project, write: (a) the title, phrased as the finding and readable from across a room; (b) a one-sentence takeaway box; and (c) a description of the one dominant figure with an interpretive caption. Then describe the reading path for the rest of the poster (how does the eye know where to start and where to go?).

C5. Prepare your Q&A defense. List the five questions you'd least like to be asked about your project — the weak control, the small sample, the alternative explanation, the scaling concern, the "why didn't you try X." For each, write an honest, bridging answer in the §18.6 style (admit the limit precisely, frame as future work where true, offer a reasoned prediction without overclaiming).

C6. Write the assertion headlines only for a complete 8-slide talk on your project, in order — no visuals, no notes. Then read the eight headlines as a list. Do they tell a coherent story (problem → approach → result → meaning) by themselves? Revise any headline that's a topic rather than a claim until the list stands alone as your argument.

Part D — Synthesis & Critical Thinking ⭐⭐⭐

Integrate across chapters; find the flaw; translate for an audience.

D1. The figure, three ways. Take one figure from a project (or invent a plausible one: capacity vs. cycle number, two conditions). Produce it for three contexts: (a) the paper (a full interpretive caption, Chapter 9 style); (b) a slide (a sentence headline + a stripped-down, screen-readable version of the figure); (c) a poster (a takeaway box + a one-line caption). Explain in two sentences why the three versions differ even though the underlying data is identical.

D2. Find the flaw. A colleague argues: "Posters and slides are basically the same thing — visual summaries of your work — so I just print my slide deck four-up as a poster." Identify at least three reasons this fails, drawing on the distinct jobs of a poster (§18.4) versus a slide (§18.2).

D3. Translate the result for three audiences. Your key finding is "a sulfide interphase yields 94% capacity retention after 800 cycles vs. 80% after 500 for the baseline." Write the one-sentence version you'd say to (a) an expert in your subfield at your poster, (b) a scientist from an adjacent field (e.g., a chemist who doesn't work on batteries), and (c) a non-scientist (a journalist, a relative). Note what changes and what stays constant. (This previews Chapter 28.)

D4. The chapter claims a talk is "a trailer for the paper, not a compressed paper." Defend or complicate this claim. When, if ever, does a talk need to be more complete — and even then, what does the "can't read and listen at once" constraint still forbid?

D5. Connect this chapter to Chapter 17. The Specific Aims page and the elevator pitch share a structure. Lay them side by side (hook/problem, gap, what you propose-or-did, payoff/why-it-matters) and explain why the same skeleton serves both a tired reviewer reading a page and a passerby at a poster — and what differs between the two contexts.

Part M — Mixed Practice (Interleaved) ⭐⭐–⭐⭐⭐

These mix this chapter with earlier ones, so you have to choose the right tool — not just apply the most recent lesson.

M1. You're handed a paragraph of dense results prose. Decide: is the right move to (a) write an interpretive caption (Chapter 9), (b) turn it into an assertion–evidence slide (Chapter 18), or (c) lead with the finding in a sentence (Chapter 9 / Chapter 4)? The catch: the context isn't given. Explain how the context (paper vs. talk vs. poster) determines which tool, and produce the version for a talk.

M2. A draft talk opens with two minutes of literature background before stating the question. Which two earlier-chapter principles diagnose this (think audience knowledge and document structure), and how do they combine with this chapter's "front-load the result" rule? Rewrite the opening.

M3. You must present the same solid-state battery result in three forms this month: a 15-minute conference talk, a poster, and (Chapter 17) a one-page Specific Aims summary for a follow-on grant. Sketch how the opening differs across the three, and what single element is nearly identical in all three.

M4. A slide shows a 3-D bar chart with heavy gridlines, a rainbow palette, and a truncated y-axis that starts at 70% (making the difference look enormous). Two chapters' worth of problems collide here. Name the Chapter 9 design failures and the Chapter 18 slide-design failure, and describe the slide you'd build instead.

M5. Your Q&A answer needs to say no to a suggestion ("you should have used oxide electrolytes instead") without alienating the questioner. Which Chapter 7 idea (tone/register; disagreeing gracefully) combines with §18.6's "separate substance from tone"? Draft the answer.

M6. You're revising a poster and a slide deck the night before. Apply the Chapter 12 editing hierarchy (content → structure → … → proofreading) to a presentation: in what order should you fix a deck, and why is "fix the headlines/structure before polishing fonts" the same lesson as "don't proofread before you've cut"?

Part E — Extension ⭐⭐⭐⭐

For motivated readers and the Deep Dive track.

E1. Run a real five-second / one-minute test. Find a published conference poster online (many are shared openly). Apply the two tests from §18.4: from a glance, can you get the title and main figure's point? In a minute up close, can you get the takeaway, the key caption, and the conclusion? Write a one-paragraph critique and one concrete redesign recommendation.

E2. Record and time yourself. Record a 5-minute lightning version of your project (audio is enough). Listen back with the chapter's lens: Did you front-load the result? Did you read any slide? Did you finish under time? Where did you ramble? Write three specific fixes, then re-record and compare.

E3. Watch a master and reverse-engineer. Find a well-regarded recorded research talk (many conferences post them). Map it to the five-beat arc in §18.3: where's the hook, the roadmap, the approach, the peak result, the takeaway? Note one thing the speaker does that the chapter didn't mention but that clearly worked, and one thing you'd steal for your own talks.

Selected solutions and rubrics: see appendices/answers-to-selected.md. For open-ended tasks (C1–C6, D1, D3, E1–E3), use the rubric below.

Self-assessment rubric for the build-and-revise tasks

Score each dimension 0–2 (0 = absent, 1 = partial, 2 = solid):

• Assertion, not topic: Slide headlines are full-sentence claims, not noun-phrase topics. (Read your headlines alone — do they make the argument?)
• Visual carries the body: The slide/poster body is a single visual, not bulleted text. Almost no body text.
• Front-loaded: The result arrives early (talk: first 90 seconds; pitch: by sentence 3; poster: in the title/takeaway box).
• One idea per unit: One claim per slide; one takeaway per poster; one idea per lightning talk. No "and."
• Timed and trimmed: You actually timed it out loud and landed at ~90% of the slot; you cut rather than raced.
• Reader-aware: The design respects a listener who can't rewind / a hall reader who's standing and distracted (big fonts, reading path, direct labels).
• Honest in Q&A: Where relevant, answers admit limits and bridge — no bluffing, no overclaiming.

11–14 = strong; 7–10 = revise the lowest dimension; below 7 = re-read §18.2 and §18.3 and rebuild the headlines first.