Further Reading — Chapter 18: Conference Presentations and Posters

Annotated, Tier 1 (landmark works and verified public guidance) and Tier 2 (real, widely-attributed ideas) only. Conference formats and norms vary by field and venue — always confirm the specific session's length, format, and conventions against the current call, not any summary here.

Tier 1 — Landmark works on presentation and visual design

  • Michael Alley, The Craft of Scientific Presentations (Springer). The definitive source for the assertion–evidence approach this chapter centers on — slides whose headlines are full-sentence claims and whose bodies are visual evidence, not bullet lists. Alley and colleagues developed and tested the method specifically for scientific and engineering talks; if you read one book to improve your research presentations, read this one. The companion site (the "Assertion-Evidence" project, assertion-evidence.com) offers free templates and worked examples.

  • Garr Reynolds, Presentation Zen (New Riders). The most influential popular treatment of stripping slides down to a single image and an idea, and of designing for the audience rather than for the speaker's notes. Reynolds's "no bullet points, one idea, visual-first" philosophy is the design sensibility behind §18.1–18.2. Read it for the why of simplicity and the eye it trains for clutter; pair it with Alley for the research-specific rigor.

  • Edward Tufte, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information (Graphics Press). Carried over from Chapter 9 because every slide and poster figure is a data display: maximize data-ink, delete chartjunk, never truncate a bar axis. Tufte's principles are even more critical on a slide than on a page, because a hall reader has two seconds, not two minutes. (Tufte's separate critique of slideware is itself worth reading as a provocation, even where you don't fully agree.)

Tier 2 — Widely-attributed ideas and craft guidance

  • The cognitive basis of "you can't read and listen at once." The chapter's central mechanism rests on well-established ideas in cognitive psychology — that working memory has limited capacity and that competing verbal inputs (on-screen text vs. spoken words) interfere. This is the territory of cognitive-load theory (associated with John Sweller) and the multimedia-learning principles associated with Richard Mayer (e.g., the "redundancy" and "modality" effects: don't make people read text that duplicates narration). Treat the specific effects as Tier 2 — real, robustly attributed findings — and the direction as solid: redundant on-screen text degrades a spoken presentation.

  • Conference and poster-design guidance from scientific societies and university communication centers. Many professional societies, graduate schools, and science-communication programs publish free, practical guides to talk structure, slide design, and poster layout (reading path, one-takeaway, font-size minimums, the five-second test). These converge on the same lessons this chapter teaches, which is itself evidence the principles are real. Use them, but verify any venue-specific rule (talk length, whether you control your lightning-talk slides, poster dimensions) against the actual call for your conference.

  • Guidance on handling Q&A and presentation nerves. The "restate the question, answer briefly, bridge honestly when you don't know" advice in §18.6, and the cognitive-reappraisal idea (relabeling anxiety as readiness), are widely taught in presentation-skills and public-speaking traditions. The reappraisal finding is associated with research by Alison Wood Brooks and others; treat it as Tier 2 craft wisdom. Chapter 31 develops delivery, nerves, and Q&A at length.

  • Chapter 9 — Visuals and Data. The hard prerequisite. "A figure does not speak for itself" and the interpret-don't-present discipline are exactly what the assertion headline does on a slide.
  • Chapter 4 — Structure. Inverted pyramid / BLUF and signposting drive front-loading the result and the talk's roadmap.
  • Chapter 13 — Lab Reports. IMRaD and the Results-vs-Discussion discipline are what a talk compresses (and what it keeps).
  • Chapter 17 — Grant Proposals. The Specific Aims spine (hook → gap → what you did → why it matters) is the elevator pitch and the talk's opening minute.
  • Chapter 30 — Slide Design and Chapter 31 — Delivering Presentations. The Part VI payoff: assertion–evidence generalized to any deck, and delivery, demos, nerves, and Q&A in depth.

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