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SNUG Saber 2008
June 3 - 4, 2008
Author's Kit
ADDTIONAL READING:
Copyright Statement
Please read the following notice before submitting your written materials to the SNUG program.
By submitting materials to the SNUG program you and your employer are giving Synopsys the following rights: (1) to reproduce, publish and distribute your submitted materials for use by Synopsys employees, contractors and licensees; and (2) to reproduce and post the submitted materials on the SNUG web site for access by Synopsys employees, contractors, and licensees.
It is your responsibility to confirm that your employer agrees to the use described above. You and your employer reserve the right to modify the submitted materials at any time. Synopsys shall reproduce any copyright or other legal notices that you include in your submitted materials. Synopsys will not use your submitted materials for product marketing purposes without first obtaining your express written consent.
If you have any questions or comments regarding your submission or the submission process, please contact the SNUG program manager at 1-800-344-SNUG.
Introduction
This is your opportunity to address other Saber simulator users in a dynamic, encouraging environment. Users attending your presentation want to hear your experiences. Authoring a SNUG presentation is an important event in your professional career and your acceptance represents a significant accomplishment, but acceptance is just the first step towards success. This document will describe the process for developing a successful presentation, as well as offer suggestions on helping you develop and deliver your talk.
Dates for Authors to Remember
| January 25 - March 14, 2008 |
Presentation abstracts due |
| March 11, 2008 |
Authors notified of acceptance |
| April 30, 2008 |
Draft Presentation due |
| April 30 - May 13, 2008 |
Presentation Review; Feedback to Authors |
| May 23, 2008 |
Final Presentation due |
| June 3 - 4, 2008 |
SNUG Saber 2008 Conference |
Organizing Your Presentation
Each user presentation is allocated 30 minutes. About 20/25 minutes of this time should be allotted for your presentation; the remainder will be used for questions. Plan to use all of your allotted time. A presentation that is too short is as undesirable as one which runs over so you will need to adjust your timing in your rehearsals.
Put Across a Few Key Points
The audience has a professional interest in your subject. They want to find out how your ideas will affect their work, or better yet, how they can use your ideas for their benefit. In your short presentation time, you can transmit only a few key points to the audience, so concentrate on what is most significant and hold to relatively simple relationships. Your audience can confirm your more complex points by reviewing your presentation slides in detail. Explain with familiar examples or analogies, and compare your new material with existing technology that is well known to your audience. Resist using jargon because your jargon may not be as widely used as you think. If you must use a word that may not be familiar to the audience, define it.
Follow a Simple Outline
- Introduce your problem. What led to your work? What were your goals?
- Describe your solution. Tell how you did it.
- Why is your solution a good one? What are its disadvantages or limitations?
- Suggest other applications.
- Do you recommend further development along the lines of your work?
Why? Or why not?
- Summarize what it all means.
Tell your story in a straight line, and make one point lead to the next. Comprehension is better when the subject is organized simply.
Planning Your Slides
Good technical talks are an effective mix of verbal and visual elements. Plan a series of slides that progressively disclose your subject by building from cause to effect, simple to more complex, and questions to answers. Do not bury your points in too much detail and make sure that the text on your slides is concise. Each slide should express only a few closely related ideas, tersely stated. Too much information prevents understanding and too many details prevents easy reading! Use your slides to assist your words and to keep you on track.
How Many Slides?
Use the minimum number of slides that will allow you to convey the essence of your presentation to your audience. You have 30 minutes for your presentation. Experience tells us that most SNUG talks do well with between 10 to 15 slides.
What to Illustrate
You have probably been working on the subject of your presentation for months. What is perfectly clear to you must be made clear in minutes to people unfamiliar with your work. Your slides help you to accomplish this goal. Since words have limitations you may want to illustrate what you cannot verbalise, what you want to emphasize, or what takes too long to describe. Graphs, drawings and photos can often explain what language cannot. Use your slides to hold attention, enliven, clarify, restate, explain, and interpret. Ears have trouble accepting numbers and abstractions. In addition, quantities and relationships must be visually compared. When you digress from the topic of the slide on the screen, use a blank slide, coloured and shaded, not white, to darken the screen. Furthermore, it will confuse your audience if you say one thing orally and you display something else visually on the screen.
Consider these graphic ways to make points clearly and quickly when you plan your slides:
- Introduce Key Items -- Outline slides focus attention on key ideas and orient the audience. An outline of your major topics should be your second slide, just after your title slide.
- Trends -- Line graphs show trends or correlation effectively.
- Comparisons and Proportions -- Bar graphs are best for comparing magnitudes. Pie charts are good for showing relative parts of the whole.
- Symbols -- Symbolic diagrams and flow charts are useful if not too detailed. Use standard symbols if possible.
- Structure and Relationship -- Simple schematic diagrams effectively convey the structure of systems or relationships of objects. Show only what is necessary to explain how a thing works.
- Tables -- Do not use detailed tables. Tabular data is more legible and more easily compared on graphs or charts. If you must use a table, keep it simple and include only items that you will mention.
- Duplicate Slides -- Use duplicate slides when you need to refer to a visual more than once.
Suggested Slides and Template
These four slides should be included in your presentation:
- Title Slide -- The first slide in your presentation must contain the title of the presentation, and the author name(s) and affiliation(s).
- Purpose Slide -- The second slide should state the purpose of the work you will describe (i.e., the problem you have addressed).
- Outline Slide -- The third slide should present a concise outline of your presentation.
- Conclusion Slide -- The last slide in your presentation should state your major conclusions.
Because SNUG Saber is a professional technical conference, the work presented should be identified primarily with the speaker and his or her co-authors. Therefore, the company, university, or other organization for which you did the work should be identified only on your first (Title) slide.
Please submit your presentation in the following electronic format:
If you require a different version of PowerPoint, or prefer to use framemaker, please contact Shirleen Nunn for the appropriate template. You may also submit your presentation in PDF format.
Preparing to Present
Above all, we try to keep a fairly informal atmosphere at SNUG Saber presentations and most presenters find it an enjoyable experience. However, for those who are unfamiliar with giving technical presentations, here are some general guidelines.
Rehearsal is the most important part of preparing your talk! Please do not let it slip by! Thorough preparation will improve your performance and make you more relaxed. Plan to rehearse several times - alone, with your spouse or friend, with co-workers, with your boss, and with your department. In rehearsal, the primary task is to find out how you sound. If possible, record and play back your talk. Listen for words with fugitive sounds that are hard to say, or difficult to comprehend, and replace them with words that come through loud and clear. Keep in mind that you are speaking to an audience. If you were a member of that audience you would appreciate a presentation that is clearly communicated to you in conversational language. Also, practice varying your speaking level and intonation. Instead of speaking in a monotone, let your voice emphasize key points. Rehearse your talk with your slides until you can practically ignore your notes. One way to reduce dependence on your script is to underline key words to recall ideas.
Remember that your talk is a combined verbal / visual presentation. Let the slides carry the message visually at points throughout your presentation, but do not completely rely on the visuals. After the audience has had time to comprehend a slide and you are elaborating on a subject, it is most effective if you do not have the competition of the projected image. Use a blank slide at those times.
Look in a mirror to observe your gestures, stance, and facial expressions. Use your hands only when you want to emphasize specific points. Pace your rate of speaking according to the familiarity of your subject. When introducing something new, slow down. After rehearsing alone, practice in front of your associates at a formal session. Rehearsals with an audience will help you discover how listeners will react. They can tell you where to polish, where to put in another visual, and when to offer more explanation. Have someone help you time your rehearsals, and then trim or extend the material as required to keep your presentation within the time limits. Ask your rehearsal audience to think of questions that may come up. Make a list of probable questions the conference audience might ask, as this will help you during the discussion period after your talk.
The SNUG Saber audience will be a group of professionals, all of them interested as proven by their presence. But remember that many of them may not be well-versed in your particular topic. They came to learn from you. Address your talk to them, not to colleagues familiar with your work!
On the Day of the Conference
Giving Your Talk
Oral communication depends largely on what listeners receive through their eyes. If you are alert, enthusiastic, and confident, your audience will sense it. Be eager to share information and you will convince your audience to listen. Do not read your presentation, instead converse with your audience as you might talk in a conversation.
If you have a lavaliere microphone, you will have freedom of movement but you must remember to face your body in the same direction as your head when you speak. Normally, of course, this is towards the audience. If you talk while looking back at the screen, the microphone pickup will be poor, and if you then look down at your notes and speak, you will "blast" the microphone. Face the audience and speak distinctly with normal volume. If your presentation room is small, a microphone may not be necessary. Also, do not use the optical pointer if you are nervous. When you use a pointer, point to an object when first mentioning it, then turn the pointer off. Otherwise, it causes too much of a distraction.
With a well-prepared, well-rehearsed talk, supported by clear, readable slides, you can be confident of giving an excellent technical presentation that will enlighten and educate your audience at SNUG Saber. Your presentation published on the SNUG website proceedings will enhance your professional reputation and bring credit to your company or university.
Contact Information
Please contact the SNUG Saber Team if you have any questions.
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